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Ask HN: Do you take notes during work? If so, what do you use?

13 points by django-boy ↗ HN
Hello Hacker News,

I have been trying to take notes using Evernote, Bear and Apple Notes. None of them compare to writing my notes down on paper. However, writing my notes down on paper has none of the benefits these apps have (sorting, searching, etc).

Do you take notes during work? If so, have you found a "perfect app" or way of doing it?

21 comments

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icedchai
Early on in my career, I used to take notes, then realized I never looked at them. Now, I don't bother. I sometimes send emails to myself if I want to remember something. No point in a separate note app.
duke_of_newyork
I use dropbox paper almost exclusively now. It has great code snippet support and uses markdown. Sometimes I just use good old paper too.
cm2012
I type doc.new into the url bar.
clubm8
A 4 color pen + cheap amazonbasics moleskine knockoff

Black = facts. numbers, locations, new edicts, etc Blue = thoughts. musings. edge cases I think of during meetings but don't want to derail over, etc green = events (after work social, conferences, etc) red = todo

It's not perfect (ex: I usually write the details of meetings such as time/location and add a red star with "TODO: enter meeting X into calendar" but the line between a meeting an event can blur. Is an intern presentation an event or a meeting?

My main distinction is meetings are mandatory, events can be moved.

(Ex: I won't schedule a doctor's appointment during a client meeting. I would list the day there's an evening drinks session as a time I could meet the doctor)

It's not perfect, but the general idea is that the notebook is to store things until the end of the meeting - then they go into my calendar, into my todo list, or onto my whiteboard as problems to be brainstormed.

PeOe
For short notes or reminders which should last about an hour, I use just sticky post its. For further info and task-related stuff, I use our own tool https://zenkit.com. It's really good to visualize your notes and tasks.
smarri
I take my notes on excel. One sheet for current items, one sheet for closed items.
arduinomancer
I use the built in notes in outlook. The feature is a actually pretty bad and glitches out a lot on me but I find its one less window to keep open since you're usually constantly reading emails as a developer anyway.
tomjen3
Oh man, I would hate to be in a place where I would constantly be reading e-mail.
beatgammit
I've been playing with emacs org mode, and it's nice. I use Orgzly on my phone and have my devices sync with Syncthing and it has been mostly okay.

I'm still finding a rhythm (I'm a vim person), but it seems to be really useful. I like that it can handle scheduled things and automatically make notifications for me on my phone. I also like that it's just a text file, but has a ton of features that most text-based organization systems lack.

hazz99
Vim, or Notion.so. Notion is great software, and I'll recommend it to anyone who listens.
dawidw
https://bulletjournal.com/

I'm not following exactly that system but even though it's been great change in my life to remember and organise notes, events, ideas etc.

piocho
Like you, I tried several tools for taking notes (work or personnal). However, I didn't succeed using them during a long time.

So I switched to little notebook with one pen that is smooth to use. For now I find (quite) easily my notes, but in the future I'll probable need an easy why to search and find notes.

Usinge Markdown might be the newt thing I'll do. It's super easy to get perfect/clean notes with it.

So you might have a try with a notebook and see if it's enought for you.

All my note are "simple", they are only ideas or TODOs. But if you want to keep some code/dev/scripts notes you should concider markdown tool.

tedmiston
I keep a notes folder full of markdown files, one per project or high-level topic to constitute an "engineer's notebook". Then within each file, I add an h2 for each day I work on that project.

I would rather keep paper notes honestly, but the power of digital text wins out here quickly. The ability to copy & paste URLs and terminal sessions, and to be able to project-wide search for them later when I can't remember the particular args used on a command from weeks ago.

This setup mostly works but it would be nice to have a little more of a software layer on top.

For personal notes, I like Day One setup with multiple notebooks and tags.

tmaly
For work related info, I have my team take notes in structured pages in Confluence.

We use this to help onboard new hires as well as to communicate better.

I have used some of the information in the book Organizing Knowledge by Patrick Lambe to help keep things accessible

bradknowles
If I write down any kind of notes, that would be on paper. With a pen. Lately, I'm liking the Papermate Inkjoy Quatro four-color pen. I'd love to try a better pen, but I'd be afraid of losing it in a bathroom somewhere, so I should probably stick to the Papermate.

Tickets are in JIRA.

Documentation goes into Confluence.

Discussions tend to happen in e-mail.

Sometimes I remember to take the results of tickets or discussions and write them up as documentation in Confluence.

bradknowles
Years ago, I had tried a LiveScribe pen, and automatically uploading and transcribing my notes in Evernote.

That worked really well for a couple of weeks. Then a co-worker flipped out that I had been recording his voice without his permission, and worse I was uploading the files to the cloud.

I never picked up a LiveScribe pen again.