I'm using Orgzly. But to be honest my use case doesn't involve much use of org-mode on the phone. And I just a had more thorough look and it doesn't support a lot of important features, to the point I should probably retract that bulletpoint not be misleading:
- No codeblock support (execution not working is probably to be expected, but I would expect at least syntax highlighting, but it doesn't do that either)
Either don’t take notes and read more, in clusters by topic, or write about what you read. You’ll still forget a lot but at least you’ll be able to find out what you thought about something at the time. Or you could use Anki or another spaced repetition system.
This can only be an individual question. Try things.
Relatively simple, but effective at least for me. I've a notes folder, and every day I'll save a text file called YYYYMMDD.txt, and in it I'll write lots of one liners like,
Note: Do something
Read later: some url and description
Bug: whatever
Then I'll just grep on a particular term and keyword and rank by filename to get the most recent.
I follow the same approach, I use obsidian to create the daily note with a button. When I study I take notes there and then if I have to, I move them to different files
Commonmark with a few essential pandoc extensions like attributes and pipe tables.
Unfortunately, Commonmark and Markdown have a widespread ecosystem and are recognized everywhere. There are commonmark preview tools available even for the terminal (glow, mdcat). Its ecosystem makes Commonmark a necessary evil, at least for me. You can also find literate programming tools for Commonmark. You can edit Commonmark in lots of different editors and many static site generators work primarily on Commonmark (Mkdocs Material, Hugo, Zola).
The only other viable alternative I know of is Emacs Org Mode. However, OrgMode is tied to Emacs and you'll have to be comfortable with Emacs to use OrgMode. There are some addons for editors like Neovim but they're not at feature parity and probably never will be because of the inherent limitations of a terminal (showing multiple different monospace fonts, for example). Emacs can generate HTML using Org documents. There's ox-hugo for the Hugo static site generator.
In recent years, many tools have been created in the note-taking space. They often market themselves as something like "personal knowledge management tools", "Zettelkasten" or "second brain".
There are just so many solutions now (and it seems like every week someone develops a new one). I keep a list where I note down solutions I see mentioned. In case you are still in search of a tool, here is a short extract containing some of the more popular tools from my note:
Now I don't know what you are referring to with "sustainable", if you mean finding a note-taking workflow that is easy to keep up for you, then of course that highly depends on your personal needs (method of input, type of content, multi-platform requirements etc.).
My advice would be:
1. pick something that works outside the browser
2. pick something that you can sync, and that has a mobile solution for quick notes on-the-go
3. pick something that works on a "future-proof" plain-text format, e.g. .txt files or .md
4. some tools offer spaced repetition integration, either as core functionality, as plugin, or by syncing to a dedicated SRS app like Anki. If you find a way to frictionlessly create SR cards in your notes, that can be a nice way of keeping some knowledge "cached"
5. keep it simple in general, don't rely too much on specific tools or workflows. they will all cease to work/go out of business at some point.
6. If you are going with any solution that operates on a local folder of .md/.txt/.org files, a nice goodie is that you can actually version your notes with git.
I thought a lot about this and tried several different methods in my early twenties.
I encourage you to abandon this pursuit and let your human mind perform it’s most wonderful magic: synthesizing, compressing and expanding mental inputs.
Don’t get in the way of this magic:
throw everything you can into the input chute and marvel at the connections that result.
I'd say decent notes are still important in a way that's not contrary to what you're saying. Our minds are very good processors but are not the best memory banks. Knowing what to take note of is part of that skill.
Sure there are people with eidetic and impressive memories but for most it's easier to just take notes of something and know where to look for the info later. That's one reason why I still keep to-do lists and calendars. Sure I can just use my brain to store all of these things, but it's easier to just have notes to look back onto and use my mental energy for other tasks it's more suited for.
>abandon this pursuit and let your human mind perform it’s most wonderful magic: synthesizing, compressing and expanding mental inputs.
Not sure if you're trying to convey some "zen" advice but the way I actually synthesize & connect information is to take notes. My previous comment on how many thinkers use notes like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30331114
If you're suggesting that the mind makes more synthesis & connections without notes, I guess that's possible but that's not what happens in my case. Maybe that just means brains are different.
