I built one enrich myself and to make my life easier, but I have little doubt my employer has benefited from it. I don't mind that form of "trickle up" economics.
It’s often called “Confluence” (or something like that.)
(No, I don’t love it. It’s just what’s there.)
The supermarket analogy glosses over the fact that supermarkets are designed to be accessible to many people. Documenting what everyone needs to know because you needed it for yourself anyway is a great way to make teams happy with you. Plus you get to demand the attention to ask lots of detailed questions “for our documentation” and often encounter and surface issues with internal processes.
Pretty graphs, but I wonder how it stands up to the tests of the real world.
I've personally tried to use mind maps (a bit more general than solving technical problems) but gave up pretty quickly. I think part of the problem was the technology itself, mind map apps are mostly desktop only and the mobile experience navigating a 2D diagram is kind of clunky. The other part was just laziness, after building a mind map for an entire weekend I didn't even scratch the surface of what I wanted to achieve with it.
Also I take objection to the fact that we go straight to Google for solutions, I check the existing codebase I'm working on, code search in my company's internal repo, code search github, then go to Stackoverflow / docs. So there's some amount of intermediate caching.
After a few goes at it, I've mostly settled into using mind maps as a brainstorming / thought organizing construct and I transcribe the useful results to plain text for longer term search and storage.
Writing as someone who uses mind maps as part of my kit, I empathize with your comment. For my purposes, I've found that it helps to focus the map around a specific objective, project, etc. If I'm preparing a paper or presentation, it's helpful to see how the content can be structured, what can be pruned and what relationships between concepts there are. For project work or other objectives, I find them to be helpful in tracking and guiding learning.
FWIW, I use iThoughts across a couple of different devices. It's been around for a while now and has a good mix of usability and functionality.
I moved from mind maps (I used and liked FreeMind) to indented outlines in plain text files when I realized I wasn't really losing anything to map the nodes to headings and the edges to sub-headings. I can capture the same relationships, keep it synced to everywhere via cloud storage, and I don't need special software beyond a text editor to look at or edit it.
Now I just need to learn how to go back through them.
It sounds like a lot of work and overhead for something that nine times out of ten I'll only need once and if I need it again, I'll default to Google anyway.
What good is doing all this filing and organizing if it only serves you personally? It's like building and maintaining a cache, but with a high percentage of cache misses.
Writing notes and organizing your thoughts will by itself solidify your knowledge, even if you never read them later.
Also:
* when you write something, it challenges you: do you know enough to form cohesive sentences or do you just have scattered thoughts
* when you write, you get to organize the information in a way that makes sense to you - it's your knowledge, not someone's else
Currently I just use some markdown notes but I'm looking forward to augment them.
This seems too heavyweight to me, specifically step 3 with all the data structures and templates. There's just no way capturing all that metadata is going to pay off for me. I see it as:
1) define your basic structure for capture (I also like PARA[1])
2) invest in the tools (for me, emacs/org-mode combined with the BrainTool browser extension - disclosure I built it[2])
3) understand your inflows and workflow.
4) just use search on your second brain for retrieval.
I've tried to incorporate some of the ideas of the "second brain" and it didn't really give me that much. My lessons:
1. It's always super helpful to write things down. Taking notes from what I read/learn is a great way to verify that I understand it. It sharpens my thinking.
2. However, maintaining the "second brain" is a lot work. It's not only about "linking" together notes. You also need to maintain some consistency between them. I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about the structure instead of actually thinking about the content.
3. Most of my notes/thoughts fall into two categories: (1) Either they are critical for something I'm actively working on or (2) it's just loose concepts that I'm toying with. For (1) I immediately end up playing with it in code — which is far more concrete and tangible than notes. And for (2) it was rarely important to retain the knowledge accurately many weeks/months later.
What I've ended up with is taking a lot of notes, but I hardly focus on organizing them.
I would recommend looking into the Zettelkasten ("slip box") system, then ("How to take smart notes" by Sonke Ahrens is a great read).
Particularly to your point (2), the problem I've seen with most systems is they are not simple to maintain. Contrast this with "Getting Things Done", which is practically the simplest productivity system I've ever used that accurately works, where you have only two chores:
1. Write down tasks as they come up
2. Flesh them out later with as little metadata as possible (typically, at most, a project + due date if necessary)
The Zettelkasten mirrors this in a lot of ways. It has the advantage of re-writing your notes in your own words (your point (1)), but it is very simple to maintain. You re-write, make links to other notes in your existing setup, and you're done. Your notes should be as context-less as possible (which causes you to think further), and you should generally be able to relate it to GTD's daily "review" process.
A big point of clarity is the Zettelkasten is against "organization" - everything falls into the box. Ahrens talks in depth about how folders, categories, and even tags can be very limiting - you think about the metadata more than the actual content, which gives us a headache to maintain. A system should be as friction-less as possible if we want to actually use it.
Additionally, he does address your (3) to some extent, but it seems like you've figured out what these thoughts are, and resolved that they probably aren't worth fleshing out further (beyond maybe your proof-of-concept, fail-fast demo). I imagine if they are worthy ideas you probably would elaborate on them further.
--
I've been using it for a while now, and I can personally attest that it's been very helpful, especially as I've progressed into more architectural/design work, and less direct day-to-day coding.
What I've found myself doing is taking a lot of notes, then when the moment arrives to organize them, I just delete them.
I end up having to rebuild my (admittedly tiny) "second brain" from scratch from time to time, but at least I end up with stuff that's relevant now-ish, without having to bear the cost of a lot of long-term knowledge inventory.
NOTE: This is not advice, and this approach would probably not work even for me if I was inclined to regret throwing things away.
> I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about the structure instead of actually thinking about the content.
This is why wikis, which I originally thought were just the best things ever, seem to become useless over time.
The Mac application Quiver [1] introduced me to the idea of categories, which can contain one layer of sub-category, and either categories or sub-categories can contain articles, which contain text. A really simple tree.
This extremely simple structure is just enough to (A) contain everything I've thrown at it and (B) know where to look for something. And, you can make links from one article to another for when a cross-reference is good to have (but I do it very rarely).
