Ask HN: Why the obsession with note taking?
If there's one thing absolutely guaranteed to get a gazillion comments on HN, it's a post about either 1) note taking software, 2) note taking methodology 3) a combination of the two.
I'm kinda fascinated by this, in large part because I'm sucked in by it too. I can't count the number of apps I've tried, or the dopamine rush when installing a new one.
What's this about? Do we all secretly believe we can be truly better people if we can just get this right? Or are we just endlessly curious about what everyone else does? Tell me, I need to understand myself better!
218 comments
[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 324 ms ] threadIt’s professional pride.
It’s a hard problem to solve and that leads to many people “having a go” at it.
There's no open source standard. No LibreOffice or Krita of notetaking.
They all only have a small subset of features one might want.
And yet they are critical infrastructure for people's entire life. It's a pretty exciting space.
So for me as a long-time Mac user (and rather less long-time iPhone/iPad user), the realistic benchmark is Apple Notes: it is simplistic, fast, well-integrated and ubiquitous. It has just enough features to be useful and not enough features to be opinionated.
Absent the iPhone side of things, I'd likely use Simplenote.
I hope, at some point, something akin to another enhanced subset of Markdown will become the de-facto standard.
For those who just want a generic and easy to use app like OneNote, they’re not going to find it in Obsidian.
That's not an accurate statement. Obsidian can literally be as simple as one wants it to be, or as sophisticated in virtually any direction. The culty "Zettelkasten" emphasis is entirely coming from the community and can be totally ignored (as I do).
There's UTF-8 and JPEG.
I've stopped trying to get it _right_ and I just focus on actually doing it.
Simplenote, Things and Apple Notes get the closest to doing what I need; I've used only the latter for several years now (despite the egregious alternate lowercase A and all the yellow).
My guess is that we all think that the right application can save us from the failings of (or failure to consult) our notes, when the truth is that it's note-taking discipline that wins the day, not functionality.
The main thing I took from all of my searches through the world of notes apps is that if you don't write almost all your notes (and especially your to-do actions) as complete sentences, you're failing right out of the gate, no matter what app you write in.
I think so. In the end I just use Google Keep for mundane things like grocery lists (haven't found anything better for that, checkboxes and autocompletes most common items so it's quick) or random ideas I have (it's easy since it's on a phone and cloud). For programming shit it's todos in a readme in the repository. It's more about the act of writing it down than any feature in any app.
There is also enormous inefficiency caused by covering the same ground over and over again, but it happens quite frequently as nothing survives from one discussion to the next. In addition, lots of decisions get made in side Slack channels.
There are some massive gains here to be had if this can be solved.
Obviously there’s a middle ground between the above and the “amnesia” that many orgs seem to suffer from, but digging into the actual causes of the amnesia and confusion often reveals it’s not due to missing tools (off either the software or organizational variety)
Individuals sometimes take notes to collect random ideas. That's fine. I do that too. No one other than myself could ever make sense of my notes though, and sometimes not even I can.
When organisations take notes in prose form, it is unlikely that anyone will ever have time to read them in order the extract the parts relevent for a particular task. There are of course exceptions. Someone will surely read the FOMC minutes.
There has to be a deliberate process of modeling and collecting structured data so it can be queried and transformed into something that facilitates specific decisions. At that point, it's no longer called note taking.
In my view, it is this sort of ad hoc data modeling that is too inefficient right now. It's something I'm on working on, but I can't claim to have found any silver bullets yet.
This is one of those aspirational things that should exist, like automated testing. In practice, many places are just reliant on people knowing stuff.
People often take a shot at this problem, which makes for the monthly or bimonthly thread on HN, but I think there's still a lot of room for innovation.
And I do want to think better.
Currently really happy with Slack, Org-mode and Roam Research, each for its own use.
I take notes to remember TODOs, to draft communication, to write random crap I want to come back to. Sometimes I don't even come back to it, but somehow writing it down still helps.
I started using Obsidian which has been nice, but feels a bit clunky in a lot of ways on Windows...I'm hoping to find something more lightweight.