The point of taking notes is not to preserve the information (or at least not primarily) but to load it into the brain where the connections can magically be made, as you put it. Rich Hickey has a nice talk on this called "Hammock Driven Development".
I cannot echo this enough. As someone who's experimented with this a whole bunch with a million things, here's the thing I realized: Get good at understanding what the COMPUTER is good at vs what the HUMAN is good at. For me, all the wasted time was a result of me misunderstanding and mixing these two up.
Namely: Things like mindmaps and lots of little individual connected nodes (e.g. Obsidian) appeal in theory to human minds, because that's how our minds work.
But for me, I realized they weren't good tools for this because my brain is much much better at doing this than the software.
Ah, yes then: The software is good at 1) writing things down verbatim for detail and 2) re-reminding me of them when I go to look at them. The other stuff, the thinking and the connections, that's ME. That's NOT the software.
So for me that means. What I look at on the computer needs to be dense and well organized, not a mess of nodes. Which usually leads back to bigger, simpler chunks. I still use http://zim-wiki.org, but try to minimize the number of pages.
(To go broader, yes, this has very much deepened my skepticism of AI and machine-sentience)
Pilot Vanishing Point Fountain Pen
(Or Lamy Safari 2000)
After using Remarkable tablet (and iPad with pencil) for nearly 2 years, and various notes tech (mem.ai, roam, logseq), for “serious”
notes (I.e learning a new topic) I went back to my handwriting days and realized what I was missing. Key features:
1. You can flip through pages really fast and find your notes from visual cues. Ah yes I remember how the page looked, here it is.
2. You can create an index page to quickly find topics you’ve written about. No need to build an exhaustive index right away. When you find yourself hunting for “where did I write about this equation”, then make an entry after finding it.
3. You can freely make diagrams, link things on a page with arrows, circle portions of text or equations and write side notes in different color pens (stabilo pens are good for this)
4. No shoulder/wrist strain issues from computer typing.
5. You really do find yourself revisiting your notes often. Even if you don’t, remember Feynman:
>”A visitor came to Richard Feynman's office. When he saw Fenyman's notebooks, he was excited to see "records of Feynman's thinking." Feynman replied, "They aren't a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process." Writing is thinking. Plenty of people think, then write.”
Of course “write” can be interpreted as writing on computer, but Especially for “mathy” notes, I believe writing with pen + paper makes a huge difference in learning, thinking, retention, recall.
I’m no Luddite but I’d like to focus on what really matters (my learning and recall, and yes the quality of my experience) and avoid contributing to some startup’s ARR and a VC’s returns.
I still use logseq (and Apple notes) for less serious things like quick meeting notes or pasting receipts etc.
More often than not, I have found the Google results for highly specialized topics and areas that I know well enough to Google, but not remember all of the details, to be very sub-par, superficial, or rudimentary in nature.
It seems like there is a lack of good quality highly specialized information that flies under the radar or just isn't indexed properly. I have now turned to hn.algolia.com [1] for certain specific searches, as well as in the process of downloading entire archives of books (PDFs and ePUBs) that I will be running OCRmyPDF [2] on just to ensure search-ability.
This way, I know for a fact I can search for almost any topic of relevance and it will be indexed/cached on my local machine.
Google has gotten terrible at displaying information that is very niche and or highly specialized and I want to take that control back into my own hands.
I've gotten a lot of use from a version of Zettelkasten in Roam recently.
The general idea is this.
1. Take "Literature Notes" in your own words as you consume content. These are little summaries of ideas in the text that are usually 1-3 lines. For paper books, I do this in a little Muji notebook. For digital resources, these go straight in Roam.
2. When you have finished the resource, copy your notes to one page and summarise them in "Permanent Notes".
3. Keep your Permanent Notes in one Permanent Note page and link everything together.
The best guide I found for getting this kind of system set up was https://www.nateliason.com/blog/smart-notes. The original "How to Take Smart Notes" book is also good, but much less concrete.