I now use Obsidian [2] which is more modern, not Mac only, as well as being much simpler to use than Quiver, using simple markdown.
I've found that if you don't have structure, then you're reliant on plain search terms. As you have more and more leafs, without a tree, your searches will match more and more leafs, to the point where you'll have difficultly finding conceptually related but not textually related concepts. If you're using tags or links, I would claim those are structure. I've often found I have to go back and add tags/links to pages so I can find them in the search results.
I think structureless is not possible, since some form of structure will grow, with lumps. I think there's some happy in between, with some light structure in place.
Perhaps "useless" is the wrong term -- perhaps just "wildly inconsistent" would be better (which winds up being pretty much useless, if you can't find anything).
nomel wrote:
> I think structureless is not possible, since some form of structure will grow, with lumps.
This really nails it. There will be some kinds of structures (note the plurals), particularly if more than one person is involved, since you just think... differently at different times. A minimal structure like Quiver/Obsidian just takes all those silly decisions away that wind up lumping your data into a difficult-to-access wad.
I actually stopped using Obsidian a few months ago. I feel like these knowledge collection/note taking applications over complicate everything. I wasn't happy with the search feature in Obsidian specifically and the fact that it forces you to add their own application specific characters/flavor to your markdown. [0]
I thought about it and my minimum requirements for a knowledge graph tool are:
1. Edit files in vanilla Markdown (no application specific cruft)
2. Be able to search content easily (ideally via grep)
3. Add 1:1 or 1:many links between files (direct links vs. tags, ideally using requirement 2 to implement this)
And the simplest solution for me was:
1. A single level directory of md files (no folders!)
2. Vim + Telescope [1]
3. A small set of guidelines [2] to define searchable patterns for linking files/nodes
I also wrote a little md renderer (seen in link 2) that adds the features I wanted for exploring my notes/second brain in a browser that picks up on the patterns in the guidelines. Gotta get a grep search on that thing and it'll be golden, but I apologize I'm rambling at this point.
Never been happier. I just use Working Copy to jot notes on mobile when I'm not at my computer.
Have a look at the German software 'The Archive' https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive , this might be what you are looking for.
It is not overloaded with fancy features and is text/markdown based. Enables you to focus on your actual notes and ideas and how to connect and inter-act with them, instead of getting lost in fancy diagrams.
Their user forum is in English and is THE best ressource regarding all things Zettelkasten.
https://forum.zettelkasten.de
Niklas Luhmann, the inventor of the Zettelkasten system, was German, after all :)
I tried out The Archive, definitely a good option! My guidelines are very similar to theirs but to be honest I think I value the speed and power of my Vim setup too much to use any other text editor... so maybe the setup I described above is only relevant to people who want to also edit notes in their preferred editor lol
Although, I do think I have a small gripe with the Zettelkestan method. I don't see the point in having a large collection of small notes with unique identifiers. If I have a random thought, I will write it in a physical notebook accepting it's mortality. If I want to immortalize it, I flesh out the thought and transfer it either to it's own file, or add the small bit of info to a relevant file.
Even if I did want to jot down every small thought or idea of mine in my notes directory, the manageability difference between a single long file (for say all my small thoughts) vs. a ton of small files seems marginal to me. I do personally prefer the former though.
When your main method for searching relies on powerful content scanning (grep) and connections (tags/direct links) it doesn't really matter where the content lives. If the search is powerful and the connections are strong, everything is easily discoverable.
Vanilla markdown I've realized isn't what I want. What I want is Markdown's editing simplicity, but I do want WYSIWYG for inserting pictures (drag / drop, copy+paste), resizing them, and I do want inline-rendering of more complicated things like graphviz and plantuml.
Wow, no directories. That kind of blows my mind. I just really appreciate some kind of high-level "directory" (for lack of a better word) rather than trying to remember some random tag to help me find something.
Reminds me (sorry, I'm a dinosaur) of the WAIS [0] days -- I had a friend who showed me some cool sites accessible through WAIS. When I asked them if there was some kind of directory to find stuff, he looked slightly annoyed and said, "You could build one, I guess." The WwW came along shortly thereafter, with lots of directories of sites, and yeah, most folks have never even heard of WAIS :-)
It works! But only when paired with fuzzy search for file names and grep searching file contents. I do sometimes like to just roam around my files for fun though and do remember specific file names, so naming is still important for me!
Yes! and suggest "write things down" -> type thoughts in.
Organising: suggest event in {iCal, Outlook}, can search by date.
Other categories: suggest adding names of people to notes. Search (grep) for those extra names.
Suggest scheduling future event {date/time, person} to delegate task.
Suggest fractal recursion of self-sacrifice in Sierpinski Triangle, delegate out half the work, then half again. Say "thank you" to those who accept delegation; thank back to those who suggested ideas to you.
Can parallelise {reading, writing, listening, speaking, typing, singing, doing going} e.g. reading code and singing music. Can double available brainpower.
Thank you judofyr for your bug report; hope this workaround will help!
I am not going anywhere without my reMarkable 2. This is just crazy convenient tool for dumping thoughts and trying ideas.
E.g. when I design something. I'd draw abstract boxes and other shapes, then add a new layer, make connections, another layer some notes. You can freely move things around or erase with a pen.
I think my productivity gone up like 10x.
I especially like the fact that I can just leave my laptop, sit somewhere quiet and just write and draw without distractions.
I started using OneNote this year. I create a weekly "Note" where I throw all my notes in during a week. This includes a weekly ToDo checklist, a note section per meeting, and then random thoughts, code/log snippits, or whatever else I need.
It's not perfect, but it's the best solution I've found so far. I've tried every note taking method out there and I always fall off after a few months. I think this is working for me because it has the quality of a general wiki, but I start fresh every week, so I don't have to worry about carrying over or linking "knowledge" for the most part.
I go back and forth between doing this on a daily or weekly cadence, but it's also the only thing I've found to keep being useful over time. I always get a wild hair to try and write Markdown or something but really I just end up writing text and it's fine. The most meta I ever get is adding additional keywords for me to search later.
