Ask HN: What are your note-taking techniques?

My time to shine! I'm a huge note taking nerd and have tried many many solutions.

I first used my Gmail Drafts folder. This was actually really good for a time. Accessible via web or phone, the Gmail app automatically syncs the drafts to any device. However with many notes this gets messy.

I moved to some startup note-taking app after that. I can't remember the name now but it was fairly perfect. Unfortunately they closed down. This was the time I really started lookin triedg and trying many different things.

I settled on plain Markdown files stored on Dropbox. I use the excellent Draft app on Android to edit on my phone, and vim on PC. The only drawback with this, Dropbox's text renderer doesn't do fenced code blocks, so it looks funny on the webpage if I share a note with those.

I have a note-taking nerd friend and he settled on a private git repository.

I've tried Evernote but I hated it.

Y'all need Markdown

I have a personal wiki powered by Org-mode[1] that includes several thousand documents containing the notes I've taken. I keep all the documents open all the time, and I use Ido[2] to access any document in under two seconds. A high-speed note-taking solution like this is necessary for me because I refer to and take notes up to hundreds of times per day. When I last evaluated note-taking solutions (2012?), no solution was both fast and feature-rich like Org-mode.

One example of a feature that Org-mode has that the other solutions I evaluated didn't was support for plain text spreadsheets[3]. This feature is very helpful to me because many of my notes include small sets of tabular data that I strongly prefer to include directly in my wiki documents rather than in a separate Excel or LibreOffice spreadsheet.

[1] http://orgmode.org/manual/

[2] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/ido.e...

[3] http://orgmode.org/manual/The-spreadsheet.html

I have considered going paperless in lectures/etc., but I'm hesitant because of research that shows typing leads to less retention than writing, even in the absence of distractions [1]. This also conforms with my own experience with written notes and typed notes.

[1] Meuller, Oppenheimer, "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking," Psychological Science, 2014 http://zetesis.org/wp1/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/MuellerOpp...

What is the directory structure you use for managing all of your org files?

I've been converting my note taking to Org-mode over the past few months and am still trying to find the ideal directory/file layout to put things in.