However when I think about it this may be why notepad still works for me, it doesn't become overwhelming. I've tried to use quite a few systems over the years and the trajectory is always the same - it starts great but the unresolved tasks accumulate until the whole thing seems inefficient or pointless or just overwhelming.
In a round about Notepad along with occasional data loss solves that problem for me :D
We'll see if I stick with it for more than a few days.
But I bet Stephen King types his novels, rather than dictating them to his editor from memory. Jay Z is said (by himself and numerous collaborators) not to write his lyrics down. He writes them in his head, and recites them from his head in the studio.
I can't remember any ideas that originate in my head, that I haven't seen with my eyes. Except for those thrice-in-a-lifetime level ideas. I've tried the "if it's good I'll remember it" approach literally hundreds of times, and maybe retained three of those. I've had more than three good ideas in my life. I don't only want to remember the A+++ ones. I want the A++ ones, the A+ ones, and so on, so that I can work on refining them. Note taking apps are really handy for refining.
* We operate on gigantic sets of data (not from CS perspective, average human consumes more data in 10 years than avg man in his lifetime only few decades ago)
* Reasoning about data is not easy, and storing what matters is crucial in being effective worker/citizen/parent/etc.
* Promo of zettelkasten
* Good money too? Making note-taking app is not as difficult as coming up with novel startup and takes less time and money
* Internet figures promoting it (David Perell)
* Feels like we've done something without too much effort (motion vs action by James Clear - https://jamesclear.com/taking-action)
* This is the way to create articles and papers - most of the tech are not writers and their writings had happened naturally and by some impulse/itch. To repeat that we cannot rely on these forces all the time
* You can make your own personal wiki which can be the new blog, feels sexy for tech (whereas other people are doing that by cultivating their ig/fb profiles)
In practice effort is probably much more important than software features, but we blame the software we've tried instead of our own lack of effort at making good notes, and keep looking for that hypothetical perfect tool.
Personally I don't even put in enough effort to install these tools, but I look at articles about them anyway, and futilely wish I had better access to my information.
I think the answer for me is actually to share what I write with my team more. I'm quite good at documenting things, and the reason for that is because I'm writing docs for other people. If people mention seeing something in the docs then I tend to write more docs. If no one mentions them for a while my documenting dies off until I need to write more. If I could easily apply that mechanism to notes I might be more inclined to write things down.
Even if I don't share it with anyone it helps me figure stuff out. I don't read back 90% of what I write, the writing itself is what provides most value to me. Although it can be handy to dig into the archives to understand my thinking of months back.
Tooling wise; I like handwriting, as I can draw arrows and quick sketches. I used to always carry an A5 notebook around, now I use an iPad with Apple Pencil (recently upgraded to the new mini which is perfect A5'ish size).
Apps I use on the iPad are; GoodNotes for actual notes and Concepts for more visual sketching and such.
If I need to take notes that I need to share I generally use https://nota.md which is imo by far the best markdown note taking experience available. Think of it as a markdown editor with code editor features (e.g. multi cursor). It also works with normal markdown files so no lock in.
When on my phone I use the Notes app on.
Yes, lots of tools, but I find different tools are best for different things. It does means everything is spread around, but it works for me, it's sort of an organized chaos, I can find stuff when I need to.
I think the joy comes from the idea of maintaining all information, of "getting your shit together" in a way. I think most humans truly enjoy collecting and organizing things. Notes, similarly to todos, bookmarks, lists etc are just tools to scratch that itch, the more the better!
If you ever decided you want to go full digital, I highly recommend checking out the tablets from https://remarkable.com/. My wife has the same approach to handwritten notes and loves it! I can confirm that when writing on the reMarkable 2 tablet, you can forget that it is not pen and paper. I particularly enjoy being able to take notes on it in the margins when reading a book...
The main reason I went for the iPad mini was the size (and apps maybe). Before I had an iPad Air 10.5 inch, and it was just too big for my use, it made it inconvenient.
I'm still debating getting one anyway. It has that "coolness factor", and I want it haha.
If they ever produce a smaller version I am pretty sure I can not resist.
But for you, it might be perfect
Can also recommend an iPad btw. Besides being an excellent note taking device it does all sorts of other cool stuff.
(If for note taking/drawing; I suggest get one that supports Apple Pencil 2, it's a big improvement.)
