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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?

#101

Post by bayindirh »

For me, note taking is about creating pointers to practical knowledge I don't use very often, but it's very hard to find in a way useful for me.

i.e. I don't want to try to remember all the peculiarities of a system I implemented or installed or encountered during my life and get stressed about it. So, I write it all down with pointers on the web, or with all the documents I can find and, store it somewhere like Evernote in the relevant notebook with correct tags. When I need to re-use that information I just open the note and look up what I need.

I also take notes while learning something which starts as a simple and single entry point to the all knowledge and resources around it, allowing me to resume or improve much faster with less effort.

OTOH, if I'm going to transfer responsibilities, I make a copy of the notes and hand it over. Rarely any questions come after that, if any.

Lastly, organized knowledge allows me to see what I know and where can I go from there. I find this property immensely useful over the years.

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

#102

Post by MattGaiser »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #93
MattGaiser wrote: post #10

So much of the chaos of day to day work is an inability of organizations to make decisions and even after making the decision, remembering enough of it the next day or even next hour to use the information. When it comes to spreading that over a year or after someone departs, forget it. There is also enormous inefficiency caused by covering the same ground over and over again, but it happens quite frequently as nothi…

True, both people and organisations have to remember things. But when it comes to organisations, I think the existence of a separate task called "note taking" is often a symptom of slow software development and data modeling. Individuals sometimes take notes to collect random ideas. That's fine. I do that too. No one other than myself could ever make sense of my notes though, and sometimes not even I can. When organi…

> There has to be a deliberate process of modeling and collecting structured data so it can be queried and transformed into something that facilitates specific decisions. At that point, it's no longer called note taking.

This is one of those aspirational things that should exist, like automated testing. In practice, many places are just reliant on people knowing stuff.

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

#103

Post by Aeolun »

I like the idea of note taking, but my brain really doesn’t sit still enough to ever put the current contents down on the page.

That’s a problem I’ll have to solve before I ever get around to trying any new note taking software.

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

#104

Post by pdinny »

nicbou wrote: post #94
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…

Many of my notes are write only. I might refer to them here or there, but it's mostly about laying my thoughts out. However, I love flipping through old notebooks. They're a personal diary made of schematics, sketches, lists and recipes. I'm now a bit more conscious about dating each page, because I combine those with other data to form a personal timeline [0]. None of this is about productivity. It's closer to an ar…

Timeline looks really great!

I'm a fan of this approach to users owning their data: it enables things that are interesting and valuable for the user, rather than making it something that necessarily requires an audience.

I hadn't previously considered incorporating notes into a personal archive as I often see them as being of a fundamentally different class to journaling, but I'm starting to reconsider my biases in that regard.

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

#105

Post by dageshi »

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…

There's two types of notes for me. One is stored procedures for things that are tedious but I know I will need to do again, a lot of programming snippets might fall into this one but procedures of any kind.

Second is writing my current thought processes as I'm working on stuff, once a task is complete these are rarely if ever references again but they're very handy for if you're working on something, get interrupted and need to get back on task.

I use Roam Research for both.

I think for people who heavily link and organise notes by subject, they're more about getting back within a specific context area and getting the brain firing on that context area than necessarily finding specific answers.

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

#107

Post by WA »

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" and "get it out of your system"?

I give you a simple example. If you play Wordle and you stop to think about your next guess, you can make all the possible permutations in your brain. This is possible with the downside that you might start to think in loops and consider the same word-pattern over and over again.

Or you write them down and solve the next guess by doing all permutations on paper (or a text editor).

Note-taking is somewhat similar. Structuring thoughts for me means that I write them down to avoid looping around the same thing all the time. I get it out of my system, because my brain isn't stuck in the same loop. Note-taking helps to speed up the passive brain processing task in some cases. Not always. Not for everything.

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

#108

Post by dewey »

Everyone takes notes differently and retains information differently. So every developer thinks there's no app that covers exactly their use case and the others do it wrong. So they build their own app.

It is similar to people chasing endless productivity by reading about it while actually not getting anything done. It feels productive, but you are just busy.

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

#109

Post by coldtea »

>What's this about?

We're overloaded with BS information, BS demands, and BS business "requirements" non-stop, plus BS aspirations and BS role models (from Ferris to "wake up at 4am founders").

This is an (appropriately BS itself) attempt to cop.

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

#110

Post by GGfpc »

walterbell wrote: post #90
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.

does that actually work though?
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