Most of note taking happens at work. I tried local plain text notes, then stuck with confluence for some time. Confluence is slow and resists a lot.
OneNote is what I have end up with for now. Every page in one note is like a whiteboard where you can put anything anywhere. I sometimes store screenshots of code snippets. Sometimes even full files. Use it for small temporary todo lists. OneNote is a great place for putting down random info as quickly as possible.
Not worrying about how and where to put your thoughts down is very very important. Thoughts get lost in the process otherwise.
I think the missing things for most people revisiting notes is they record the what but rarely the why. The why makes the what easy to back into but we tend to focus on the destination what too much. ymmv
I think one of the problems is that people want to "de duplicate" knowledge and have such solutions with "DRY - don't repeat yourself".
What is my idea - I have VS Code and just write down things with tags using # - then even if I have something in two places on the same topic I don't mind. When I see it in search I will recall which one I need.
Disk space for text files is nowadays basically infinite :)
The problem is that "taking notes" means different things in different contexts.
For an academic sociologist, building a zettelkasten is a step in the process of writing academic publications; for me an academic in Earth Science, taking notes is documenting the software my team writes, documenting the scientific methods we use; keeping track of tasks and writing meeting notes; for a programmer, taking notes is storing examples of code, ideas, etc.
That's why there is no one way to taking notes. There will almost be as many note-taking tools as people using them!
One person can have multiple systems of note taking. Just daily notes that you need to write down to keep some thoughts around. Other system might be for writing a book that needs to be really structured.
I think problem is that a lot of people think that they need to have "one master system" to rule them all.
But what is my idea - that if you have some daily note that you want to include in your book, you copy that piece to your "book notes" from your "daily notes" and have 2 copies in different contexts.
Sometimes I have that grand idea that I would like to wrap my mind around entirety of my life ... it is just not possible and CONTEXT is the king.
I'm in the same place. I optimized the note taking experience and now I have loads of notes/links/snippets in Org files but the organizing part (move, link, update) is still painful.
I would love to have a pseudo-smart tool that suggests meaningful actions based on the note content. Like "Move note to project 'learning-kubernetes'", "Tag with 'home-improvement'" or "See similar notes: [...]". That and the ability to do it on my phone would be a killer feature for me.
Not sure about second brain but I’ve come to the conclusion that a life long git repo is probably a good idea. eg keeping track of vaccines, medical history etc.
I started writing a daily journal with obsidian, which has a lot of this information. It’s all in a private repo on GitHub and is mirror on my home NAS. I actually keep two daily journal one for personal and one for work.
I keep is simple, three main section’s. A morning section where I write what I need to do that day, what happened already, what’s going on in my brain.
A evening section listing what I got done that day, and what’s going on in my brain.
The third section is technically the “first”. Which is a reflection on yesterday after a full night sleep. What I did wrong, what I need to improve on, etc.
A small section in which I include excerpts from my task lists for personal or work. A small section with generic daily goals like “For god sakes comment your code”.
Another small section I call “daily avoidance“ which is stuff I want to avoid, like “Working through lunch” basically bad habits, etc.
The reflection part I use as an outlet to write about what worked/didn’t work in achieving those goals, avoiding the bad habits or any other thoughts I had about yesterday or yesterdays work.
I keep both as strictly separate, I don’t write about work in the personal one unless it’s because I had a issue that caused a strong reaction. I.e Argument with co-worker. The work one doesn’t have personal stuff in it and is mostly talking about the projects or idea’s I had.
Most of them are less the 100 (average is less then 75) lines, with about 2 dozen or so markdown formatting.
You might have meant this as a joke, but I honestly think this is a better way of doing things than a rigourously designed system of organisation and workflows and all that.
There are a million ways to approach this kind of thing, and whilst browser tabs aren't nessecarily the best way, they're certainly up there
Oh, I'm absolutely not kidding. I've tried to do the OneNote thing, or get into org-mode, or manage collections of bookmarks. Too much overhead, not enough value to justify the work.
So I have a browser window per "thing" that I'm dealing with, with a whole bunch of tabs, and when I'm done with the thing, the browser gets closed and the tabs go away.
It wraps around this exact workflow, saves your tabs, and can manage your browser windows. You may have to login to Chrome to get your bookmarks, tabs and stuff.
This is also my exact workflow. Currently at 260 tabs after an OS reset but I've gone up to 1-2k before (though that was a particularly bad time for me). Every tab or bookmark manager I've tried just didn't feel right, too much friction, too little return, eventually forgotten.
I feel like the tool I'm looking for doesn't exist, but I don't really know what I'm looking for either.
This approach kind of exploded on me, and I couldn’t find any window anymore. Recently discovers tab groups, and that you can name browser windows. With those two in place I actually see some hope of recovering control.
I would say the too many windows issue is a feature, not a bug. If you have too many windows thats too many things to do, either you need to do one or prune your list
Indeed, to many windows. Partly due to not finding things though, ctrl+n being simpler than look for the old context. Named windows made them simpler to find, thus simpler to avoid ctrl+n.
The other issue, of course, is my TODO-stack growing faster than I have time to organise and plan it. I’m hoping a working Zettlekasten can address that part by moving the entire class of research and design type of tasks out of the “should be doing right now” category.
However, none are built for software developers. If you want to know why, ask yourself — does anything here make me feel special as a developer? My guess is the response is "No".
I'm the founder of archbee.io, and although it's an early stage product, I built it for engineers — and you can see that by the features: architecture diagrams, GitHub integration, markdown shortcuts, very speedy, API docs with GraphQL and OpenAPI, custom domain hosting, Mermaid diagrams and more.
Please check it out and let me know what you thought!
I still believe that all those "second brain" solutions lack an essential feature: spaced repetition, which I built my solution[] around.
Spaced repetition is a way to automate the reviewing schedule of the notes you took, which is essential if you want your knowledge to linger. It allows you to iterate and improve notes on the topics you probably know better now than when you wrote them.
He's at least "a promoter of the second brain concept". I'd find your comment more useful if you mentioned or linked to someone that you think would better fit the "creator" category, instead of claiming how he's never done anything original.
time required to curate a local pantry of information is just too high and mostly benefits decline overtime unless that information is very complex to remember and so specific to your domain that you wont find a quick solution online.
