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Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#101

Post by item007 »

yawnxyz wrote: post #37

yes and no; I "hoard" ideas and articles because it's a good way for me to offload them from my brain As a designer, I absolutely DO scroll through my swipe files once in a while to get inspiration; sometimes I'll also go through saved github repos to borrow an implementation E.g. that's how I ended up using a lot of libraries like Immer, Svelte, ended up loving Observable / d3js, etc. Idk about all y'all, but notes…

Totally agree — “notes as offloading” is real, and for design/dev work swipe files are legitimately high ROI (inspo + implementation references).

Concerns isn’t trying to turn everything into more notes. The premise is: most useful context already exists in lots of places (articles, emails, posts, links, repos), and forcing all of it into a single note system is extra work. I’m exploring a connector approach where those sources can stay where they are, and the system only surfaces/reconnects the right items when they’re relevant to an active project — without you having to rewrite them as notes.

Curious: for your workflow, what’s the most valuable “resurface moment” — when starting a new project, when you’re stuck mid-way, or during review/polish?

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#102

Post by item007 »

xenodium wrote: post #18

I had been hoarding links/notes to movies/tv shows for some time, saved to a plain text file. Often by sharing links from other apps (ie. Reddit or Letterboxd), paired with hashtags, using an iOS app I built. Finally extracted the data for these hashtags and fed it to an LLM to organize. I'm happy with the result https://xenodium.com/film-tv-bookmarks-chaos-resolved

Nice write-up — I like the “capture with lightweight hashtags, then batch-organize with an LLM” approach.

Curious: what part created the most friction before you automated it — capturing, tagging consistency, or resurfacing when you actually want to watch something?

Also, after the LLM organized it, did you find yourself maintaining that structure, or do you plan to re-run organization periodically?

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#103

Post by item007 »

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #50

Workflow is key. Things do not just immediately get done - there is a process. Over-generalization is the devil - precise description of targets and goals is key to execution, and soon enough, delivery. The ability to describe a workflow - or a production pipeline, or whatever you want to call it - but lets say, workflow, is very important in these kinds of automation systems. You could generalise workflows such that…

Strongly agree. I think the biggest leverage is forcing explicit targets + a small, user-defined workflow, otherwise automation becomes vague and noisy.

One direction I’m exploring is a constrained “active projects” list (only a few at a time) plus lightweight workflow templates, so the system can map incoming info to a specific stage/next-step rather than spraying suggestions.

If you had to pick, what’s the minimum workflow schema that’s still useful: stages (e.g. research/draft/review), clear Definition of Done, or explicit next-action ownership? (If helpful, I wrote up the idea in my HN profile/bio.)

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#104

Post by item007 »

nitwit005 wrote: post #20

> Project context signals (repo/PRs? issues? tasks? calendar? a “project doc”?) There's a cost to recording what you're working on, so usually the only people who track it in a fine grained way are those that need exact numbers for billing. It's not worth the time otherwise. There are hints to what people are working on. Connecting to a database means SQL may happen, but maybe not. It's a big issue with personal assi…

You're totally right — fine-grained “what I’m working on” tracking is usually not worth the overhead unless it’s tied to billing or some hard accountability.

One direction I’m exploring is to stop treating context as a single ground-truth stream and instead use cheap, probabilistic hints: a small “active projects” list (explicit but constrained), plus weak signals (recent files, open tabs, issue activity), and then ask for confirmation only when confidence is low. Calendars are a great example of why “seems firm” isn’t actually firm.

If you were designing this, which would you rather tolerate: (a) fewer suggestions but higher precision, or (b) more coverage with lightweight confirmation prompts?

And yes — this is exactly the problem I’m outlining in my HN bio/profile if you want the longer version.

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#105

Post by item007 »

robshippr wrote: post #58

I am very good at writing down notes, especially in meetings... I am not so great at going back to those notes. I also have an issue with jumping around to different notebooks.

That’s a super common pattern: capture is easy, retrieval isn’t, and fragmentation makes it worse.

Two small things that often help without changing your whole setup:

Keep a single “Meeting Inbox” note/page where all meetings land first (even if messy), and only promote items out when they turn into actions.

Add a 2-minute “end of meeting” ritual: write 1 decision, 1 next step, 1 owner/date at the top of the note.

