Thanks for recalling the earlier discussion. It includes testimonials to Emacs org-mode, and to the Zettelkasten package built atop org-mode, org-roam.
Org-mode can't be beat, IMO, if you live in Emacs all day long, as I do.
One thing I would really like for my notes is some sort of AI or fuzzy thesaurus-aware search, so I can enter a search phrase and get "similar" matches from all my local files, not just "exact" matches like you'd get from grep.
Bah humbug. The premise of this article is extremely shallow.
E.g. TextEdit.app (change default to plain text in settings) + saving text files to one particular directory with reasonable file names + regular maintenance (like twice a year) + Mac full text indexing/search works pretty well for me.
The thing is: After 6 months it's actually interesting to go through your old notes. The Finder preview makes it a matter of one keypress per file.
happy user of my own (free, no ads, no account, all locally stored) android app Idea Growr, and I have ideas in there that are many years old that I revisit. including the first entry, Idea Growr itself.
Why let go of old ideas? in a year you'll have a different perspective and a bad idea can become good or inspirational. I believe in quantity.
The app is for ideas only, so easy to retrieve. Most if not all my 'pet projects' started inside that app.
I love this, and I love how disturbing it is for a lot of people (especially those who only read the title)!
We think we write to remember, but it's really the act of letting go as the article gets into as a theory, that really lets those notes become effective to us. We can revisit these notes at a later date, with fresh eyes, having forgotten about it entirely. It adds value, not because the original idea or note was particularly great, but because of what we are then combining it with (action and experience).
This is also why blindly making notes isn't effective as a form of memorizing. You are writing just to write, you have to revisit them blindly in a new way for them to become effective with a new combination. As if you are a chemist creating a new concoction previously thought impossible.
So let your notes app become a giant trash pile. It's better for you, and they should do their job with proper search anyways. Don't spend time optimizing for note link graphs or any of that BS that doesn't help you and you absolutely will stop caring about those "features" in 5 months anyways. Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind.
I use plain text files (1 markdown doc per day) + grep so kind of in line with your recommendation here. But I've also tried Obsidian/Logseq and stuff like that for complex topics with interlinking, and I still think backlinks & knowledge graphs are useful and maybe better than just grep. Basic search relies on you to remember some keyword you want to search on, but networked notes let you traverse your old notes in faster more productive ways.
I revisit old notes maybe once a month, and every time I do that I wonder why I still haven't migrated fully to Logseq.
> Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind.
Don't forget that everyone has a different workflow and what works for you might not be ideal for someone else. Also Obsidian/Logseq are both free vs Roam/Notion/etc -- some people just intensely incorporate notes as a part of their workflow.
Are they faster more productive ways though? You're still operating off keywords. It combines the mechanical effort of tags, with the mental upkeep required to remember which notes can be linked. Not great.
I do agree everyone has a different workflow, but also you're a really good example of why the productivity is so massive despite the very little improvement to productivity brought on by these additional services: everyone is so desperately trying to convince themselves a better workflow is right around the corner. That someone else has a superior workflow, you just have to use that new app or service. Repeat every time a new gimmick comes out.
I've never used obsidian or zettelkasten based notes app . I only have a vague idea of how they operate . It's something I've wondered how one would do effectively. When adding a new note , how would one know what are the relevant notes one has to link the current notes to ? It seems a bit stressful .One has to go through O(N) notes every time a new note is added to find all possible links .
I think what the original commenter meant was not to worry about these structuring in your notes , "letting it go" . Else it can tend to become productivity masturbation.
I mean, given that you pose this question and leave it entirely unanswered, the rest of your response reads pretty condescendingly to me. A knowledge graph in markdown is not propped up by Big Notetaking, what an asinine stance.
I think this is an avenue LLMs will shine. Contextual search. "I was writing about one idea for an app I had a few weeks back. I think it had something to do with a calendar? Can you help?" And that should be enough for GPT4 to actually act on I'd say.
If you're okay with losing the privacy of your notes. A locally hosted model seems more reasonable, though I don't know when it'll get good enough to have the context it needs to do proper search in a thicc stack of notes. Something something vector databases, I guess.
