Ask HN: How do you keep your notes organized?

I currently use Quiver https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quiver-take-better-notes/id866...

I've had a hard time replacing it so far.

I really want a note taking app that securely stores and syncs my notes between colleagues and does code snippets/attachments well. I haven't found anything I like yet, I've tried Bear/Notion. I love OneNote, but we don't have MS licenses at my current gig.

I was in similar shoes as you. I even had my notes scattered all over the place, some on paper, some in different softwares. Now I use only OneNote both personally and professionally and I cannot be happier. It has a lot of features, which helps because I can keep every idea/info/todo in one place. It has apps for everything (except Linux, but the web app works great in that case), so I can access my data anywhere. I even had a client where we all used it and we were easily able to make it work like a wiki for that project. It might seem obvious, but what really helped me with keeping my notes organized (and my browser bookmarks too, because I have a ton of those as well) is revising them periodically, in my case weekly. If you do it frequently enough, then it's really just a couple of minutes of reorganizing each time and you can keep everything nice and tidy.

I also use multiple services to take notes/store info and I like to make an “index of organization”.

Basically, just write down all of the different services/folders/notebooks you use and what you use them for.

For example, in Notion I write that I use: - Notion for boards and knowledge. - Todoist for tasks - Day One for quick notes and journals - OneNote for school.

Etc...

I find listing where you store different types of information (because different tools are built for different use cases) helps keep it all organized.

I've tried a bunch of different programs, apps and approaches but have (hopefully) finally settled on plain text files in Markdown, stored in a git repo in dropbox. It seems to be working better than anything else I've tried, though OneNote was very close to perfect. I just have too many MS accounts because of contract work, and syncing/keeping it all straight became an issue.

I was inspired by all the posts about emacs org-mode, but couldn't go all the way to emacs, because VSCode has become the center of my coding universe. I'm surprised that's not the #1 answer (yet).

It's very liberating to be completely in control of the format and organization, and it's very easy to move things around as needed using familiar tools. I don't have a lot of screenshots or non-text things to remember, so markdown is fine for me.

  Customers
  ->Customer A
  --->Projects
  ----->Project A
  Journal
  ->2019
  -->201912
  TechNotes
  ->Unix
  ->SQL
  ->Infolease

etc. etc.

There's 2 note taking service that I use: todoist and dropbox paper. Todoist is for quick notes and "to-do list-ish" stuff and dropbox paper is for long term note taking.

Here's the step of how I usually do it.

1. Have a phone with me anywhere I go. Anytime I have an interesting thought/idea, I'll add a new item on my todoist inbox.

2. Every night, I'll process that inbox. Most of it will be to-dos, but sometimes I jot down some ideas there. If the ideas is interesting enough, I'll move it in a writing project (e.g., I think I should write why I love cats.) If an idea is not worth writing about, then I'll just re-articulate the ideas and mark it done.

3. I use dropbox paper to write. There's only two important folders: a rant and completed folder. For each item on my todoist writing project, I will create a document in the rant folder and I write about it. E.g., On todoist, I'll have the entry "I think I should write why I love cats." Later on, on dropbox paper I'll create a document with the title "Why I love cats."

4. Write. I don't finish everything though. I usually just stop writing if it gets boring.

5. If it's finished, then I'll move it in a finished folder. It contains my essays, blog entry and book notes.

I tried Notion, but it's too complicated and it gets overwhelming really fast. Another huge cons of Notion is that you can't jot ideas quickly (I can do it in seconds in todoist). I'm happy with these two services.

Edit: typo

I use Trilium notes. Their search and linking function is very useful for finding notes again.

You might want to check out bullet journal, as an organizational system that can help you out irrespective of tool choice.

Trello is my favorite. Hooked on the kanban style.

I'm digging Notable on a cloud synced and encrypted KBFS folder these days. Simple markdown note taker.

After more than 1 year of tinkering with various apps, I've finally settled for Todoist for todos and Standard Notes for notes. Extremely satisfied.

Roam Research. Past HN submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21440289

It feels effortless, almost fun, to me unlike any other tools I’ve used.

After years of Evernote and OneNote, discovered “Bear”.

If you’re on iOS and value great design and simplicity, I cannot recommend it strongly enough. And it’s really cheap.

Everything is in markdown and hashtagged.

Google Keep for todos & shopping list, Evernote for everything else.

