Daily Notes Considered Harmful
literallythevoid.com
Daily Notes Considered Harmful
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Re: Daily Notes Considered Harmful
#2Daily notes are my life line.
If you’re managing any fairly complex organisation and handling multiple threads on variable time horizons, daily notes can be an immensely useful tool.
Re: Daily Notes Considered Harmful
#3I like that “one note per issue/resolution” thing. I have an .md in our company’s main internal app’s repo which is just a bunch of tips and patterns for doing DevOps tasks. At the bottom is a section called “## Useful Shell Script,” a collection of scripts each in their own block quote. The approach work well for our small team, but it couldn’t scale. Having a personal repository with this sort of pattern would be very helpful. Thank you!
Re: Daily Notes Considered Harmful
#4It's difficult for me to read past the sentiment of the author's language, which is unfortunate, because there are interesting ideas here.
At any rate, my takeaway isn't anything to do with whatever the author considers a "daily" note or not, but about how the way we structure and synthesize our thoughts, alters the things we make.
For example, if in the creative process, I create an audience for myself (i.e. by thinking of sharing my notes), that may or may not introduce productive constraints to my process. On one hand, it could force me to better articulate my thoughts. On the other, my inner critic could preclude important insights.
Re: Daily Notes Considered Harmful
#5I disagree with the author, but I also get the impression that their view of notes is fundamentally different than mine so there's that.
I like the way LogSeq implemented daily notes, UX wise. It's an infinite scrolling page where you can add and edit dailies, so I end up "doomscrolling" my daily notes and re-reading them a lot more often than in other apps.
Re: Daily Notes Considered Harmful
#6I indulge in daily notes but make and organize them (mostly) topically. Dates are obfuscated, "discreete" if you will; they are, or can always be made, visible if so desired.
The notion of "not asking the same question twice" is laughable to anyone who interrogates different structures based on the same parameter(s), e. g. for comparative purposes. And daily notetaking based on a date-based organization principle is of course widely applicable, e. g. for (project) diaries, "to-be-sorted" infodumps, etc.
But then again, I find most programmer's notions of notetaking to be quite tedious, often bordering on the literally void. ;)
Re: Daily Notes Considered Harmful
#7This is quite a personal thing... I'm terrible at note taking and I've tried a few methods. I find organising this kind of "data" very difficult and I also find habit forming around note taking very difficult also. Finally, I always hated the idea of daily notes/journaling, so I resisted it for the longest time.
But when I finally started making a journal it was a lifeline. It works so well for me. I stop worrying about what I'm writing, how well I'm writing it, how I'm structuring it, where I'm storing it... and I just write it.
If it's something pertinent to what I"m working on, then it'll be a note from the last few days. Old notes, I just don't worry about.
I do have a page for "todo" type thing and I'm still working on that and I also write "proper" documentation separately. But daily notes are a huge win for me.
Re: Daily Notes Considered Harmful
#8Well I have been doing daily notes for probably 10 or 15 years, and love it. The clean slate every day is a godsend, and it's really not that hard to 'cat ' or even cat * | vim - if you want a full note.
I guess all I can do is average out TFA since we precisely disagree.
Re: Daily Notes Considered Harmful
#9I have a single system that I use for both digital and paper notes. Start writing, put new stuff at the end. Date every entry. Use topic headings that stand out clearly from the text. When it gets too full, slap a date on the file / notebook and open a new one.
Mostly this is not for returning to, but for thinking things through, although the paper system is also good for to do lists.
Re: Daily Notes Considered Harmful
#10I do weekly notes instead of daily. My problem with daily notes was that managing them was tedious and felt very duplicative (even when I found ways to automate their creation). It made searching for a particular topic or task more difficult because the unfinished item is in 3-4 daily notes cause it gets buried and I have to search through all of them.
Now that I am using weekly notes, I find myself finding information easier and the work to create the note is a 1/5th of the chore since I only do it Monday mornings.