Sure it will. I've got similar setups working effectively with both OpenAI Api and Falcon. Though there is room for improvement, it's moving at a rapid enough pace and it's already better than old school search.
There are (probably many) solutions being developed for this. Open source, self-hosted LLMs that can be used to query private data sets. You can query private data sets with an LLM hosted on your local machine. There are some projects online doing these kinds of projects with LangChain and using the leaked Meta LLM. It also ties into the "second brain" concept, being able to query your own data exclusively (there's a book on this, but you can get the gist of the concept on youtube).
I myself have a huge OneNote notebook, with all kinds of interesting projects or snippets that I've collected from HN or Reddit over the years. Being able to query that like a super-smart friend ("what was the error I ran into when I tried to implemt a self-hosted Synapse instance? How I can I fix that?") would be insane for personal productivity.
> Are they faster more productive ways though? You're still operating off keywords
It's explore vs exploit (or hash table vs graph lookup); keywords are faster if you know what you're looking for. But reviewing linked notes leads to more exploration about related topics, and walking the graph can still be a reasonably efficient way to find what you're looking for. If you adopt networked notes, you get both at the cost of some notetaking overhead, but it's typically pretty small.
The one thing I hate about some of the notetaking apps is (and I understand folks need to make money) notes are really personal and private and need to stand the test of time. I can't have my notes locked away in a proprietary format or held hostage by some company charging $/mo so Notion is a no-go for me. I also don't really want to get locked into a workflow only to find out that the app is discontinued and then have to reinvent my workflow.
But yeah, networked thought is still cool and totally unrelated to why I don't use typical networked thought tools. Logseq came closest to converting me.
You caught my interest, so I went to look at LogSeq. I began to get excited, then got a message from the live demo that it requires Chromium. Oh, well. So much for that.
What's your opposition to Chromium? Do you use a low powered machine?
I've sucked it up and use a ton of electron apps. I can hardly blame anyone for doing that given the terrible fragmentation of hardware and lack of easier to use unifying APIs. Sometimes we just don't have time for that shit :)
What OS are you on? Linux? I’m on MacOS and there’s just an electron app which runs fine. Yeah maybe it’s Chromium underneath but I don’t need to know it, and can keep right on using Firefox as my daily driver for the web alongside the Logseq app for notes.
> we think we right to remember, but it’s really the act of letting go
I’ve found this to be true with writing music as well. Prior to recording stuff I found I’d play stuff that I had written a lot. The act of recording lets me forget those things and write more (and usually better) song ideas.
Tim Hunkin uses a similar explanation in "The Secret Life of Machines" when talking about computers vs. human mind: that the real strength in the human mind is the ability to forget things!
I am not sure about the rediscover part or that there's any synergy going on there. For me the value of notes is that they cure my "fear of forgetting". File it away knowing that it will be there if it's necessary. I don't have to spend mental energy and have the nagging feeling of losing something. You can then accumulate new things and do the same thing to them if they are not immediately useful/necessary. This is the gist of what I got from the part of the GTD book I read too. Though everybody is different of course.
That's why we all have massive ZFS pools, right? It's so much easier to "blow away" a workstation and move on to a new one when you know you have the entire disk saved :P
It was also a running thread in Carl Sagan's "The Dragons of Eden" that a lot of the history of communications tools and writing formats is the ability to externalize memory and what that means for how we think and behave and what brain power that opens up for other things when we can externalize those memories to focus on other tasks.
Indeed, I have read my notes from younger self. Absolute dog pile.
Like was thinking about a fully virtual avatar, not a person. But the tech wasn't there, and still ain't, to generate decent conversation, virtually rendered body with humanistic movements and facial expressions. Not to mention being able to select an interest field, Ie likes tech, hence tech conversations.
Back then I thought it was a brilliant idea. Now, it's quite impossible and better left sometime in the next 10ish years.
My interpretation of the article was to stress the "publish or perish" mentality of writing. Your notes are serving no one any good, put the work in to publish something or else it's probably not actually worth much.
You'd be surprised. I publish a lot of notes to internal wikis, with the thinking that, hey, maybe someone will find this useful.