IMO Search Engine is the food pantry. local knowledge repositories are good for any domain specific knowledge thats really hard to find elsewhere online
I recently read "Getting Things Done"[0] and began incorporating what I learned into my simple second brain. And the results are kind of ridiculously good for me.
I built my whole system on a Google Sheet, but I'm experimenting with building myself an App instead- something I would never have been able to accomplish or even been willing to start if I didn't have this second brain helping me.
The lessons I've learned from this:
1. Being pro-active on things instead of reactive makes everything easier. Each action takes less work because there's no worry or guilt associated with it. Just a small amount of planning to make myself pro-active is a worthy investment.
2. Putting things I need to remember into a system and then forgetting about them, trusting that my system has it under control, removes a huge cognitive load from me. I have more energy to use elsewhere.
3. Building a system that evolves to fit my needs, being flexible with myself, rather than trying to jam myself into someone else's system has made it work at all. That's why Google Sheets is awesome as a prototype tool for this.
> I'm experimenting with building myself an App instead
This approach has worked great for me. I have a local web app that's grown (and rewritten) over several years, which renders a folder of Markdown files into a view with navigation, interconnected links, dynamic components (like calendar or calculator), syntax highlight for code snippets..
I love being able to write notes in natural language as well as code, and extend it with any feature I want.
Edit: Also I have some shell commands that open, add, or search notes from the terminal.
5 or 6 years ago, I got big into Getting Things Done. I definitely gained real-life wisdom, but eventually I stopped because following David Allen's methodology was taking multiple hours a day.
Do you find that it's taking a ton of time for you? Or maybe you're doing a loose interpretation of the system?
Another person replied with the key question: multiple hours of organization and maintaining the system, or multiple hours of getting things done?
I'm definitely not following Allen's methodology exactly. I'm doing what works for me. I'm automating a lot of the bullshit, and ignoring Allen's entire half-chapter devoted to why paper is the only option (there is no paper in my system at all). I also don't have any references to sort or organize- everything is in my google drive, which has a powerful search feature. That may come back to bite me, but it hasn't yet.
I do find I am spending a couple hours a day just doing stuff that I would have procrastinated on otherwise.
> 2. Putting things I need to remember into a system and then forgetting about them, trusting that my system has it under control, removes a huge cognitive load from me. I have more energy to use elsewhere.
This is the key for me. My brain gets jumbled if I try to juggle too many things at once.
I write stuff I need to do down in a single place, or move my "I will _definitely_ read this later" bookmarks to Pinboard and promptly forget them.
When I need something new to do or read, I know where to find it.
I have used Google docs for this for 12 years to build a business with 200 full-time people and it has worked fantastic. I have probably a hundred separate documents describing policies and processes in depth. It is easily searchable for not just myself but many people.
Most organizations systems are ridiculously good in the beginning because we still have enough memory to know where things are and low information content that allows an easy organization. Any information organization system can only be judged after a few years of use in my experience.
My second brain keeps moving. For example, I have a great setup with Notability on an iPad. Except after a few months, I start typing stuff into Workflowy. No reason, I just reach for a different tool. A few months later I'm in a random text file and then back to Notability. I don't know why I do this. One thing that sorta helps is implementing the Jonny Decimal System so that all the different pieces can be indexed. But, I make it harder than it needs to be.
I bought an iPad for other reasons (I like the apple ecosystem in general). And I really liked the notability app. Being able to take hand written notes and have them be indexable is fantastic. I'm sure there are other ways to do it but that's the one I've settled on.
I've gone back and forth on the ideal platform over time. I loved the feel of iPad/pencil but it was too closed a system. I'm currently using a Galaxy Note with the pen for mobile and emacs/org on laptop. I type faster and more legibly than I write but you need that paper and pencil type feel for capturing thoughts IMO.
BTW @genghisjahn given your tool usage I'd love to get your thoughts on BrainTool (which I've been pimping throughout this thread!) Since most of my inflow and things I need to keep track of come via browser and most of my notes are in orgmode text, BrainTool is the thing I built to bridge the two. I'm hoping its a more generally useful lightweight organizational tool which doesn't require the maintenance of other solutions and have been gathering informed feedback wherever I can.
Hoenstly for me the issue is I want someone to create the "killer" note-taking app.
I don't want to be restricted in how I am taking down information. Sometimes, I want to draw on a tablet, sometimes I want to write markdown, sometimes I want to do workflowy style outlining.
I shouldn't be restricted in that way!
So far, the only one I've been able to settle on for about 1.5 years now is Obsidian.
Same thing happened to me with grocery list apps. I must have tried all the grocery list apps in the app store and have finally settled with the old-fashioned but the best app --- Paper & Pencil. For me the simplicity of paper and pencil and quick access of it during the actual shopping just beats all the cool features you get in a smartphone app.
I'm wondering how to keep "slices of projects" aligned. Like, different things are in different repos - how to keep notes and additional files belonging to that, it ends up being a side hierarchy?
I don't currently use it so can't comment on what features it has or doesn't have, but I find it interesting that Obsidian [1] is only given an honourable mention in this article when according to the Wayback Machine, its elevator pitch has been "A second brain, for you, forever" since before this article was published.
While these are great concepts, I find it to be an overcomplication for my needs. When we build systems of any kind it's nice to imagine the ways in which they make our lives easier, and we always underestimate the required maintenance of our systems and the ways in which they come to constrain our thinking and action.
I have a pretty simple organizational structure for information: I keep text files on ongoing projects and ideas. I think on ones that are on the back burner and update my notes on them when I have something compelling come to mind, and the forefront ones or ones that are related to maintenance I keep accessible, usually on my desktop or always open in my text editor. It's a bit of a disorganized system but it is just the right level of complexity. I'm the kind of person who knows which pair of pants on the floor that I left my wallet under last night and so a good portion of organization exists in my head and I work better that way. I'm always on the lookout for new organizational tools, but a huge criteria for them is that they require little to no overhead or maintenance.
