How I Manage My Random Daily Notes

Trello has been the best Notes and todo app I could find.

For years, I experimented with paper, org-mode, text notes (Sublime Text, TextEdit) to manage my thoughts and life. What I ended up with was folder after folder of disorganized notes, files like daily.txt, todo.txt, log.rtf that ended up disgusting me.

I would so strongly recommended everyone reading this to check out Roam Research (https://roamresearch.com/). At it's core, it's a collection of text notes in the cloud. Just open it up and start typing your thoughts down. No folders or hierarchy. The key enabler is that is that you can link together different pages. Roam Research helps you make so much better sense of your thoughts - I use it personally to plan out goals, projects, brainstorm research, track meetings/dates, and keep a daily log of everything I go through. I can't recommend it enough - even my dad started using it everyday after I showed him.

Just try it out and starting typing a few notes. It'll start off as a simple graph for text notes / documents, but there are so many more powerful features to discover, too.

EDIT: Roam is a cloud-based service, notes are not end-to-end encrypted. It doesn't bother me, but if it bothers you, there are many open source, offline-first alternatives that the community has created (emacs-org, Foam, Obsidian, etc.). I am in no way sponsored by Roam, I don't know anybody at Roam, I don't run any of those bullshit Roam courses, and Roam is expensive as fuck, but let me tell you this: there are so many features and UI optimizations that make Roam have the best user experience. Don't compromise your time and user experience.

Sure, you can do this via the agenda [1], which essentially aggregates your tasks in various ways. You would organize your tasks as headers as follows

    * some project :tag:
    ** open tasks
    *** TODO Fix widget
    a stacktrace
    [[screenshot.png]]
    *** TODO Extend screen
    some notes on xrandr
    ** tasks done
    *** DONE Profit
    some notes about making money
    more notes about how much money was made

Then you can use the agenda to show all TODO items in that project, which preserves the order you have in the Org file.

[1]: https://orgmode.org/manual/Agenda-Views.html

Sure thing.

It's a script called "d" (for diary) that I keep in my home folder. I try minimise mouse usage, so I've got a keyboard shortcut for opening a terminal, and then in the terminal I run ./d

=== start of script ===

#!/bin/bash

y=`date +%Y`;

ym=`date +%Y-%m`;

ymd=`date +%Y-%m-%d`;

if [ ! -d "Dropbox/diary/$y" ]; then

    mkdir Dropbox/diary/$y

fi

if [ ! -d "Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym" ]; then

    mkdir Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym

fi

vim Dropbox/diary/$y/$ym/$ymd.txt

=== end script ===

I could probably refactor the hell out of this. But I'm an old beard that prefers explicit readability. For example I don't need to use YYYY-MM for the month sub-folders (I could just use MM), and similarly I don't need the full YYYY-MM-DD.txt for the day files (I could just use DD.txt) - so your preference may vary.

And yeah I use .txt files because I can edit those natively in the Dropbox app on my phone too. Don't need any special apps installed to manage my notes on the go.

In terms of the contents of the files, I've kept the searchability really simple by using hashtags, example:

=== Dropbox/diary/2020/12/04.txt ===

## #keyword1 #keyword2

Here be notes on keyword1 and keyword2.

## #keyword3

Here be notes captured later on the same day on keyword3.

These can span multiple lines if I want.

## #keyword4

Here be notes on keyword4 captured even later in the day.

===

I use the single hashtag keyword system for quick grepping (and future indexing if I want to build a searchable database out of this one day), and the double hashtag ## at the start of each note snippet so that I can parse individual snippets more easily.

Hope that helps! :)

I love Trello but I don't want my data on the cloud. I wish I could have something as nice and easy as Trello but self hosted