I get to see page views. The pages I'm really proud of nobody reads. The pages with the most page views are boring stuff (related to process, navigating my company's org structure, etc.).
More broadly, I've noticed that the things you do which have massive impact aren't always what you'd think. I once wrote a VBScript (long enough ago, it predated powershell) for a friend of mine to just run a program if there was no already running process by that name. He worked at an engineering firm, where for some inane reason some engineering software was always exiting and requiring a long init time to restart. The script kept it more or less always ready when you needed it.
Years later, I'd forgotten about it when he mentioned that it was a massive productivity boost. Every engineer at his company who had seen it in action, wanted it for themselves. Dozens of engineers were saving hours of productivity every week because of a throw-away script. Madness.
The act of writing helps me solidify that information in my brain - I have to process it to commit it to words. Paper works better than a text file, but a text file has the advantage of being faster and searchable. Once I've taken notes, I rarely go back and look at them. (Conversely, if I don't take notes, I'll wish I had)
I definitely do not take notes to abandon the information. Information I don't see the value in, I browse the web while listening. Some of that still sticks with me anyways.
Yeah, I was all ready to post a scornful or dismissive comment... but first (of course?) I actually read the whole thing and found myself smiling at the truth of it.
I do diligently record things in Apple Notes, since they finally added categories (or groups, or whatever). I used to use Outlook notes the same way. It's really all I need. And I DO truly refer to them, although sometimes it's a long time later and I find way more detail and cool ideas than I remembered having come up with.
But browser bookmarks... these are mostly a waste. I have a big collection of them, again organized in groups. But it is vanishingly rare that I use them instead of just doing a new search.
I kinda agree with your point, and hate spending time organizing or following some "system" for my notes. Search is great, and is the thing that almost killed my paper notebook.
However, one feature I would really love to have but never seen, is a combined todo - notes app.
I often jot down notes as in "things to note / remember", but also, in the same flow, I'd note thinks I'd need to do. I would love to be able to gather those automatically in a view, and be able to see them as done when I revisit the initial note after marking them as such from the "todo view".
The closest I've seen was some VimWiki, but I've found that fairly unwieldy (though I love the idea of taking notes in vim).
I tried doing that (I pay for Obsidian Sync, and have a lot of plugins so I run only the bare minimum plugins I need on mobile), but app start time and syncing time on mobile makes this quite a bad experience. Instead, when I need to write something quickly, I create a temporary Google Keep note.
When I'm back at my laptop, I merge it into my Obsidian Vault.
I recommend LogSeq with Syncthing for your use case.
I'm using that right now for both TODO and notetaking. I have syncthing set up so that it syncs my vault across 3 devices (including my phone). Very easy to set up (tho admittedly also easy to mess up the set up process). Have had minor hiccups the past 5 months but nothing that would make me want to stop using this setup.
All this is free. I feel like I've found a gold mine that nobody else seems to know about.
I don't feel like learning emacs and trying to shoehorn vim mode (evil?) into it (vim-style editing is much too ingrained in my text-editing muscle-memory).
I understand that you do not want to leave your prefered editor but just wanted to sya that enabling Vim key-bindings with evil is a one line configuration. After that is feels native. I would not call it shoehorning at all.
My notes have always been a huge messy pile with a tiny amount of well structured/formatted/linked notes. The well structured ones got that way because I returned to them many times and improved on them a tiny bit each time. The quality of a note is really just a reflection of how much time I have spent on a subject.
Writing it down helps to solidify an idea into the heap from the stack, maybe even take it from hot storage to cold storage. It allows you to jot it down while it is still fresh and offload it to focus on it later. This is super helpful in ideas, jokes, thought streams, todos, one pagers on some projects, etc. It does help you remember but also allows you to move to the next thing for now.
Writing down ideas is like a sketchbook, ideas/actions/iteration of thoughts both good and bad. It is important to write thoughts down though because how many times have you had a great idea and you are like "I'll never forget this" and then a while later you are wondering what that was or you entirely move on because life moves fast.
Creatives, writers, comedians, developers, or just projects, are better when writing is involved in ideas to realization of those ideas.