Really, I found step 1 to be the most valuable. I was previously processing highlights from articles and books and that weirdly took more time. Writing little notes as you go along saves only what is relevant and it's much more direct for your use cases.
As a word of warning though, I really haven't gotten this stuff to work very well for programming (or disciplines where you need to exercise knowledge rather than archive it in a system). I either find I need to memorise the stuff more directly with Anki, or having to practice skills in a real world context.
20 years in academia, trying many different solutions and surprisingly I've come back to... A word doc for each project/topic.
File format not going away. Sync on onedrive. Outlining. Formatting. Integration with referencing software. Already installed on any windows machine I use. And when I want to write a paper I'm in the right app already.
Crazy huh.
Equation editing is horrible if there are lots of them but in the plus side word mostly understands latex math these days.
I also learned to love word docs again after trying many tools. My word docs usually have three sections. A vocabulary section explaining the jargon. A section with the core equations and diagrams. A section that attempts to summarize-synthesize the concepts
I keep a relatively large amount of notes (1), which are fundamental to my learning.
My notes are essentially books in markdown format, which I can open with the editor/IDE I use when working on any project.
My opinions are:
- the vast majority of the effort is spent on cataloguing knowledge when adding new notes (that is, keeping each book consistently structured); this is something that no tool can do, and as a consequence, any tool will probably do equal.
- a consequence of the cataloguing effort is that the brain better remembers the topics stored.
- searching is where the other effort goes; I've found that as long as the books are consistently structured, and one puts a bit of effort to make concepts easily findable, a textual search does well. probably, a tool to do fulltext search may help in some cases, but I rarely find the need
- there are interesting differences between doing a google search and searching a stored concept: 1. the stored concept is processed 2. the search follows my brain organization, not a search engine's
- I do only very basic cross-referencing; my method will probably be inadequate if this is a requirement
For things that require rote memorization (say, System-V x64 calling conventions), I use Anki.
I take notes almost only for computer/science related stuff. If I had to catalogue diverse topics, I'd probably just use subdirectories.
I am using Anki for basically everything now. Everytime I need to look up something in Stackoverflow it goes to my Anki collection. Same for things I like to be able to remember from books.
> As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have a fairly straightforward "personal knowledge management" (PKM) methodology.
1. Capture: every interesting idea that I think up or read is immediately stored in Google Keep (on mobile or laptop). It can be very rough at this point, the goal is simply to not forget.
2. Transcribe & Organize: every weekend, I go through the notes I accumulated during the week. It tends to be between 10 and 30 notes. Sometimes the note is "read this article" or "catch up on all newsletters", so understanding a single note can take over an hour. On some tough weekends the process takes an entire day, but that is invariably a day where I feel like I learned a ton. Once the note is cleaned up (transcribed), I feel like I understand it. At this point I rarely forget it - it has been absorbed into my brain. The final step here is "categorizing" the note. I classify it using OneNote with tabs like "Clinical psychology" (nested under "Psychology") or "Investment management" (nested under "Finance") or "Math" or "Physics". This way, in the future, I don't have a million notes scattered around, but one clear place I know where to look. On average, this process takes 2-4 hours per weekend. I never accumulate bookmarks, Google Keep notes or unread emails more than a week to prevent existential dread.
3. Revisit: generally, people recommend you revisit your notes from time to time. I almost never do this. But if I ever am thinking about "Marketing" or "Sociology", I have an immense, high SNR repository of everything I've ever found valuable on the topic. I've done this for software interviews and it's been incredibly helpful.
Overall, I attribute this system to making me much smarter. It has been an invaluable investment.
The first two steps look like the GTD methodology, which I also follow. The point is to remove the cognitive load by putting all todos into an inbox for sorting later.
I find that something magical happens when you write things out by hand. Thinking slows down, you subconsciously explore the problem, and your expression becomes much more deliberate.
Also, you activate more of your capabilities as a thinking creature that way. Why just approach a problem with your fingertips on a keyboard when you can activate your visual, spatial, and temporal processing capabilities?
Personally, I’ve recently fallen in love with Leuchtturm notebooks. I bought the great big 83+ one, a nice Japanese mechanical pencil, and I’ve been going to town on problems ever since.
