Ask HN: How do you take notes?

When it comes to notes in meetings or daily notes/to do lists, I use a notebook. The only "organization" is the date at the top. When it comes to taking notes in lectures or conference talks, I use a text editor on my laptop.

I usually write down _a lot_ of stuff when listening to conference talks in person. Then I go through the notes in detail and compile them into a blog post that hopefully makes sense, which also forces me to organize the notes and review what I'd learned. Because of the sheer volume of text and the need to keep up with the talk I use a laptop for this, typing being much faster than my writing.

For meetings or other more relaxed occasions where I have more time and less volume, I just jot stuff down on paper. Aside from marking everything by day I don't really have a system there.

I write down notes in diary form through Notes on macOS.

It's light and fast, enough for casual notes taking. Too complex thing is hard to last.

    #!/bin/bash

    date="$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")"
    location="/home/developer/Dropbox/Personal/journal"
    filename="$date.md"
    output_path="$location/$filename"

    echo $date
    echo $location
    echo $filename
    echo $output_path

    # No existing file so lets create it
    if [ ! -f $output_path ]; then
        echo "Creating Journal Entry"
        touch $output_path
        echo "Journal: $date" >> $output_path
        printf "==================\n\n" >> $output_path
        echo "$output_path:20000"
        code -n -goto :2000 "$output_path:2000"
    else
        echo "Opening Existing Journal Entry"
        echo "$output_path:20000"
        code -n -goto :2000 "$output_path:2000"
    fi

Bound to the star key (I have an Ergo 4000 that has a non-standard key right in the middle).

All it does is create a markdown file with the name of the current date and then open that in vscode and move the cursor to the end of the file unless the file already exists in which case it skips creating it and just opens it at the end.

vscode realtime markdown preview is lovely.

I'm aware the bash is horrible, it was a 30s hack to see if it'd work (about 6mths ago...).

Went through a million of note taking apps and got back to pen and paper.

I use https://www.lifepim.com (disclaimer: I wrote it) for all my notes now. It has a simple cut down version of markdown with headings, code blocks and linking which works very well for me.

I manage the structure through the folders feature so notes are grouping into my categories (Dev, Design, Study, Fun, Home, Work, Health, Business)

simple markdown files enhanced with search+tagging via qOwnNotes synced with NextCloud

https://www.qownnotes.org/

There are some discussion about note-taking in the past:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6406198 (123 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945882 (85 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15579047 (77 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750534 (69 comments)

I use a graph paper notebook for planning, a blank paper notebook for design and software notes.

When I need to take longer or more important notes, I use markdown and vim. I keep them in ~/Dev/notes/

At the beginning of the day, I pull tasks from Notion (https://www.notion.so/). I use a dot grid notebook (this one is good and cheap http://a.co/fQUVPpF) for general notes and design. At the end of the day I review and put the important stuff back into Notion.

Blank A4 sheets from the printer folded twice and ripped apart.

Too cheap for notebooks and I'm a lefty.

Notes I want to keep/search are in keep.google.com

I use clocker to track my time so I don't worry too much about noting what I do each day because it's mostly in there.

Paper is mostly for just remembering things, todo, doodling, or drawing up system flow when I need it.

The paper is mostly ephemeral I find the things I want to look back at historically are what I did when which is in clocker, old scribbles are just that. If it's important it went in keep or email.

Edit, now that I think about it, has anyone looked at digital paper solutions? I use a mix of hand written and typed and find hand written doesnt lead to distractions like context switching on my laptop often can.

I trello everything in my life. Todos/bookmarks/everything. Linked to IFTTT I have my completed todos in G calendar and some other integrations like that.

I use nvALT, Todoist, and a calendar to organize everything. I don't have a good system for writing the notes specifically though.

repeating a previous comment of mine:

"What works for me is taking notes via email. Backing up, organizing, searching, and distributing email is more-or-less a solved problem, and my note-taking inherits those solutions. I can read and add notes from my phone and from my computer, with the ability to choose from a plethora of applications. I have multiple backups of my email around the world via standard email syncing. My email host has been 100% reliable in not losing my emails, as well. If I want to migrate to a different email host, that is trivial."

I wouldn't say my notes have much structure, though.

Shameless plug: http://write.pub

We're evaluating moving entirely to the browser using webassembly. Our experiment is here: http://www.write.pub/wasm-demo/hello.html

Workflowy changed my life https://workflowy.com/

Pen and paper.

I used to use Evernote but now I have completed Switched to StandardNotes which has end to end encryption. Link: https://app.standardnotes.org/

For meeting summaries I use paper, if i need it searchable I will type it into a single google doc title meeting summaries. For actionable notes I forward to my email (android app named Mail Mysels), and then I use Centask to manage and schedule a single outline composed of emails, todos, notes, links, and google drive files/images

I use and develop Standard Notes. It’s an open source encrypted note taking app available on all platforms:

https://github.com/standardnotes/web

Pen and paper - dot grid notebook with a systematic approach. Addition details in the hn thread below.

For professional life: Pen + dot grid notepad - developed independently, but similar to the bullet journal technique. Dot grid plus pens make the whole thing ultra customizable. I can sketch engineering designs, make a calendar, track action items, take detailed notes, all in the same format. The key is to be strict with page numbers, dates, and index as much as possible.

Things I occasionally miss - keyword search (I can still look things up by date or subject in the index), multimedia inserts (think dragging video/photos/sound clips into one note), never ending space (notebooks run out of pages), easy backups (thinking about digitizing with photos or scans), team collaboration (if this is necessary I use Trello).

Things I like - no OS/tech stack compatibility issues, "it just works", lighter then a laptop) tablet, don't need to charge, easy to read, can bring into a secure area (where outside electronics are not permitted), travels well, hard to damage.

http://bulletjournal.com/get-started/

For personal life: add Google keep for simple lists, and then a mix of Trello and dot grid for larger projects (less strict formatting than professional life project management).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17537675

If you're oriented towards academic writing, "How to Take Smart Notes" from Sönke Ahrens describes the Zettelkasten method which is akin to the GTD method but focused towards writing. Besides, the book contains interesting insights on how we learn and get motivated to work. Recommended reading.

emacs org mode. with a heavy customization inspired by bernt hansen (http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html).

I'm trying to figure this out myself. I do some pen and paper, but for online I use OneNote, used to use Evernote. OneNote is free, and on any given day I could be on iPad, iPhone, Windows, Mac or Linux. OneNote has a web client and iOS clients so things stay synced up.

Loose A4 Paper + Pen - new note always on a new paper; bundle similar papers with a paper clip; I also add sticknotes on the first page of a bundle to uniquely identify it.