Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Evolving my note-taking processes

codethrasher.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 80 posts

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#61

Post by type0 »

rrgok wrote: post #60

I don't take notes at all, I just use Notepad++ as temporary clipboard for big copy/pastes or edit before paste. I'm really curious to see what the notes looks like for these heavy note taker with hundred of pages/notes. I'm also curios to know if it depends on the career, maybe a ML Engineer need more note taking than an electrician who wire cables all day. I'm a software engineer. My thinking process gets better as…

My philosophy that one should make note taking system as effortless as possibly, once you over-engineer it becomes a chore

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#62

Post by liketochill »

oxff wrote: post #52

> 0 mentions for Zotero Question for anyone that consumes a lot of PDFs as I do: what do you use instead? Manual data insertion is an absolute no. So that leaves the Zotero alternatives, but quick search shows 0 mentions for any of them too.

I’m still using qiqqa instead of zotero or mendeley for searching my pdf library but never got heavily in to the annotations feature - I would copy or screenshot to one note and then add my thoughts

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#64

Post by Joeri »

pen2l wrote: post #30

I came to appreciate and realize the importance of note-taking, finally this year, with org-mode. Folding and easy-labeling features jive well with me (and for when sharing my notes and thoughts with others), babel and linking is pretty cool too. I use orgmode for to-do lists too, but it's a little weak there. I think an effective to-do list management implementation is tightly coupled with calendars... It was such a…

I think an effective to-do list management implementation is tightly coupled with calendars...

That is a fascinating take, because I am of the opposite opinion. I don’t think a todo system that involves scheduling tasks can work well, because it is impossible to figure out ahead of time whether too many or too few tasks are scheduled on a day, and because it is hard to reprioritize scheduled tasks. Instead, imho, the only role dates play in an effective todo system is to label tasks with their due date, but never to schedule a task on its due date (as that is too late) but only to inform the setting of priorities. Instead in my view the critical aspect of an effective todo system is a clear priority of tasks, easily reprioritized, so that working time involves only tackling the flat list of tasks in order of priority until the completion of the working day.

For me integration with email instead of calendar is super convenient though, because that is where tasks often stream into my todo list. But I never use unread or flagged status to mark mails as a todo, because email does not afford reprioritizing. I see email as a way station between other people and my todo list.

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#65

Post by wainstead »

rrgok wrote: post #60

I don't take notes at all, I just use Notepad++ as temporary clipboard for big copy/pastes or edit before paste. I'm really curious to see what the notes looks like for these heavy note taker with hundred of pages/notes. I'm also curios to know if it depends on the career, maybe a ML Engineer need more note taking than an electrician who wire cables all day. I'm a software engineer. My thinking process gets better as…

> I'm also curios to know if it depends on the career, maybe a ML Engineer need more note taking than an electrician who wire cables

I started keeping a “log” back in 1999 just for work (I too am a software engineer). I note what I worked on and/or what problems I was trying to solve and/or what solutions I found. And some personal stuff too.

My inspiration is the idea of the scientist’s lab book where “if you didn’t write it down it didn’t happen.”

Countless times — even this past week - it has proven invaluable when I wanted to look up how I solved something before (“how do we generate those CSP headers on the fly?” “How did I mount that Docker container?”) or when no one knows why something was built a certain way (and I noted the date and time a manager made that decision).

After a few years I wind up with a few novels worth of entries (by volume) so it’s amazing how writing a little each day adds up.

As to format, it started as a .txt file in Emacs but has evolved into a moderately simple org-mode file.

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#66

Post by keeptrying »

I find writing and journaling in a real book much more therapeutic.

If you buy an executive notebook and a really nice flowing pen like the G2, it’s a pleasurable practice.

Once I have it written down I feel much less stressed. I’ve never felt hat way about online notetsking

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#67

Post by bstpierre »

reactspa wrote: post #10

Markdown question: I want to take create a chronological journal where I track tutorials I've done (and how well, etc), but I want to add some sort of a tag wherever I feel like so that with a click I can find all my entries related to (say) React, or R (statistics), and so on. If you're reading this, and have had luck with such a tagging mechanism, please share your solution. FOSS only, of course.

Agree with sibling comments; tags aren’t worth much to me.

The best outcome I’ve had for finding stuff in notes related to a particular concept is just by grepping through my notes, which are just plain text (and/or markdown) files, in a directory, that I “manage” with vim. If I know that I want something to be findable in the future I just make sure to sprinkle some keywords in the note. Since it’s just my notes and it doesn’t need to conform to any formal system, I can also drop images into the dirs (diagrams, screenshots, etc) and either link them from markdown or just name them so they come up in a ‘find’.

For a long time this even worked well when I had irc logs saved near the notes so I can grep them too, because I often remember having a conversation but not the details. But now with less irc and more slack/etc this isn’t as fruitful.

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#68

Post by corobo »

abrax3141 wrote: post #32

I find all online note taking to be useless because you can’t efficiently and effectively draw on any existing platform with anything like the convenience of p&p. Also, why aren’t you all just using gDocs, like everyone else? Self hosting your personal notes seems like you’re putting your precious brain dumps one drive failure away from disaster.

My notes are text files. Markdown to be precise. Theoretically I could add an images folder no problem, though I've not needed to yet. I store them in a git repo and they're also a part of my normal backup process.

I'd need my PC and 3 NAS drives (all different vendors/batches) to fail AND Backblaze and GitHub would need to both break before I worry about losing my notes.

I doubt I'd be able to lose them if I tried honestly. There'll be a copy on my laptop too now I'm thinking about it.

As for why? Because I can build my own systems no bother. I also like to have many ways of adding to my notes such as via phone, via command line, via the share menu in iOS, via web browser (github.dev), via Siri if I really wanted to.

Wrapping all this up into a nice working system took the better part of a few hours and I don't have to worry about anything being discontinued. Text files will probably still be usable 100 years from now, which is plenty for what I need.

E: Oh yeah there's another copy of the repo on both my phone and my iPad haha. Both autosync using iOS Shortcuts whenever I write a note on that device.

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#69

Post by fikama »

reactspa wrote: post #10

Markdown question: I want to take create a chronological journal where I track tutorials I've done (and how well, etc), but I want to add some sort of a tag wherever I feel like so that with a click I can find all my entries related to (say) React, or R (statistics), and so on. If you're reading this, and have had luck with such a tagging mechanism, please share your solution. FOSS only, of course.

Logseq, it has journal built in, and it supports tags, it may be an overkill though

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#70

Post by FinnKuhn »

wainstead wrote: post #65
rrgok wrote: post #60

I don't take notes at all, I just use Notepad++ as temporary clipboard for big copy/pastes or edit before paste. I'm really curious to see what the notes looks like for these heavy note taker with hundred of pages/notes. I'm also curios to know if it depends on the career, maybe a ML Engineer need more note taking than an electrician who wire cables all day. I'm a software engineer. My thinking process gets better as…

> I'm also curios to know if it depends on the career, maybe a ML Engineer need more note taking than an electrician who wire cables I started keeping a “log” back in 1999 just for work (I too am a software engineer). I note what I worked on and/or what problems I was trying to solve and/or what solutions I found. And some personal stuff too. My inspiration is the idea of the scientist’s lab book where “if you didn’t…

If I understand this correctly you could almost describe your note taking as writing a personal documentation
Post reply on HN