See Tiago Forte's "Building a Second Brain" (esp. the PARA approach, and Progressive Summarization note-taking technique) for a comprehensive system that answers precisely your question.
More generally, this topic has come to be referred to as PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) and TFT (Tools For Thought). IME Obsidian.md stands out for its power and flexibility and community, though Roam Research (and Athens, its OSS counterpart), logseq, and Notion have their merits.
Most formats aren't going to stand the test of time and unless you want to spend a lot of time converting from one format to another its usually best to stick as close to just text as possible. Initially I used simple ascii text documents in a folder structure which I maintained backups of and then gradually I have used more markdown and use Dokuwiki currently for the software to display and edit. It still works from files so it is still just text but it links them together and offers some benefits beyond just text but it is still completely readable and will be in 20 years time long after I dump that software and use something else.
Whatever you do consider its got to last 40+ years of a career and if it becomes too difficult to maintain you will likely stop.
Yeah, my notes from online courses and things all go into org-mode documents. Still plaintext, but with the convenience of inline LaTeX math and executable code snippets. 20 years from now the in-line Python or R might not still run, but the output gets saved into the file at least.
Pen and paper (a notebook) served me very well. If copy and paste from screen is important to your learning, anything that can handle markdown, because of portability. No proprietary apps or formats.
89 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadKitchen sink is yet to be implemented[1], but for everything else you are covered:
- Executable blocks
- Footnotes
- Inline charts/images
- TODOs tracking
- Multi-device support (there are mobile apps)
It's not going away any time soon, and you can always add-on stuff yourself if you familiarize yourself with emacs-lisp.
1: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TheKitchenSink
- No codeblock support (execution not working is probably to be expected, but I would expect at least syntax highlighting, but it doesn't do that either)
- No image support (so no charts or diagrams)
- No support for tables
This can only be an individual question. Try things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system
Note: Do something Read later: some url and description Bug: whatever
Then I'll just grep on a particular term and keyword and rank by filename to get the most recent.
Unfortunately, Commonmark and Markdown have a widespread ecosystem and are recognized everywhere. There are commonmark preview tools available even for the terminal (glow, mdcat). Its ecosystem makes Commonmark a necessary evil, at least for me. You can also find literate programming tools for Commonmark. You can edit Commonmark in lots of different editors and many static site generators work primarily on Commonmark (Mkdocs Material, Hugo, Zola).
The only other viable alternative I know of is Emacs Org Mode. However, OrgMode is tied to Emacs and you'll have to be comfortable with Emacs to use OrgMode. There are some addons for editors like Neovim but they're not at feature parity and probably never will be because of the inherent limitations of a terminal (showing multiple different monospace fonts, for example). Emacs can generate HTML using Org documents. There's ox-hugo for the Hugo static site generator.
My advice would be:
1. pick something that works outside the browser
2. pick something that you can sync, and that has a mobile solution for quick notes on-the-go
3. pick something that works on a "future-proof" plain-text format, e.g. .txt files or .md
4. some tools offer spaced repetition integration, either as core functionality, as plugin, or by syncing to a dedicated SRS app like Anki. If you find a way to frictionlessly create SR cards in your notes, that can be a nice way of keeping some knowledge "cached"
5. keep it simple in general, don't rely too much on specific tools or workflows. they will all cease to work/go out of business at some point.
6. If you are going with any solution that operates on a local folder of .md/.txt/.org files, a nice goodie is that you can actually version your notes with git.
I encourage you to abandon this pursuit and let your human mind perform it’s most wonderful magic: synthesizing, compressing and expanding mental inputs.
Don’t get in the way of this magic:
throw everything you can into the input chute and marvel at the connections that result.
Sure there are people with eidetic and impressive memories but for most it's easier to just take notes of something and know where to look for the info later. That's one reason why I still keep to-do lists and calendars. Sure I can just use my brain to store all of these things, but it's easier to just have notes to look back onto and use my mental energy for other tasks it's more suited for.
