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Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

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Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#81

Post by medstrom »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #68
odiroot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My take - note taking is a symtom of ADHD It's not a symptom of ADHD. It's one of the coping strategies for people with ADHD who have problems memorising things.

If note taking is used to help with memory, it should be done under rules or supervision, in my opinion. The usual way to track knowledge and tasks is within a project. You come to a road block, do research, overcome, and continue. But many of those note taking posts talk about personal "wiki" projects and tracking _everything_. I suspect that with ADHD its hard to filter out the important things from background. And…

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#82

Post by MattGaiser »

pdinny wrote: post #77

A related question for note-takers: what would you estimate as your rate of reference to prior notes? For my own part that rate is so dismally low that right now I get more value out of making notes than retrieving and reading notes. I'm reminded of a response to another thread on HN a few weeks back about organizing physical documents. Many commenters had very sophisticated processes with scanning, OCR, indexing etc…

Within a week, I frequently refer to notes. It drops off heavily after that, as I start forgetting that I had notes on that topic.

Maybe I need notes of the notes I took.

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#83

Post by kragen »

sputr wrote: post #57
WA wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, but nah. Writing it down is a way to structure thoughts and get it out of your system. But I use a simple text editor (Sublime) for this and I write them in a braindump-kind-of-way. There's really only one thing you gotta know about note-taking: you either optimize for fast writing or for fast information retrieval. Since I rarely read my notes, I optimize for fast dumping them. All apps and organizational sch…

> Writing it down is a way to structure thoughts and get it out of your system. Why do you feel the need to "structure thoughts" and "get it out of your system"? Asking as a way to point out that feeling the need to do it is not a forgone conclusion.

> Why do you feel the need to "structure thoughts"

Well, because the alternative is for your thoughts to be unstructured. Lots of people live their lives that way: reminiscing about that time they got so drunk or really told that guy off, repeating funny lines they heard on some TV series, rehearsing ethnic or religious stereotypes, complaining about the neighbors' loud music, trying to get laid, and heating up some hamburgers at dinnertime. Lots of people are content to be consumers and to repeat what they've heard. Then they die.

But it doesn't have to be that way. You can structure your thoughts. You can be a creator, not just a consumer, and to a significant extent you can direct your life to a goal rather than simply floating at random. Notetaking is helpful for doing that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098854

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#84

Post by carschno »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #68
odiroot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My take - note taking is a symtom of ADHD It's not a symptom of ADHD. It's one of the coping strategies for people with ADHD who have problems memorising things.

If note taking is used to help with memory, it should be done under rules or supervision, in my opinion. The usual way to track knowledge and tasks is within a project. You come to a road block, do research, overcome, and continue. But many of those note taking posts talk about personal "wiki" projects and tracking _everything_. I suspect that with ADHD its hard to filter out the important things from background. And…

I think the parent's implication was that not taking is a coping strategy for ADHD, but it does not mean that note taking indicates ADHD. Meaning that you are probably right that ADHD patient should be supervised or guided in note taking, but that does not necessarily apply to other note takers.

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#85

Post by medstrom »

stareatgoats wrote: post #76

I believe the main reason for the obsession is that we intuitively know that it can be done "right" (according to our own personal preferences) - but that a solution is not yet at hand. So we install every possible attempt we come across, only to find that no - not yet. Here is some of what I am personally looking for: - a wysiwyg rich text interface, with embedding capabilities, with an optional markdown interface a…

Have you used digital zettelkasten and if so what were your issues? Most of these functionalities exist as far as I know except for AI summarization, but I think with the nature of zettelkasten, you don't need that.

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#86

Post by kragen »

eternityforest wrote: post #4

All notetaking apps are disappointing with the possibile exception of Obsidian that I haven't tried long enough to have an opinion on. There's no open source standard. No LibreOffice or Krita of notetaking. They all only have a small subset of features one might want. And yet they are critical infrastructure for people's entire life. It's a pretty exciting space.

> There's no open source standard. No LibreOffice or Krita of notetaking.

There's UTF-8 and JPEG.

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#88

Post by kragen »

sippeangelo wrote: post #54
simias wrote: post #22

My deep dark secret is that I never take notes. Not for lack of trying, I just don't know how to do it. I never did it at school, never did it at work, never did it outside of work. I'm in my mid-thirties now, I just gave up on the concept. Every time I see a post on HN about how somebody manages to organize their lives around a personal wiki or org-mode or whatever I get a bit jealous.

Same, but I never tried. Back in school we were encouraged to take notes during lectures, but I found that if I was focused on note taking them I wouldn't take in any of what was presented to me, and my notes would be useless. No note taking software even comes close to how my brain works either. Of the few notes I've actually taken I've never gone back to read them again. Sure, I will forget stuff, but I feel like i…

Yeah, I take lots of notes (https://dercuano.github.io/ for example), but I can't take notes during lectures. I figure the people who are taking notes during the lecture must be a lot smarter than I am, because if I try to take notes during the lecture, writing distracts me and I lose the thread of the lecture.

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#89

Post by qwerty456127 »

My understanding of the phenomenon is the following:

1. The gap between how many things human brain can reliably and easily keep in mind (bringing up every time it is importantly relevant) and how many things do we have (for optimal performance, suboptimal performance means failures and stress) to keep in mind today is mindboggingly huge.

I even believe an average person would be orders of magnitude the Einstein (or whoever you like better) genius if they could simultaneously recall and relate everything they ever learnt (let alone read/heard/seen).

2. Note-taking software can potentially help a lot. Some note-taking apps and some methodologies help some people in some extent.

3. The actual current capability and UX of existing note-taking apps is miles away from perfect (let alone fitting everyone). This means there is a lot of potential to explore.

4. Substantial activity in 3. has been taking place during the pandemic.

5. All the above ideas have became more visible.

6. People get more interested.

Bonus: the very act of writing a fact down (let alone structuring them) itself contributes to learning it.

Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?

#90

Post by walterbell »

ollysb wrote: post #75

It isn't about note taking, it's about supporting a brain that simply isn't capable of retaining the level of information that we have to deal with. The ultimate note taking device is actually an augmented human brain that has perfect recollection and organisation. In the mean time the note taking apps help with: Working memory - a page can hold far more information than I can retain in my working memory. Having a bu…

Memory can be improved with 2000-year-old techniques like memory palaces. This doesn't replace note-taking, but low-latency cache can improve synthesis and note quality.
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