I do rely on online search a little too much, I often forget to store information I find and might need later and instead store my google-fu queries in my head, and because of that often times I cannot find it again later (because online search as a tool is degrading as we speak) and this article is a good reminder that I cannot rely on external tools like that that I have no say in them continuing to work the same way.
Something that became obvious to me after reading through this is how variant individual learning can be, super interesting to me generally.
Very few of the premises used in the article are how I solve problems or gather information as an engineer, either now or in the fledging times of the start of my career 15 years ago. Consequently, the second brain concept seems less useful for me at least at a glance.
I thought it was peculiar that in the initial flowchart of "problem requiring information" - there is no mention of RTFS (I use that acronym affectionately here), which is probably the most useful skill I have learned in my time building and maintaining software projects. It may be an innocent omission and its admittedly a steep initial learning curve, but I think it it amortizes incredibly well over the span of a whole career.
Not accepting "black magic" anywhere in your stack and challenging yourself to understand why something is breaking can certainly lead to rabbit holes, but avoiding it altogether introduces a significant opportunity cost, in my view.
Maybe trying to strike a balance there can dodge the information asymmetry/inefficiency issue established in the premise of the article. Really interesting read, whatever the truth may be.
Having tuned in a few times to watch https://twitter.com/AdamLearnsLive on twitch, I was inspired to take notes throughout my development process. What I noticed of Adam13531's note taking was they wrote down every question that came to mind as they worked down the rabbithole of learning that is software development.
For my own practices, I've added in a bit of an OODA loop process. My intent is to systematically balance between deciding and executing, focusing on accumulating knowledge towards achieving a goal.
When I'm stuck, or dealing with unknowns, the brainstorming in each of Observe, Orient and Decide enable me to gain some flow.
Later, I can observe where I had blindspots, or anchored to certain contexts or scopes. I'm noticing I could develop checklists to go through to avoid repeating those biases.
I was disappointed that Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/) wasn't included in the app list.
Having used both Evernote and OneNote, I've found Joplin to be a better choice, especially when I'm bouncing between platforms. It doesn't lock you to a particular ecosystem or cloud service, and the open source app is free for use.
For what it's worth, I'm not affiliated with Joplin, I'm just a user.
I'm also a heavy Joplin user! The feature to sync with common file backup services (Dropbox, OneDrive, etc) is really useful, and doesn't feel like I'm locking my second brain into someone else's walled garden.
Also using Joplin, it is perfect for me to have everything on windows android and Linux. All syncing with nextcloud.
The only thing that bothers me it has poor search, if you want to search for 'google' 'goog' doesn't resolve any results. A bit baffled by this, you can use an * wildcard but would prefer fuzzy search
Articles like this are nice for picking out ideas to incorporate into your own system. I try to avoid reading much "productivity porn" because it gets repetitive and what captures your attention is the novelty of an idea rather than its effectiveness.
There's no system that works for everyone. You have to develop your own, and it will evolve because you change. I started journaling over 10 years ago - it was a simple "daily log" that I only wrote in occasionally. Over time I got more prolific and proficient at it. The structure of that journal became more complex, with different journals for day-job vs personal, multiple levels of summary vs detail planning/notes/ideas, and links between them. I've had to refactor that structure and the taxonomy of tags many times. And much like he describes here, I ended up adding cheatsheets and Q&A and dev templates. *There's no way I'd recommend this system to a beginner.* You have to build your own system according to where you're at in your journey.
> I try to avoid reading much "productivity porn" because it gets repetitive and what captures your attention is the novelty of an idea rather than its effectiveness.
I keep seeing this term, but I have trouble understanding it. I open lots of productivity articles. It's not often that I make it past the third sentence because it's too general or not relevant to me.
You have a better filter than I do. :) I went through a phase where I gobbled up anything productivity related, and eventually had to stop myself because it was too distracting. I still want to believe someone can tell me a valuable trick that I don't know about. Often even just the headline or title of a productivity-oriented article or Kindle book seems to evoke an appealing idea that I'm curious about, and after reading the text it's not always clear to me that the idea would work or not without trying it. But now I've developed a system that I'm happy with, it's much easier for me to filter.
Brings to mind Umberto Echo's "Vegetal and Mineral Memory: The Future of Books" at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in 2003 (PDF):
> WE HAVE THREE TYPES OF MEMORY. The first one is organic, which is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts. However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today's computers, based upon silicon. We have also known another kind of memory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first papyruses, again well known in this country, and then on books, made of paper.
I'm currently reading 'Remember' by Lisa Genova[0]. She points out that we have 'Temporal' memory for events in our lives, 'Semantic' memory for facts and figures (divorced from when we learned them), and 'muscle' memory for things we do with out body. So yeah, 3 types ;-)
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] thread(No, I don’t love it. It’s just what’s there.)
The supermarket analogy glosses over the fact that supermarkets are designed to be accessible to many people. Documenting what everyone needs to know because you needed it for yourself anyway is a great way to make teams happy with you. Plus you get to demand the attention to ask lots of detailed questions “for our documentation” and often encounter and surface issues with internal processes.
I've personally tried to use mind maps (a bit more general than solving technical problems) but gave up pretty quickly. I think part of the problem was the technology itself, mind map apps are mostly desktop only and the mobile experience navigating a 2D diagram is kind of clunky. The other part was just laziness, after building a mind map for an entire weekend I didn't even scratch the surface of what I wanted to achieve with it.
Also I take objection to the fact that we go straight to Google for solutions, I check the existing codebase I'm working on, code search in my company's internal repo, code search github, then go to Stackoverflow / docs. So there's some amount of intermediate caching.
FWIW, I use iThoughts across a couple of different devices. It's been around for a while now and has a good mix of usability and functionality.
Now I just need to learn how to go back through them.
What good is doing all this filing and organizing if it only serves you personally? It's like building and maintaining a cache, but with a high percentage of cache misses.
Also:
* when you write something, it challenges you: do you know enough to form cohesive sentences or do you just have scattered thoughts * when you write, you get to organize the information in a way that makes sense to you - it's your knowledge, not someone's else
Currently I just use some markdown notes but I'm looking forward to augment them.