Not sure if you're trying to convey some "zen" advice but the way I actually synthesize & connect information is to take notes. My previous comment on how many thinkers use notes like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30331114
If you're suggesting that the mind makes more synthesis & connections without notes, I guess that's possible but that's not what happens in my case. Maybe that just means brains are different.
I just observed myself cataloging facts and trivia … and I noticed the real insights came about spontaneously.
I decided that every minute spent note taking was better spent reading or re-reading or simply walking and thinking.
I agree with you that YMMV.
Namely: Things like mindmaps and lots of little individual connected nodes (e.g. Obsidian) appeal in theory to human minds, because that's how our minds work.
But for me, I realized they weren't good tools for this because my brain is much much better at doing this than the software.
Ah, yes then: The software is good at 1) writing things down verbatim for detail and 2) re-reminding me of them when I go to look at them. The other stuff, the thinking and the connections, that's ME. That's NOT the software.
So for me that means. What I look at on the computer needs to be dense and well organized, not a mess of nodes. Which usually leads back to bigger, simpler chunks. I still use http://zim-wiki.org, but try to minimize the number of pages.
(To go broader, yes, this has very much deepened my skepticism of AI and machine-sentience)
https://www.jetpens.com/Apica-Premium-C.D.-Notebook-B5-7-mm-...
+
Pilot Vanishing Point Fountain Pen (Or Lamy Safari 2000)
After using Remarkable tablet (and iPad with pencil) for nearly 2 years, and various notes tech (mem.ai, roam, logseq), for “serious” notes (I.e learning a new topic) I went back to my handwriting days and realized what I was missing. Key features:
1. You can flip through pages really fast and find your notes from visual cues. Ah yes I remember how the page looked, here it is.
2. You can create an index page to quickly find topics you’ve written about. No need to build an exhaustive index right away. When you find yourself hunting for “where did I write about this equation”, then make an entry after finding it.
3. You can freely make diagrams, link things on a page with arrows, circle portions of text or equations and write side notes in different color pens (stabilo pens are good for this)
4. No shoulder/wrist strain issues from computer typing.
5. You really do find yourself revisiting your notes often. Even if you don’t, remember Feynman:
>”A visitor came to Richard Feynman's office. When he saw Fenyman's notebooks, he was excited to see "records of Feynman's thinking." Feynman replied, "They aren't a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process." Writing is thinking. Plenty of people think, then write.”
Of course “write” can be interpreted as writing on computer, but Especially for “mathy” notes, I believe writing with pen + paper makes a huge difference in learning, thinking, retention, recall.
I’m no Luddite but I’d like to focus on what really matters (my learning and recall, and yes the quality of my experience) and avoid contributing to some startup’s ARR and a VC’s returns.
I still use logseq (and Apple notes) for less serious things like quick meeting notes or pasting receipts etc.
It seems like there is a lack of good quality highly specialized information that flies under the radar or just isn't indexed properly. I have now turned to hn.algolia.com [1] for certain specific searches, as well as in the process of downloading entire archives of books (PDFs and ePUBs) that I will be running OCRmyPDF [2] on just to ensure search-ability.
This way, I know for a fact I can search for almost any topic of relevance and it will be indexed/cached on my local machine.
Google has gotten terrible at displaying information that is very niche and or highly specialized and I want to take that control back into my own hands.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/
[2] https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
The general idea is this.
1. Take "Literature Notes" in your own words as you consume content. These are little summaries of ideas in the text that are usually 1-3 lines. For paper books, I do this in a little Muji notebook. For digital resources, these go straight in Roam. 2. When you have finished the resource, copy your notes to one page and summarise them in "Permanent Notes". 3. Keep your Permanent Notes in one Permanent Note page and link everything together.
The best guide I found for getting this kind of system set up was https://www.nateliason.com/blog/smart-notes. The original "How to Take Smart Notes" book is also good, but much less concrete.
Really, I found step 1 to be the most valuable. I was previously processing highlights from articles and books and that weirdly took more time. Writing little notes as you go along saves only what is relevant and it's much more direct for your use cases.
As a word of warning though, I really haven't gotten this stuff to work very well for programming (or disciplines where you need to exercise knowledge rather than archive it in a system). I either find I need to memorise the stuff more directly with Anki, or having to practice skills in a real world context.
