Ask HN: What are your note-taking techniques?

My setup is on OneNote, which does a really great job of indexing everything you throw into it.

- Start with one notebook, call it "Work" or "Main" or whatever. Put it on OneDrive or some other web-accessible location if you want (or don't - OneNote may be proprietary, but it's file-driven and you own your data). Create a section in it called "Unfiled". Create another section called "Unfiled Archive."

- Customize the system notification icon to create a new quick note when you click it.

- In OneNote Options > Save and Backup, set the Quick Notes Section to the Unfiled section you just created.

Need to jot something down? Click the notification area icon and you get a new note. Most of your day-to-day can live in the Unfiled section until you get a little down time, which you can use to organically sort and organize as you see fit. If something's old and you're not sure if you need it, drag it to the archive section. Over the years I have grown one huge notebook called "Learning" with tons of sections on every conceivable subject. My main "Work" notebook primarily consists of the Unfiled section plus a few others that have some long-lived stuff in them.

A few other OneNote-specific tips:

- Win+Shift+S freezes the display and lets you draw a bounding box to take a screenshot. I configure this to send the screenshot to the clipboard; super handy.

- OneNote has a printer driver. I print stuff to OneNote all the time.

- Interesting web pages have a habit of disappearing. Use IE's "Send to OneNote" or the OneNote printer driver to capture them. Bonus: the entire text of the page gets put into the OneNote full-text index.

The number one problem with note taking for me is keeping track of all the notes. In the past, I'd make all these great notes with Zim then never read them. With anki and spaced repetition, that problem is solved. When the memory of the note is on the verge of decaying, anki reminds me, keeping it fresh.

Anki has a web, android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and iOS client, it features online syncing, supports html markup and has extensions support with python. Works for me!

Evernote is basically my OS.

In this time, I have never been able produce legible or useful notes much less come up with a personal note taking system that works for me.

My studying habits in school boiled down to showing up to class and pretending to take notes and then going home to spend hours outlining textbook chapters until I had everything I needed to do well on exams.

At work, I take notes in meetings for the exact same reason I took notes in college - so I won't be judged for not taking notes.