Writing it down and notes is a form of brainstorming. Brainstorming allows ideas to be spontaneous and allows improvisation to get to better ideas. Even writing down bad ideas because somewhere in it is something good.
I use notes apps but more now just a repo (super easy with github.dev everywhere) and notes have easy history that way and you can freely add/remove without feeling like notes are lost. When I use notes apps or even Google Docs, yes they have history but it isn't as fluid/quick as github for that. The important thing is find something that works for you that makes the barrier to writing it down almost non-existent. It needs to be very easy to write things down in between busy days and to capture these fleeting moments.
«Documentation» is always digital for me, but all my working notes are hand written and scattered over my desk at work. Every so often I have to clean up the mess and go through my notes. Most of it is trash, some have been reworked as digital notes and sometimes I find some rare glimpse of past me inspiring current me.
A lot of my ideas are dependent on timing and that's why I write them down.
Like I have photography ideas for winter but it's not winter yet. Or something I want to do or eat the next time I go to a certain city but I don't want to fly to that city for that reason only.
Or vacation project ideas, but it's not convenient to take PTO right now, but when I can take PTO I hit a mental block about what to do with it, and it's nice to have a "menu" of ideas I had thought of before and pick one.
Timing-dependent ideas is one of my primary use of notes apps.
I actually disagree with this. For me, I find notes apps help me reflect on things. I daily journal into Notion. If you ask me what I did exactly seven days ago from today, I could tell you a rough idea from the top of my head but my Notes app would allow me to recall and tell you an answer. That, and it helps me flesh out ideas that I want to explore. If the idea was bad, I would jot it down and forget, but if it was really good I would definitely go back to it
Of course some notes you write down become outdated (as author mentions), but other ideas you write down are almost timeless.
I'd be screwed without Notes. It's a repository of so many abstract thoughts that I have no place thinking about all day. There's simply too much going on.
Having things written down in shorthand like a prompt is so handy when I have some time to go back and browse the gallery of good and bad ideas.
Same. I felt on Notes.app every day for both work and personal stuff. Some stuff dies but there are many long running notes I go back to. I only wish the search feature was better.
I mostly agree with the message of this article. I rarely ever reference the knowledge and information I captured in a note. Nor have I experienced a major revelation by seeing all of my notes rendered in the structure of a particular notes app.
However, I believe there is a benefit to notes kept over a long term which is being discounted. I believe that notes allow you to see how your thinking on a topic has changed over time.
They allow you to cast your mind back to your thinking when you first encountered a new topic, or back to a time when you were struggling with an idea that now seems obvious to you. They are a way to observe the progress and velocity of your learning.
I think that notes can be for active learners what a lifting journal is to a power lifter, or a mile and pace log is to a runner. Those logs are objectively not that interesting, but they allow you to measure and reflect on your progress.
An aside: I personally find that audio recordings are the best form of notes. Hearing your own voice explain an idea or concept carries so much more information than can easily be captured with text.
I never really took notes in school. Read the textbook, learn the material, and then forget it after the final exam. Sometimes when there was an open-note exam I'd go back through the textbook and write down the important definitions. But now that I'm doing research I take lots of notes. I organize it like I'm writing some papers: files with abstracts, definitions, comparisons, and a bibliography. The goal eventually is that they'll be published, either in scientific journals or as a book if there's not enough novel material. I'd say, form follows function, so if you don't know what your notes will be usable for in the future they probably will be useless.
I strongly disagree with the premise (that the only utility from note-taking is being able to forget about it). I take copious lists and notes, and am surprised how frequently I can find some incredibly apt (but very obscure) reference I stumbled upon and noted 4 or 5 years ago. The exception are links to youtube videos, which often vanish.
did you read the article? the idea is you write a note to forget it, get it out of your mind, and then later relying on the fact you can rediscover your note when you might need it.
While this was true for me for a long time, basically my notes were useless in my day to day life, this has changed for me with Obsidian.