File format not going away. Sync on onedrive. Outlining. Formatting. Integration with referencing software. Already installed on any windows machine I use. And when I want to write a paper I'm in the right app already.
Crazy huh.
Equation editing is horrible if there are lots of them but in the plus side word mostly understands latex math these days.
You need a master index of what you do where.
Then use sub indices until you reach your concrete notes. Don't expect these to be tidy or simple. They are living documents.
You don't technically need anything more complicated than this.
The important thing is you take notes and actually use them.
I even blog and journal on GitHub.
Anything I finish gets deleted or delegated, anything I can’t use gets posted or integrated into future writings.
My notes are essentially books in markdown format, which I can open with the editor/IDE I use when working on any project.
My opinions are:
- the vast majority of the effort is spent on cataloguing knowledge when adding new notes (that is, keeping each book consistently structured); this is something that no tool can do, and as a consequence, any tool will probably do equal.
- a consequence of the cataloguing effort is that the brain better remembers the topics stored.
- searching is where the other effort goes; I've found that as long as the books are consistently structured, and one puts a bit of effort to make concepts easily findable, a textual search does well. probably, a tool to do fulltext search may help in some cases, but I rarely find the need
- there are interesting differences between doing a google search and searching a stored concept: 1. the stored concept is processed 2. the search follows my brain organization, not a search engine's
- I do only very basic cross-referencing; my method will probably be inadequate if this is a requirement
For things that require rote memorization (say, System-V x64 calling conventions), I use Anki.
I take notes almost only for computer/science related stuff. If I had to catalogue diverse topics, I'd probably just use subdirectories.
(1) https://github.com/64kramsystem/personal_notes/tree/master/t...
I also use OneNote as a temporary place for holding relevant information (screenshots, text or pdf printouts) about a bug or a feature I'm developing.
1. Capture: every interesting idea that I think up or read is immediately stored in Google Keep (on mobile or laptop). It can be very rough at this point, the goal is simply to not forget.
2. Transcribe & Organize: every weekend, I go through the notes I accumulated during the week. It tends to be between 10 and 30 notes. Sometimes the note is "read this article" or "catch up on all newsletters", so understanding a single note can take over an hour. On some tough weekends the process takes an entire day, but that is invariably a day where I feel like I learned a ton. Once the note is cleaned up (transcribed), I feel like I understand it. At this point I rarely forget it - it has been absorbed into my brain. The final step here is "categorizing" the note. I classify it using OneNote with tabs like "Clinical psychology" (nested under "Psychology") or "Investment management" (nested under "Finance") or "Math" or "Physics". This way, in the future, I don't have a million notes scattered around, but one clear place I know where to look. On average, this process takes 2-4 hours per weekend. I never accumulate bookmarks, Google Keep notes or unread emails more than a week to prevent existential dread.
3. Revisit: generally, people recommend you revisit your notes from time to time. I almost never do this. But if I ever am thinking about "Marketing" or "Sociology", I have an immense, high SNR repository of everything I've ever found valuable on the topic. I've done this for software interviews and it's been incredibly helpful.
Overall, I attribute this system to making me much smarter. It has been an invaluable investment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25302365
Also, you activate more of your capabilities as a thinking creature that way. Why just approach a problem with your fingertips on a keyboard when you can activate your visual, spatial, and temporal processing capabilities?
Personally, I’ve recently fallen in love with Leuchtturm notebooks. I bought the great big 83+ one, a nice Japanese mechanical pencil, and I’ve been going to town on problems ever since.
More generally, this topic has come to be referred to as PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) and TFT (Tools For Thought). IME Obsidian.md stands out for its power and flexibility and community, though Roam Research (and Athens, its OSS counterpart), logseq, and Notion have their merits.
HTH!
Whatever you do consider its got to last 40+ years of a career and if it becomes too difficult to maintain you will likely stop.
Andy Matuschak has written about his techniques for keeping notes. https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes
Molecular notes is another take on keeping notes https://reasonabledeviations.com/2022/04/18/molecular-notes-...