Notion after years of trello. Once you get how it works and how to use it your way it just blows everything else out of the window. I have sql like relations through notes,topics,websites,people and much more. My setup: https://i.imgur.com/Cd22G8x.png

I've recently started using https://jrnl.sh/ and I'm hooked. It is on the command line, and easy to use. I've been using it more for daily journal entries, but it has a tagging system so you can do @idea and then search for all the entries with the tag @idea. I've been trying to organize my cooking recipes with tags. Also, it's encrypted on disk, so I just sync it to iCloud and a few backups.

Maybe it's just me, but because it's a diary, I don't feel the need to delete things. If anything, not deleting it is the point. Even if it's a disorganized mess, I would suggest keeping things around! It's really fun to look at your old writings and notes!

I used to be in a similar situation, with multiple notebooks for different things and apps for others - became totally unmanageable. I've gone totally offline with my note-taking now, using a variation of the bullet journal concept. I've found it very useful for keeping track of the day to day notes and tasks, along with longer term ideas and plans (technical or otherwise).

Anecdotally, having a single notebook for everything has made me feel more in organized and in control of my notes as everything is there, indexed into a single notebook.

- https://bulletjournal.com/ - https://simpleprogrammer.com/bullet-journal-productivity-pro...

The trick is to tree-shake and regroup your notes agressively. If you treat them as read only soon you'll not be able to extract useful info from your data.

Regularly organise them. Dump everything in to an inbox as it comes to you throughout the day and then have a set time to edit, curate, and label it properly.

For to-do's which can vary in time sensitivity this might be straight away for some that need to be done that day, that day for some that need to be later that week, or weekly for those you hope to get done just eventually.

For your links, ideas, and thoughts you could probably do it weekly.

The trick is to not let it build up so much that when you get around to looking through it, you're looking at three full days worth of organising work, much of which you can't do anyway because you've long forgotten the context within which your short hand notes made sense.

Specifically for to-do's, Getting Things Done is a very (the most?) popular organisational system with a book by the same name.

Here is a much shorter summary of it:

https://hamberg.no/gtd/

I use a self hosted Bookstack Instance for Notes, Blog Posts and Knowledge Base plus StandardNotes for my daily diary.

Permanently trying out other stuff (basecamp, todoist, notion, etc.) but keep coming back.

I also have a self hosted Nextcloud instance, where I started to put down thoughts which won't fit in the other two (like "lessons learned this week") but eventually will be moved to Bookstack.

I used to imagine I can have a system that would keep concepts together and continuously reorganize them manually as the goal is to both not keep it in the head, but also know what's there. However, as the time passes, the cognitive load of reworking it increases dramatically, and the use and the ability to find stuff in it drops as contexts mutate through that rearrangement. It is very difficult to manage change in that kind of system no matter if it's low-tech or high-tech. After some mismanagement you just lose trust in it and drop for a new one.

About a year and a half ago I started a lowtech weekly diary approach. Documents folder on your computer or a GDrive/Dropbox/whatever. Folder for the year, and then folder for each week of the year. Usually create it on monday and transfer what I expect to need that week. Treat that folder as my desktop for that week and move on the next week. I now have a year and a half of such notes, am confident I can find stuff and when I open such snapshot I'm quickly able to gather all the needed contexts that were relevant then.

I have written my own app. Is it Zettelkasten + vim + keyboard shortcuts.

I have one main document with general topics like Programming Startups Social science, and inside more general topics.

I don’t think this is the best way to structure it

GoodNotes 5 on iPad is the best way I have found :)

I've kept extensive notes for years and always find I never use them, so now I'm transitioning towards only taking notes in actionable format, as GitHub issues, task list items, etc.

NextCloud and GitHub. I use NextCloud for the browser/mobile syncing and more journal/quick todos type of notes. I use GitHub for my technical notes. My big thing is minimizing the time between a thought and getting it down and freeing that space in my mind. Whatever is fastest is what I need because I forget things pretty quickly, or I don't trust my memory. Being able to pull out my phone, open the NextCloud Notes app to make a note, and then being able to access that anywhere in a browser really cuts down on syncing issues and delays. This is an evolution from my earlier years where I wrote in notebooks which I favored that for the longest time until I saw the value in minimizing the delay between thought and writing.

I use markdown for everything and have txt files going back to 2013 that I'm slowly formatting to markdown as they were dumped from a Google Docs exodus I haven't made the time to clean up. My goal is to eventually make a database of my thoughts and look for patterns and insights while learning the tools required to do that in the most modern ways :)

I found that over time, it's more advantageous to be disorganized but have good search features than to have a system that required good habits.

I found Google Keep to be good for search features, because it extends beyond text and into images.