I now actually go back and curate my notes into a kind of wiki that is meant just for me. I've tried running a wiki for my self, but it doesn't work offline. And I tried just using plain text or OrgMode, but they were impossible to deal with on my phone. It just strikes that perfect amount of customization and cross-platform support that I needed to make it somewhere I trust storing the information. And in the end it really is still just a bunch of markdown files in a git repo (thanks Working Copy!) so I am not really locked in like I was with any other apps I've used.
Obsidian has been a game changer. It has replaced all my note taking at home and at work. The absence of lock-in is a big factor for me. But the clincher has been the plugin system - it already has rich features but whatever is missing has been more than covered by the whole host of actually useful plugins. I bought their Catalyst license[0] just to support their development - unless something really weird happens, I think my quest for note taking apps has ended.
>I've tried running a wiki for my self, but it doesn't work offline.
Why not use a tool that is specifically made for that?
TiddlyWiki works both online and offline, and is both a note-taking tool and a wiki.
As a showcase: I turned the notes I was taking for myself in preparation for my ADHD diagnosis by uploading the single HTML file to my website, and many people found it useful:
If we assume that there is a cure for ADHD, which tools and programs would be needed to accumulate and distill all relevant information and let people with ADHD discover and implement that cure?
Honestly, the "cure" for 90% of ADHD symptoms is fixing our society that expects everybody's brains to work the same way for no good reason.
Most people are expected to be happy getting educated the same way, going to work at the same hours, and generally fulfilling the same sort of expectations.
We don't expect a racecar to be a great vehicle for hauls to home depot, but we expect all humans to be good with coming to work on time, filing taxes, paying fines promptly, etc — even when a lot of this can be automated away.
Then there are stimulants like Adderall which help people with ADHD manage the symptoms that affect them, like executive dysfunction.
But overall, the way ADHD is diagnosed is, remarkably, by how much inconvenience it causes to others.
Which is more of a you-problem than a me-problem ("you" here refers to society).
>which tools and programs would be needed to accumulate and distill all relevant information and let people with ADHD discover and implement that cure?
Tiddliwiky and social networks to raise awareness.
Frankly, that's going to get most of us about 90% there.
Most of "cure" of ADHD if changing the lifestyle and expectations.
Other than that, repeat after me: ADHD is not a disease, and does not need to be cured. Neither is autism.
> ADHD is not a disease, and does not need to be cured. Neither is autism. Both can be a great asset too.
That is an actively harmful statement. It is akin to saying losing a leg is not a disease and can be a great asset. ADHD is executive function disorder where person is unable to manage time and memory which is required for basic living. It may also come with issues in emotional regulation and other problems.
It is NEVER an asset. People maybe able to manage it and succeed despite having it never because of it.
You-problem becomes me-problem if you want to keep job/friends/partner or simply you want to keep track of the keys and turn off the gas.
>It is akin to saying losing a leg is not a disease
Well, it's not. Losing a leg is losing a leg. It is not a disease.
It is, however, a disability, which is something ADHD may be.
But, unlike losing a leg, ADHD is not just a disability. It comes with a different set of abilities. Understanding that is key for a fruitful life and relationships - and that applies to both people with ADHD and without.
>ADHD is executive function disorder where person is unable to manage time and memory which is required for basic living. It may also come with issues in emotional regulation and other problems.
Note that we are not in disagreement here.
A disorder is not a disease. And executive dysfunction and time (mis)management are not the only ADHD traits. There are many others.
ADHD traits become symptoms when they impede one's life. Those can be treated and managed, but not cured (unlike diseases).
>It is NEVER an asset.
This statement is patently wrong and harmful.
People with ADHD are known to handle emergencies better than neurotypical people, for example. Having an immensely diverse set of skills and interests (which ADHD people are amenable to) is an asset.
So is hyperfocus[1].
There's a reason why you are more likely to find people with ADHD among software engineers and musicians.
It would be wrong to say that ADHD is an asset in today's world. But it can be, if you understand how your brain functions like, and have the right expectations.
What you say is akin to saying that a racecar is NEVER an asset because it gets stuck in the mud, unlike a tractor. Well, duh! It doesn't belong there.
>You-problem becomes me-problem if you want to keep job/friends/partner or simply you want to keep track of the keys and turn off the gas.
