11–20 of 219 posts
People often take a shot at this problem, which makes for the monthly or bimonthly thread on HN, but I think there's still a lot of room for innovation.
And I do want to think better.
Currently really happy with Slack, Org-mode and Roam Research, each for its own use.
I take notes to remember TODOs, to draft communication, to write random crap I want to come back to. Sometimes I don't even come back to it, but somehow writing it down still helps.
I started using Obsidian which has been nice, but feels a bit clunky in a lot of ways on Windows...I'm hoping to find something more lightweight.
* We operate on gigantic sets of data (not from CS perspective, average human consumes more data in 10 years than avg man in his lifetime only few decades ago)
* Reasoning about data is not easy, and storing what matters is crucial in being effective worker/citizen/parent/etc.
* Promo of zettelkasten
* Good money too? Making note-taking app is not as difficult as coming up with novel startup and takes less time and money
* Internet figures promoting it (David Perell)
* Feels like we've done something without too much effort (motion vs action by James Clear - https://jamesclear.com/taking-action)
* This is the way to create articles and papers - most of the tech are not writers and their writings had happened naturally and by some impulse/itch. To repeat that we cannot rely on these forces all the time
* You can make your own personal wiki which can be the new blog, feels sexy for tech (whereas other people are doing that by cultivating their ig/fb profiles)
All notetaking apps are disappointing with the possibile exception of Obsidian that I haven't tried long enough to have an opinion on. There's no open source standard. No LibreOffice or Krita of notetaking. They all only have a small subset of features one might want. And yet they are critical infrastructure for people's entire life. It's a pretty exciting space.
I hope, at some point, something akin to another enhanced subset of Markdown will become the de-facto standard.
In practice effort is probably much more important than software features, but we blame the software we've tried instead of our own lack of effort at making good notes, and keep looking for that hypothetical perfect tool.
Personally I don't even put in enough effort to install these tools, but I look at articles about them anyway, and futilely wish I had better access to my information.
I think the answer for me is actually to share what I write with my team more. I'm quite good at documenting things, and the reason for that is because I'm writing docs for other people. If people mention seeing something in the docs then I tend to write more docs. If no one mentions them for a while my documenting dies off until I need to write more. If I could easily apply that mechanism to notes I might be more inclined to write things down.
Even if I don't share it with anyone it helps me figure stuff out. I don't read back 90% of what I write, the writing itself is what provides most value to me. Although it can be handy to dig into the archives to understand my thinking of months back.
Tooling wise; I like handwriting, as I can draw arrows and quick sketches. I used to always carry an A5 notebook around, now I use an iPad with Apple Pencil (recently upgraded to the new mini which is perfect A5'ish size).
Apps I use on the iPad are; GoodNotes for actual notes and Concepts for more visual sketching and such.
If I need to take notes that I need to share I generally use https://nota.md which is imo by far the best markdown note taking experience available. Think of it as a markdown editor with code editor features (e.g. multi cursor). It also works with normal markdown files so no lock in.
When on my phone I use the Notes app on.
Yes, lots of tools, but I find different tools are best for different things. It does means everything is spread around, but it works for me, it's sort of an organized chaos, I can find stuff when I need to.
I think the joy comes from the idea of maintaining all information, of "getting your shit together" in a way. I think most humans truly enjoy collecting and organizing things. Notes, similarly to todos, bookmarks, lists etc are just tools to scratch that itch, the more the better!