1) define your basic structure for capture (I also like PARA[1])
2) invest in the tools (for me, emacs/org-mode combined with the BrainTool browser extension - disclosure I built it[2])
3) understand your inflows and workflow.
4) just use search on your second brain for retrieval.
[1] https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/
[2] https://braintool.org/2021/05/15/Organizing-your-life-with-a...
1. It's always super helpful to write things down. Taking notes from what I read/learn is a great way to verify that I understand it. It sharpens my thinking.
2. However, maintaining the "second brain" is a lot work. It's not only about "linking" together notes. You also need to maintain some consistency between them. I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about the structure instead of actually thinking about the content.
3. Most of my notes/thoughts fall into two categories: (1) Either they are critical for something I'm actively working on or (2) it's just loose concepts that I'm toying with. For (1) I immediately end up playing with it in code — which is far more concrete and tangible than notes. And for (2) it was rarely important to retain the knowledge accurately many weeks/months later.
What I've ended up with is taking a lot of notes, but I hardly focus on organizing them.
Particularly to your point (2), the problem I've seen with most systems is they are not simple to maintain. Contrast this with "Getting Things Done", which is practically the simplest productivity system I've ever used that accurately works, where you have only two chores:
1. Write down tasks as they come up 2. Flesh them out later with as little metadata as possible (typically, at most, a project + due date if necessary)
The Zettelkasten mirrors this in a lot of ways. It has the advantage of re-writing your notes in your own words (your point (1)), but it is very simple to maintain. You re-write, make links to other notes in your existing setup, and you're done. Your notes should be as context-less as possible (which causes you to think further), and you should generally be able to relate it to GTD's daily "review" process.
A big point of clarity is the Zettelkasten is against "organization" - everything falls into the box. Ahrens talks in depth about how folders, categories, and even tags can be very limiting - you think about the metadata more than the actual content, which gives us a headache to maintain. A system should be as friction-less as possible if we want to actually use it.
Additionally, he does address your (3) to some extent, but it seems like you've figured out what these thoughts are, and resolved that they probably aren't worth fleshing out further (beyond maybe your proof-of-concept, fail-fast demo). I imagine if they are worthy ideas you probably would elaborate on them further.
--
I've been using it for a while now, and I can personally attest that it's been very helpful, especially as I've progressed into more architectural/design work, and less direct day-to-day coding.
I end up having to rebuild my (admittedly tiny) "second brain" from scratch from time to time, but at least I end up with stuff that's relevant now-ish, without having to bear the cost of a lot of long-term knowledge inventory.
NOTE: This is not advice, and this approach would probably not work even for me if I was inclined to regret throwing things away.
This is why wikis, which I originally thought were just the best things ever, seem to become useless over time.
The Mac application Quiver [1] introduced me to the idea of categories, which can contain one layer of sub-category, and either categories or sub-categories can contain articles, which contain text. A really simple tree.
This extremely simple structure is just enough to (A) contain everything I've thrown at it and (B) know where to look for something. And, you can make links from one article to another for when a cross-reference is good to have (but I do it very rarely).
I now use Obsidian [2] which is more modern, not Mac only, as well as being much simpler to use than Quiver, using simple markdown.
[1] https://happenapps.com
[2] https://obsidian.md
I think structureless is not possible, since some form of structure will grow, with lumps. I think there's some happy in between, with some light structure in place.
nomel wrote:
> I think structureless is not possible, since some form of structure will grow, with lumps.
This really nails it. There will be some kinds of structures (note the plurals), particularly if more than one person is involved, since you just think... differently at different times. A minimal structure like Quiver/Obsidian just takes all those silly decisions away that wind up lumping your data into a difficult-to-access wad.
I thought about it and my minimum requirements for a knowledge graph tool are:
1. Edit files in vanilla Markdown (no application specific cruft)
2. Be able to search content easily (ideally via grep)
3. Add 1:1 or 1:many links between files (direct links vs. tags, ideally using requirement 2 to implement this)
And the simplest solution for me was:
1. A single level directory of md files (no folders!)
2. Vim + Telescope [1]
3. A small set of guidelines [2] to define searchable patterns for linking files/nodes
I also wrote a little md renderer (seen in link 2) that adds the features I wanted for exploring my notes/second brain in a browser that picks up on the patterns in the guidelines. Gotta get a grep search on that thing and it'll be golden, but I apologize I'm rambling at this point.
Never been happier. I just use Working Copy to jot notes on mobile when I'm not at my computer.
[0] https://help.obsidian.md/How+to/Internal+link
[1] https://github.com/nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim
[2] https://notes.zacholland.net/file/index.md
Their user forum is in English and is THE best ressource regarding all things Zettelkasten. https://forum.zettelkasten.de Niklas Luhmann, the inventor of the Zettelkasten system, was German, after all :)
Although, I do think I have a small gripe with the Zettelkestan method. I don't see the point in having a large collection of small notes with unique identifiers. If I have a random thought, I will write it in a physical notebook accepting it's mortality. If I want to immortalize it, I flesh out the thought and transfer it either to it's own file, or add the small bit of info to a relevant file.
Even if I did want to jot down every small thought or idea of mine in my notes directory, the manageability difference between a single long file (for say all my small thoughts) vs. a ton of small files seems marginal to me. I do personally prefer the former though.
When your main method for searching relies on powerful content scanning (grep) and connections (tags/direct links) it doesn't really matter where the content lives. If the search is powerful and the connections are strong, everything is easily discoverable.
Reminds me (sorry, I'm a dinosaur) of the WAIS [0] days -- I had a friend who showed me some cool sites accessible through WAIS. When I asked them if there was some kind of directory to find stuff, he looked slightly annoyed and said, "You could build one, I guess." The WwW came along shortly thereafter, with lots of directories of sites, and yeah, most folks have never even heard of WAIS :-)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server
Also the tags are very deliberate.
Organising: suggest event in {iCal, Outlook}, can search by date.
Other categories: suggest adding names of people to notes. Search (grep) for those extra names.
Suggest scheduling future event {date/time, person} to delegate task.