The main differentiator between the RM and other tablets (such as iPad), besides the excellent "write on e-ink" interface, is that the RM device is very committed to a minimalistic approach. There are lots of "features" that would be trivial for them to implement (notifications, email, messaging, socials, etc) that they have deliberately chosen not to support in the official software. Instead, the RM is focused on only providing the cleanest approach to reading and note taking. This approach is perfect for some people's desires and use cases, but not for everyone...
Also what I missed in Obsidian when I tried it. I will also simply not use all of its fancy features, not to say they aren't useful, just that I'm not that organized haha.
I also really like how Nota looks; neutral, under styled, minimal. This is oddly important to me haha.
Nothing against Obsidian though, it seems to really excel in its purpose of knowledge base building.
Every time I see a post on HN about how somebody manages to organize their lives around a personal wiki or org-mode or whatever I get a bit jealous.
Thing is, after all these years, I actually think I don't need to take notes, that's why my mind doesn't feel like it's worth it in the end to organize everything into notes, when I rarely forgot about something.
I just use one physical calendar at home, and flags in outlook at work, and I'm fine.
The one time this policy was challenging was for a numerical analysis course I took where there was no textbook. So I had to go off to the library to find books that covered the topics discussed (this was back before the internet). This actually teaches you more than taking notes.
One thing I'm able to successfully track are meetings and appointments in google calendar.
Work stuff is usually tracked on jira/github issues, and when I see the issue I usually remember all the context that was established when creating the issue - if it was internal, so I have no problems there.
Take notes. Fuck it up. Figure out why your attempt wasn't useful to you. Take more notes. Rinse, repeat, and you too can eventually take notes that are valuable to you.
EDIT: One thing I forgot - taking and reviewing notes takes time. Dedicate time to both steps, and to identifying how to improve.
For me personally, writing notes down is indeed the most important step. I don't read most of the notes ever again :)
A nice UX gives dopamine bonus points for this act of getting peace of mind.
I'm also terrible at identifying which information to note down, and inconsistent in even attempting to identify it.
So I'm following the topic out of curiosity that a tool might appear that will truly argument my disorganized mind with the skill and dicipline of organization.
I've found Dendron interesting, and have started using it a bit, but I feel it's not "ambient" enough, I need something that interacts extremely well with my phone, home computer and work computer, and is not cloud based.
> Ask HN: Why the Obsession with Note Taking?
Is this some sort of social experiment? (I shall not be suc-- oh, damn!)
For me it's notes but more the closely related to-dos, and I'm always interested because it's something I want to be better at doing (from a very low starting point of almost never having anything up to date written down) but never quite manage or find myself happy with methods/apps/sites I can find.
A while ago I decided/realised my personal preference would be GitHub issues, trouble is I need them to do two things:
1. Implement 'projects' in the mobile app - https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/5609
2. Option to auto-add all my repos to a project - https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/6258
then I'll be happy, shall stop obsessing over it, and stop upvoting and participating in these threads. /s
The counter intuitive thing is that these apps are thought of as something that helps with attention disorders. But wanting to "organize life", "track thoughts and ideas", "never forget what you learned", etc, are symptoms, not cures.
I also need to take notes to raise the important things above the useless things that I remember.
If I really care about the meetings I attended being useful (not often), I will take notes on what is discussed and decided.
Now that my brain operates more closely to my neurotypical peers, I've found myself not needing to take constant notes and review my day in order to remember things.
There's really only one thing you gotta know about note-taking: you either optimize for fast writing or for fast information retrieval. Since I rarely read my notes, I optimize for fast dumping them.
All apps and organizational schemes like Zettelkasten try to optimize the information retrieval aspect, which imho, is probably not that important for many people.
Why do you feel the need to "structure thoughts" and "get it out of your system"?
Asking as a way to point out that feeling the need to do it is not a forgone conclusion.
Well, because the alternative is for your thoughts to be unstructured. Lots of people live their lives that way: reminiscing about that time they got so drunk or really told that guy off, repeating funny lines they heard on some TV series, rehearsing ethnic or religious stereotypes, complaining about the neighbors' loud music, trying to get laid, and heating up some hamburgers at dinnertime. Lots of people are content to be consumers and to repeat what they've heard. Then they die.
