I too am very torn about this. And a large part of this may be I am not an early adopter of things. What I found is I suck at taking notes for longetivity. I take notes to understand (say few first times). But where it fails me is in finding things. What I do feel well endowed with is my ability to use a search engine. So I tend to keep pointers (in my mind) to areas and concepts reasonably well and then am confident that I can find it when I need it so don't have to depend on notes. This could also be why I suck at typical tech interviews!!
Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
211–219 of 219 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#212I started something that I need to finish: I need to find the best personal note taking app for Android!
I use Google Keep at work on my work phone, tablet, and laptop and I love it. Simple to use, clean UI, I can attach photos, I can add sketches, and color and label each note. It's completely replaced my Engineering Log Books.
In my personal life I've been trying to go Google free for years even though I love Android. I've been using NextCloud for my files and notes for a few years but I've found the Notes app too basic. I can't attach images. It has markdown support but not much else.
So, last Summer I decided to look for a good note taking app for Android. Instead of figuring out my needs first, I just dove in and downloaded a whack of them and tried them out.
I've tried 80 Android apps and counting!
As I used the apps, I kept finding the different ways people designed their apps, what functions they included and became amazed at the creativity and interesting approaches (not all good). With each app my wants started diverging from what I thought I needed. I found myself wanting checklists, labels, colors, audio recording, and text highlighting to name a few.
As I shared my notes with the Developers, it started conversations with a couple of them.
If you share this passion, join my ride: https://www.noteapps.ca
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#213Learning isn't necessarily arduous. Particularly if love and/or have the time to immerse yourself in the topic. Language (and therefore music, poetry, other arts, math, programming, and surely more stuff) can be like that. It's rare, but even at the PhD level they can still be like that.
(And a good frictionless note taking system makes it easier to love studying.)
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the 'official' explanation, and definitely true. But most of it is selling that next productivity upgrade that we communally all seem to obsess over here. People sharing their note graphs is the same as the guy on youtube with a sixpack promising a new and revolutionary 5 minute ab routine. And while the 5 minute ab routine certainly won't harm you, that body was built from months of discipline and required a…
> Just like actual productive note taking and creative thinking is about spending time with your notes every day, and not the software. This is the key thing, I think, and it's why most methodologically-heavy notes apps fall by the wayside, because they get in the way.
Daily processing is incredibly powerful, but once you've got the knack it's not hard to take useful notes that you won't refer to again for months or years. When I solve a tricky problem i file the solution under whatever keywords are relevant, and if I run into that problem again I can generally find it. (In the rare case that i don't, it didn't take long to file the answer so I'm unharmed by the note taking, and indeed likely helped nevertheless, as putting it into words helped my brain understand its properties.)
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#215I think taking notes to remember important things is just in our nature. I have yet to find a piece of note taking software that will prevent my opening up a dozen Notepad instances and leaving them open (unsaved) for all eternity... I take notes to remember TODOs, to draft communication, to write random crap I want to come back to. Sometimes I don't even come back to it, but somehow writing it down still helps. I st…
Absolutely, in 20 odd years my muscle memory still opens notepad and the only thing I would love is some kind of autosave/persistence across devices as I always have a dread when occasionally I lose stuff on a crash or something. However when I think about it this may be why notepad still works for me, it doesn't become overwhelming. I've tried to use quite a few systems over the years and the trajectory is always th…
After leaving my comment a few days ago I was reminded of a web-based note taking system I remembered using years ago called Workflowy, so I went back and checked it out. I learned that they now have a desktop app and it provides a very simple, lightweight workflow for jotting down notes. It feels less bulky than Obsidian and more manageable than the Notepad windows. In fact, right now I only have two Notepad instances open instead of my usual 10 or 15, which maybe is saying something...
We'll see if I stick with it for more than a few days.
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#216A 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.
They are known as MOCs...
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#217All 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.
The markdown-based apps like obsidian are probably on the right track, but there’s too much dogma associated with methodologies like zettelkasten today that it just it’s probably a deterrent for some people. For those who just want a generic and easy to use app like OneNote, they’re not going to find it in Obsidian.
> For those who just want a generic and easy to use app like OneNote, they’re not going to find it in Obsidian.
That's not an accurate statement. Obsidian can literally be as simple as one wants it to be, or as sophisticated in virtually any direction. The culty "Zettelkasten" emphasis is entirely coming from the community and can be totally ignored (as I do).
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#218Fck note taking, live the moment and stop care about irrelevant BS.
"Irrelevant BS" like… organizing information and self-reflection? (???)
Re: Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
#219I completely understand the fascination with note taking. Most of us don't have photographic memories and look askance at a classmate in college who does well despite never taking notes. What's curious to me is how many note takers don't also talk about mind maps and concept maps, although they are talked about often on HN. I've developed my own ad hoc mind map, concept map and note taking system and one of my retire…
Could you please share some information about your project? I'm also interested in mind map and note taking apps combination. (I've looked through your https://linktr.ee, but don't find info about project you told) Thanks!