Suggest fractal recursion of self-sacrifice in Sierpinski Triangle, delegate out half the work, then half again. Say "thank you" to those who accept delegation; thank back to those who suggested ideas to you.
Can parallelise {reading, writing, listening, speaking, typing, singing, doing going} e.g. reading code and singing music. Can double available brainpower.
Thank you judofyr for your bug report; hope this workaround will help!
It's not perfect, but it's the best solution I've found so far. I've tried every note taking method out there and I always fall off after a few months. I think this is working for me because it has the quality of a general wiki, but I start fresh every week, so I don't have to worry about carrying over or linking "knowledge" for the most part.
OneNote is what I have end up with for now. Every page in one note is like a whiteboard where you can put anything anywhere. I sometimes store screenshots of code snippets. Sometimes even full files. Use it for small temporary todo lists. OneNote is a great place for putting down random info as quickly as possible.
Not worrying about how and where to put your thoughts down is very very important. Thoughts get lost in the process otherwise.
Yes, strong agree
What is my idea - I have VS Code and just write down things with tags using # - then even if I have something in two places on the same topic I don't mind. When I see it in search I will recall which one I need.
Disk space for text files is nowadays basically infinite :)
For an academic sociologist, building a zettelkasten is a step in the process of writing academic publications; for me an academic in Earth Science, taking notes is documenting the software my team writes, documenting the scientific methods we use; keeping track of tasks and writing meeting notes; for a programmer, taking notes is storing examples of code, ideas, etc.
That's why there is no one way to taking notes. There will almost be as many note-taking tools as people using them!
One person can have multiple systems of note taking. Just daily notes that you need to write down to keep some thoughts around. Other system might be for writing a book that needs to be really structured.
I think problem is that a lot of people think that they need to have "one master system" to rule them all.
But what is my idea - that if you have some daily note that you want to include in your book, you copy that piece to your "book notes" from your "daily notes" and have 2 copies in different contexts.
Sometimes I have that grand idea that I would like to wrap my mind around entirety of my life ... it is just not possible and CONTEXT is the king.
I would love to have a pseudo-smart tool that suggests meaningful actions based on the note content. Like "Move note to project 'learning-kubernetes'", "Tag with 'home-improvement'" or "See similar notes: [...]". That and the ability to do it on my phone would be a killer feature for me.
I keep is simple, three main section’s. A morning section where I write what I need to do that day, what happened already, what’s going on in my brain.
A evening section listing what I got done that day, and what’s going on in my brain.
The third section is technically the “first”. Which is a reflection on yesterday after a full night sleep. What I did wrong, what I need to improve on, etc.
A small section in which I include excerpts from my task lists for personal or work. A small section with generic daily goals like “For god sakes comment your code”.
Another small section I call “daily avoidance“ which is stuff I want to avoid, like “Working through lunch” basically bad habits, etc.
The reflection part I use as an outlet to write about what worked/didn’t work in achieving those goals, avoiding the bad habits or any other thoughts I had about yesterday or yesterdays work.
I keep both as strictly separate, I don’t write about work in the personal one unless it’s because I had a issue that caused a strong reaction. I.e Argument with co-worker. The work one doesn’t have personal stuff in it and is mostly talking about the projects or idea’s I had.
Most of them are less the 100 (average is less then 75) lines, with about 2 dozen or so markdown formatting.
There are a million ways to approach this kind of thing, and whilst browser tabs aren't nessecarily the best way, they're certainly up there
So I have a browser window per "thing" that I'm dealing with, with a whole bunch of tabs, and when I'm done with the thing, the browser gets closed and the tabs go away.
It wraps around this exact workflow, saves your tabs, and can manage your browser windows. You may have to login to Chrome to get your bookmarks, tabs and stuff.
I feel like the tool I'm looking for doesn't exist, but I don't really know what I'm looking for either.
The point there is to change the workflow in such a way that you won't need tabs
The other issue, of course, is my TODO-stack growing faster than I have time to organise and plan it. I’m hoping a working Zettlekasten can address that part by moving the entire class of research and design type of tasks out of the “should be doing right now” category.
However, none are built for software developers. If you want to know why, ask yourself — does anything here make me feel special as a developer? My guess is the response is "No".
I'm the founder of archbee.io, and although it's an early stage product, I built it for engineers — and you can see that by the features: architecture diagrams, GitHub integration, markdown shortcuts, very speedy, API docs with GraphQL and OpenAPI, custom domain hosting, Mermaid diagrams and more.
Please check it out and let me know what you thought!
:)
Spaced repetition is a way to automate the reviewing schedule of the notes you took, which is essential if you want your knowledge to linger. It allows you to iterate and improve notes on the topics you probably know better now than when you wrote them.
https://rekowl.com
Ugh, no. No, no, no. Tiago isn't doing anything original. Tiago has never done anything original. This isn't Tiago's thing.
IMO Search Engine is the food pantry. local knowledge repositories are good for any domain specific knowledge thats really hard to find elsewhere online
My technique to combat that has been combining my own notes and making use of Pocket to have copies of resources that I think are interesting.
I built my whole system on a Google Sheet, but I'm experimenting with building myself an App instead- something I would never have been able to accomplish or even been willing to start if I didn't have this second brain helping me.
The lessons I've learned from this:
1. Being pro-active on things instead of reactive makes everything easier. Each action takes less work because there's no worry or guilt associated with it. Just a small amount of planning to make myself pro-active is a worthy investment.
2. Putting things I need to remember into a system and then forgetting about them, trusting that my system has it under control, removes a huge cognitive load from me. I have more energy to use elsewhere.
3. Building a system that evolves to fit my needs, being flexible with myself, rather than trying to jam myself into someone else's system has made it work at all. That's why Google Sheets is awesome as a prototype tool for this.
[0]https://gettingthingsdone.com/
This approach has worked great for me. I have a local web app that's grown (and rewritten) over several years, which renders a folder of Markdown files into a view with navigation, interconnected links, dynamic components (like calendar or calculator), syntax highlight for code snippets..
I love being able to write notes in natural language as well as code, and extend it with any feature I want.