Sure, but again, you are not evaluating ADHD from the perspective of the person that has ADHD. Of course if you only look at how it inconveniences others, you will arrive at the conclusion that ADHD only inconveniences others.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Also, your comment is just the example of the society having idiotic/unreasonable expectations that creates a problem. Let's look at it again:
>or simply you want to keep track of the keys and turn off the gas.
Or you can simply install a door with a code lock (or put a spare key in a lockbox) and use an electric stove with auto shut-off (or instant pot/air fryer/microwave) to cook.
Presto! The problem isn't caused by ADHD, it's caused by having an expectation to do things that are hard for ADHDers when other solutions exist.
Which is another perspective of how ADHD is an asset: ADHD-friendly devices, interfaces, and ways of doing things are, in general, more human-friendly.
ADHD makes it hard to remember to switch off the lights, and easy to invent the automatic shut-off sensor. Which, ultimately, is good for everyone.
I have the same experience with Logseq. I just dump stuff into it without much organization, but through its list management capabilities, I find that I can see connections across different snippets. I can coalesce different ideas that I jotted down at different times and see patterns. To me this is the purpose of note taking — not retrieval, but insight.
I would add to this that both note apps and read it later queues/apps are where ideas go to die. One of the most important mental shifts I had in the last 10 years was to adopt a "read it now or read it never" (RINORIN) model, which de facto meant that I had to also give up annotating my RIL queues with notes and tags (largely for the reasons in this post).
Now if something catches my attention, I'll read it immediately to the best of my ability, send some highlights directly from the browser (desktop and mobile) to my Notado archive (I'd say 90%+ of my tagging of whatever I save is automated with rules) and be done with it. Whenever I'm in the mood to look back through the highlights (and comments) I've saved, it's great to have that built-in quality+relevancy+interestingness filter that comes from RINORIN.
Life is much better now that I'm not living with that constant FOMO. Even if I could read, highlight and annotate everything (I can't, and neither can you, and that's ok), I would never be able to do something with _all_ of it (I can't, and neither can you, and that's ok).
I can't always read things now, I add them to Chrome's reading list for when I have time. Sometimes they build up. If I hover over items in the list and think 'meh' then I delete them.
It seems to work for me, but I don't use notes or tags and my list is about 20 items long at most.
I solved this problem by printing anything on the Internet that I want to read. I print it. Staple it. Put it in a physical inbox. Get back to "real work". Surprisingly, having a physical inbox with papers in it consumed no mental space. I feel no pressure to read it all, to get the inbox to zero, etc. When I need to kill 15 minutes, I pick randomly from the pile and read. If I need to go to the doctor's office, I take 10 random documents and read them.
When I do read the printout, I highlight things I want to store permanently and put it in a different inbox which is processed every few weeks. However, this is the exception - probably less than 5% of documents have something I want to store permanently.
For syncing, Syncthing works pretty well for me - the only issue is syncing of plugins for which I wrote a script to selectively copy the details in .obsidian. I think it already has offline support, works fine without internet. On the point of complexity, I think the key to note taking is to avoid too many workflows; just do the minimal organization and just focus on getting it in, you can always cleanup later (or not, considering search works pretty well).
For syncing on my own database, I just put the source directory of my graph into a folder in my computer's documents folder (on a mac). Then I have the documents folder enabled for iCloud syncing.
I do the same thing on my work computer, iPad, and iPhone. So the files are synced using the iCloud backbone. I just point each instance of Obsidian to the same folder locally on each computer and the file is synced in the background, with Obsidian unaware of this, it just treats it as a local graph. And it works flawlessly.
This is effortless for people with Macs. For people on cross-platform systems you could use dropbox, google drive, or onedrive or similar. Plenty of solutions out there.
I tend to agree that I rarely, if ever, read any of the copious notes I’ve taken. However, I find the iOS notes app is a good middle step in a workflow from reading to remembering.
What I like to do is read a chapter of a book, scientific article, or blog post, let’s say, and then write a summary in a note. I can distill the message down and integrate it with existing knowledge by noting similarities.
After that step, I create Anki cards from the notes to remember the key points. By this approach I go from reading material to permanent memory.