But it doesn't have to be that way. You can structure your thoughts. You can be a creator, not just a consumer, and to a significant extent you can direct your life to a goal rather than simply floating at random. Notetaking is helpful for doing that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098854
I give you a simple example. If you play Wordle and you stop to think about your next guess, you can make all the possible permutations in your brain. This is possible with the downside that you might start to think in loops and consider the same word-pattern over and over again.
Or you write them down and solve the next guess by doing all permutations on paper (or a text editor).
Note-taking is somewhat similar. Structuring thoughts for me means that I write them down to avoid looping around the same thing all the time. I get it out of my system, because my brain isn't stuck in the same loop. Note-taking helps to speed up the passive brain processing task in some cases. Not always. Not for everything.
It's not a symptom of ADHD. It's one of the coping strategies for people with ADHD who have problems memorising things.
The usual way to track knowledge and tasks is within a project. You come to a road block, do research, overcome, and continue.
But many of those note taking posts talk about personal "wiki" projects and tracking _everything_. I suspect that with ADHD its hard to filter out the important things from background. And based on my observation wth these apps people start organizing and remembering this "background". When background noise is reduced the need for complex apps is no longer there - there are a lot fewer things left that are worth remembering. (exceptions apply, of course)
That might be your personal experience/bias speaking.
For many creative endeavours there's not a "single project" where you do research, finish, wrap up and that's it. You need to track lots of pieces of information across many projects, domains, and across time.
You're kind of implying that failing memory is unusual/exceptional and that it needs particular attention.
Here's the cold hard truth of memory: your memory isn't as good as you think it is. No one's memory is as good as they think it is. And nothing you remember comes back out of your memory quite the way it went in.
Writing good, complete notes that could be read by someone else (complete sentences) helps you design the prompts for your future recall of something complicated. Because one day you'll be that someone else.
When I write code, I try to write code and comments that a version of me that is ten years older and persistently two hours short of sleep will be able to cope with at 10pm. My tireder, older self. Because one day he'll have to read it, understand it, and change it.
I try to write notes the same way!
Unless one has extraordinary mnemonic capabilities, note taking is a way to structure and store concepts.
Even if this wasn't the case, personal notes are still a more efficient/effective way than googling, for two reasons: 1. on the notes, one puts the processed version of a concept, so that it's safer/more stable/improved/cleaner/adapted etc. 2. personal notes follow the mind of who writes them, so the concepts are faster to find.
It's the inverse.
Note-taking might be a symptom of OCD or autism disorders (that can make people compulsively take notes or enjoying collecting information in itself), but they are cures (or, rather, coping strategies) for ADHD.
ADHD is not manifested as "tendency to take notes" for note-taking to be a symptom.
It's manifested as tendency to be disorganized, to have trouble tracking thoughts, forgetting, etc - which makes note-taking a way to manage symptoms.
It's looks like you fell for the "correlation equals causation" fallacy, not in a study, but in a simple real life observation that should have been trivial to see the right casual direction!
My day can be ruined by positive and negative ruminations. Writing stuff down really helps me let go of them.
1) a symptom of being a freelancer with multiple clients who revisits projects sometimes a decade after doing them. It is the only way to proceed -- even if you were to assert that persistent "documentation" of a project is distinct from "notes" about it, those notes are still essential.
2) a route towards making that documentation; it's easier to assemble documentation from things you've noted than to start with a blank page.
3) a way to know, deeply, what it is I actually think about something. Not just what I think right now in that moment, but why. What facts I took into account; what facts I disregarded, why I disregarded them, and why I might need to revisit that next time.
I think what makes it obsessive for me is that I always want to improve my thinking, even if it's a tiny increase. That's why I always check out other people's note taking methods and software, in the hopes of finding a little nugget of optimization.
As for my method, I use plain text and vim to store my notes. If I need to think deeply about a problem, I use a paper notebook and pencil. This is because that combination is good for visualizing a problem.
There really isn't anything more to this, people enjoy being productive and meaningful in their lives, and it is one of the fundamental drives of the human condition.