Edit: Also I have some shell commands that open, add, or search notes from the terminal.
I've concluded that this is a necessary journey for me. It's a slow process, trying to learn how I best think and associate.
Do you find that it's taking a ton of time for you? Or maybe you're doing a loose interpretation of the system?
But was it hours of "administrative" tasks maintaining the GTD thing or was it hours of doing something productive?
I'm definitely not following Allen's methodology exactly. I'm doing what works for me. I'm automating a lot of the bullshit, and ignoring Allen's entire half-chapter devoted to why paper is the only option (there is no paper in my system at all). I also don't have any references to sort or organize- everything is in my google drive, which has a powerful search feature. That may come back to bite me, but it hasn't yet.
I do find I am spending a couple hours a day just doing stuff that I would have procrastinated on otherwise.
This is the key for me. My brain gets jumbled if I try to juggle too many things at once.
I write stuff I need to do down in a single place, or move my "I will _definitely_ read this later" bookmarks to Pinboard and promptly forget them.
When I need something new to do or read, I know where to find it.
But I can also relate to never wanting to stick to one system for second-brain work indefinitely.
I've made the mistake of trying to build my own second-brains more than I probably should.
BTW @genghisjahn given your tool usage I'd love to get your thoughts on BrainTool (which I've been pimping throughout this thread!) Since most of my inflow and things I need to keep track of come via browser and most of my notes are in orgmode text, BrainTool is the thing I built to bridge the two. I'm hoping its a more generally useful lightweight organizational tool which doesn't require the maintenance of other solutions and have been gathering informed feedback wherever I can.
I don't want to be restricted in how I am taking down information. Sometimes, I want to draw on a tablet, sometimes I want to write markdown, sometimes I want to do workflowy style outlining.
I shouldn't be restricted in that way!
So far, the only one I've been able to settle on for about 1.5 years now is Obsidian.
https://johnnydecimal.com
If you're using scroll events for anything other than loading and unloading content outside the current viewport you're doing it wrong. Please stop.
I'm wondering how to keep "slices of projects" aligned. Like, different things are in different repos - how to keep notes and additional files belonging to that, it ends up being a side hierarchy?
[1] https://obsidian.md
I have a pretty simple organizational structure for information: I keep text files on ongoing projects and ideas. I think on ones that are on the back burner and update my notes on them when I have something compelling come to mind, and the forefront ones or ones that are related to maintenance I keep accessible, usually on my desktop or always open in my text editor. It's a bit of a disorganized system but it is just the right level of complexity. I'm the kind of person who knows which pair of pants on the floor that I left my wallet under last night and so a good portion of organization exists in my head and I work better that way. I'm always on the lookout for new organizational tools, but a huge criteria for them is that they require little to no overhead or maintenance.
I do rely on online search a little too much, I often forget to store information I find and might need later and instead store my google-fu queries in my head, and because of that often times I cannot find it again later (because online search as a tool is degrading as we speak) and this article is a good reminder that I cannot rely on external tools like that that I have no say in them continuing to work the same way.
Very few of the premises used in the article are how I solve problems or gather information as an engineer, either now or in the fledging times of the start of my career 15 years ago. Consequently, the second brain concept seems less useful for me at least at a glance.
I thought it was peculiar that in the initial flowchart of "problem requiring information" - there is no mention of RTFS (I use that acronym affectionately here), which is probably the most useful skill I have learned in my time building and maintaining software projects. It may be an innocent omission and its admittedly a steep initial learning curve, but I think it it amortizes incredibly well over the span of a whole career.
Not accepting "black magic" anywhere in your stack and challenging yourself to understand why something is breaking can certainly lead to rabbit holes, but avoiding it altogether introduces a significant opportunity cost, in my view.
Maybe trying to strike a balance there can dodge the information asymmetry/inefficiency issue established in the premise of the article. Really interesting read, whatever the truth may be.
For my own practices, I've added in a bit of an OODA loop process. My intent is to systematically balance between deciding and executing, focusing on accumulating knowledge towards achieving a goal.
When I'm stuck, or dealing with unknowns, the brainstorming in each of Observe, Orient and Decide enable me to gain some flow.
Later, I can observe where I had blindspots, or anchored to certain contexts or scopes. I'm noticing I could develop checklists to go through to avoid repeating those biases.
When shooting my shotgun for finding more references, what I've done/know/questioned about a piece of code shows up too.
Having used both Evernote and OneNote, I've found Joplin to be a better choice, especially when I'm bouncing between platforms. It doesn't lock you to a particular ecosystem or cloud service, and the open source app is free for use.
For what it's worth, I'm not affiliated with Joplin, I'm just a user.
Amazed it wasn't mentioned in this article.
The only thing that bothers me it has poor search, if you want to search for 'google' 'goog' doesn't resolve any results. A bit baffled by this, you can use an * wildcard but would prefer fuzzy search
There's no system that works for everyone. You have to develop your own, and it will evolve because you change. I started journaling over 10 years ago - it was a simple "daily log" that I only wrote in occasionally. Over time I got more prolific and proficient at it. The structure of that journal became more complex, with different journals for day-job vs personal, multiple levels of summary vs detail planning/notes/ideas, and links between them. I've had to refactor that structure and the taxonomy of tags many times. And much like he describes here, I ended up adding cheatsheets and Q&A and dev templates. *There's no way I'd recommend this system to a beginner.* You have to build your own system according to where you're at in your journey.
I keep seeing this term, but I have trouble understanding it. I open lots of productivity articles. It's not often that I make it past the third sentence because it's too general or not relevant to me.
> WE HAVE THREE TYPES OF MEMORY. The first one is organic, which is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts. However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today's computers, based upon silicon. We have also known another kind of memory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first papyruses, again well known in this country, and then on books, made of paper.
* https://www.bibalex.org/attachments/english/Vegetal_and_Mine...
I'm currently reading 'Remember' by Lisa Genova[0]. She points out that we have 'Temporal' memory for events in our lives, 'Semantic' memory for facts and figures (divorced from when we learned them), and 'muscle' memory for things we do with out body. So yeah, 3 types ;-)
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54895704-remember