Curious: what’s the main reason you don’t go back—time, forgetting the note exists, or the notes don’t feel actionable when you do open them?

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#106

Post by item007 »

appsoftware wrote: post #10

I like obsidian, but use Logseq day-to-day. I find it pretty easy to dump information without too much work due to the block / indenting structure. Retrieval isn't too bad, because you navigate to the wikilink you need, and everything is under it (I do sometimes swear I used a specific wiki link and then find I used something else, and have to dig for information). Something that did work well recently, was creating…

That’s a really solid workflow: keep capture friction low in Logseq, then do “topic export → LLM consolidation” when you actually need a brief. The wiki-link mismatch problem also sounds like a naming/alias layer issue more than retrieval itself.

If you were to take this one step further, would you want the output to be:

1.a consolidated brief you can re-enter later, or

2.a small set of next-actions / open questions extracted from the brief?

This “export + consolidate” pattern is very close to what I’m exploring (details in my HN bio/profile if you’re curious).

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#107

Post by tolerance »

nicbou wrote: post #21

At some point, organisation can become a form of procrastination. Building a second brain is not Doing The Thing.[0] A note is not an intention. It commits to memory, not to action. I really don't care about having a whole searchable, tagged database; I hardly ever look at those notes again. At work I have topic-based Markdown notes. Sometimes I collect information about a topic for a few weeks or months, and eventua…

> Building a second brain is not Doing The Thing.

I hate the concept of a “second brain” but this isn’t necessarily true. Those guides you make at work seemingly precede the action of someone else, right? And even if the notes you write for yourself aren’t needed afterwards, don’t they contribute to “doing the thing”?

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#108

Post by item007 »

semadraw wrote: post #47

No, I do not have that issue. I process each note once and do not revisit it, which prevents clutter from accumulating. If a note needs to be retained or acted upon later, I convert it into a scheduled item in my tickler file and treat it as an explicit action rather than passive information.

That’s a really disciplined approach — “process once, then either discard or convert to an explicit scheduled action” is basically the cleanest anti-hoarding rule.

Out of curiosity: what makes something worthy of going into your tickler file versus just letting it go? Is it time-bound commitments, high leverage ideas, or anything with an external dependency?

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#109

Post by item007 »

ebhn wrote: post #27

I actually like this idea, but most of my notes are scattered in untitled, unsaved textedit windows. It would be nice if I could run something locally that would access and scrape those unsaved notes, but would also leave them be. I don't think I'll ever stop having tons of these little note windows, but it would be nice if I could request a summary or forgotten action items in my own time.

That’s a great constraint: local-only, read-only access, and on-demand (pull) rather than push.

I’m thinking the safest/lowest-friction version would treat those TextEdit drafts as an ephemeral “inbox”: index them locally, never rename/move/touch the files/windows, and only generate summaries or “possible action items” when you explicitly ask. If it ever became noisy, it should default to doing less, not more.

Out of curiosity: would you want this as a one-command “summarize all open drafts” tool, or something you run against a selected subset (last 7 days / containing a keyword)? Also, which matters more to you: preserving privacy (strictly local) or preserving the exact TextEdit workflow (no export step)?

Details in my HN profile/bio if you want the longer idea.

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#110

Post by item007 »

chaosharmonic wrote: post #13

I'd say it's more that when I hoard links, a small slice of them end up becoming useful reference knowledge long-term. Though I don't really have a system for storing them effectively as of yet, and as someone with a strong preference for open source on my critical workflows, I never got on the Obsidian train myself. Current experiment is Silverbullet.md, because I do very much like raw Markdown and file-based notes,…

That makes sense — link hoarding is basically “maybe-useful reference capture”, and the hard part is turning that small slice into something retrievable without spending your life organizing.

The open-source + file-based constraint is a strong signal. One direction I’m exploring is to keep everything as raw sources (links/files) and build a local index over them, so you can pull a “what do I already have on X?” brief on demand, without needing a fully curated Obsidian-style setup.

For Silverbullet specifically: what would “meaningfully useful” look like for you as a first step?

1. better recall (fuzzy/semantic search over saved links + notes)

2. periodic resurfacing (a digest of “you saved this months ago, might matter now”)

3. extracting a lightweight summary + a few key takeaways per link

Details in my HN profile/bio if you want the longer context.

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