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Ask HN: How do you take notes?

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Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#1

Post by sachitgupta »

Going off the discussion on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1743513 about "Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?"; I wanted to ask, how do you take notes to maximize the amount of information you remember?

I spend a lot of time consuming information (HN, books, blogs, Mixergy interviews and Twitter) but have nothing to show for it. I think we really need to note three kinds of information: notes, questions and action items. But I have a hard time keeping track of all of it for all the different sources.

I've tried using a notebook, but then its harder to go back and look through it. Ideally, I would use an iPad application that has a system to handwrite notes and then easily categorize that information.

Anyone have any strategies to easily search through and maximize the amount of information they remember? Thanks!

EDIT: I use a mac.

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#2

Post by pseudonym »

For myself, I tend to use OneNote. Not because I'm an MS fanboy, but because it allows me to keybind WinKey+S to capture one section of the screen and sends it to the clipboard. Most of the time I'm attending webinars with lengthy powerpoints, so doing that lets me pull the salient information out and type out relevant notes next to my partial screenshots. Then it's just subdividing into tabs and subtabs.

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#3

Post by sachitgupta »

pseudonym wrote: post #2

For myself, I tend to use OneNote. Not because I'm an MS fanboy, but because it allows me to keybind WinKey+S to capture one section of the screen and sends it to the clipboard. Most of the time I'm attending webinars with lengthy powerpoints, so doing that lets me pull the salient information out and type out relevant notes next to my partial screenshots. Then it's just subdividing into tabs and subtabs.

I like OneNote too; but I'm on Mac. And I prefer handwriting to typing. Thanks for the suggestion though!

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#4

Post by jakarta »

I think Evernote is pretty decent for this. I just use the web version, but because of the work I do, I have to read a ton of documents online and usually want to refer to them later. Evernote helps because I can use the web clipper to save whatever I am looking at and then tag it and even write some notes on it. Then later I can fire up the desktop application and go through my notes.

I believe the mobile versions allow for hand writing but I've never used them.

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#5

Post by BTBurke »

There are two tools that I really like -- Zotero does a great job of organizing references, keeping related things together, and has a decent search capability. The target audience is academia, but it works just as well for other kinds of use cases. I also keep a personal wiki running on my laptop to take down notes and organize my thoughts. I've tried a bunch of them and Confluence from Atlassian is my favorite. It has the ability to embed all kinds of different media and it's $10. Xwiki is pretty good too.

edit: bad grammar :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#6

Post by zdw »

Notes: Plain text. Markdown format. In SCM. Filesystem is the organization format. Don't have this syncing with iOS, but haven't felt the need.

Todos/Questions/Action Items: Plain text, into OmniFocus, via Quicksilver. Syncs with iOS.

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#7

Post by trustfundbaby »

I use delicious to bookmark the articles, and put in a snippet of the article that helps me remember what it was about.

With books, I use sticky colored tabs to call attention to important pages (instead of dogearing the pages) and a highlighter to mark up important paragraphs, with notes in the side if need be.

Re: Ask HN: How do you take notes?

#8

Post by nuttendorfer »

I tried a few full blown apps like Evernote and MS OneNote but you could say that these applications offered too much for me as I don't need fancy stuff like embedding images, I just want text.

I also wanted to do something in LINQ (LINQ to XML to be specific). Around that time I was looking at Notational Velocity and it's Windows "clones". So I went and create something really quickly and decided to make it a bigger project.

Meet Omnium. (This sounds cool.) As of now it's easy to sync with Dropbox (SugarSync, etc) but I plan to integrate synchronizing with Simplenote and also have some kind of export/import feature so you can use your NV notes/vice versa.

It's Windows only because Mono doesn't support WPF (yet) If you are interested: http://omnium.codeplex.com Please leave a comment on what you think (Codeplex' review system or here)

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