I've been leveraging the iOS notes app too for a similar personal distillation of subjects with my personal summarization of the article etc. It's also a breadcrumbs of things I found interesting on the internet which are growing every more difficult to independently search on the internet again after so much time passes. I've been leveraging more and more the native tags functionality which makes grouping notes streamlined. Would you happen to know anything quantitative on this open question? https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/439062/whats-the-m...
I really on my old notes all the time. People mention "oh, I was going to look into X," and I do a quick search through my notes to send them some links to the investigation I did earlier on X. People ask a question "What are you planning on doing on Y?" and I find in my old notes "subject matter so-and-so says: Y? I wouldn't worry about Y." Especially in engineering, there are lots of things that I think are not important at the time because I lack context to understand it's importance, and I only understand it's importance because I wrote down unimportant seeming things, go back and read through my notes and realize "Oh, 3 different people told me Z is a big deal. I didn't realize, I should go learn more about Z."
No, its not how other people operate. Most people are like you and use notes for exactly what they are used for. This making the front page is wild to me. Just write anything semi-contrarian and you are good to go.
I think the article could easily be rewritten from the perspective of "dumping your excess thoughts / stream of consciousness into note files for later examination or future discarding is good because..."
Because as mentioned, some notes are evolving documents, and others are just scrap files. And I do get a lot of value out of shelving thoughts and ideas for many of the reasons the article describes. It's just written as an unnecessarily grand sweeping generalization.
I do get the disillusions with building up huge amounts of structured data and finding it's not "worth it".
I've been pretty happy with paper notes on this front because you can quickly give up on structure and write things as fragments. You'll "know" it's there, and end up finding it eventually.
I think if you're using something like Notion or Roam, trying to keep stuff pretty flat (Search function exists!) is very helpful, as it lowers the cost of writing things down and means you don't get as burnt out.
"Old notes are worthless" is like... pretty glib though. I actually look back at notes relatively often! But it's often not a structured activity, so it's hard to say the notes are part of some generalized process. But there is a liberation in deleting some older notes, just like there is in deleting older projects.
It really makes a night and day difference when you are taking notes for studying, research, designing or other kinds of focussed mental activity that require things like pulling information together, resurfacing past insights, (re)evaluating ideas, (re)contextualizing findings, seeing/drawing the overall picture, etc.
Modern note-taking tools help our brains with their limited capacity to manage greater complexity, discover obscure connections and, of course, safely forget to free working memory for other things.
However, if you just write down some ideas from time to time that are not really related to each other or stash resources like interesting weblinks without making an effort to organize and connect them in meaningful ways, fancy new apps and features won’t really provide much value beyond just using a plain old notebook.
Overthinking really seems to be an issue with users of networked notebook apps and it can waste a lot of time and money. We should stop building elaborate systems or focussing on complicated workflows unless we really have a strong motivation, such as deep, long-term research and study. Serving this motivation will then be the actual focus of our efforts, not the tools or workflows themselves. It can be fun to explore “tools for thought” on their own, but they will not magically change our lifes if they cannot solve a problem that is meaningful to us.
I guess this makes sense if you don’t use a Second Brain/PARA/Zettelkasten/etc. system, but my entire life is structured around Obsidian (at home) and OneNote (at work).
If you’re just throwing notes into a note-taking app with no way of processing them, I can see how this would be true, but my system is constantly resurfacing old thoughts, and I make conscious choices about what gets archived and preserved.
I read the full article, and it sounds like the author hasn’t heard of these. Confident article. Not deeply researched in my opinion.
I came here to basically say this same thing. I also use Obsidian with the "Building a Second Brain" system and I can't imagine trying to function without it at this point. Notes can be functional and useful if done well.
I disagree. Notes are not only for ideas - they’re also here to manage complexity and understand things.
I use notes app to quickly remember what would otherwise be forgotten. I use notes apps just to make sense of what’s around me and not to have magical ideas.
I’m essentially a staff engineer, and my scope is very broad. I can pretend I have eidetic memory ( which I don’t have), or be lucid, and use notes as a way to not forget things, and be able to draw à meaningful plan.
This was the most powerful idea I learned to harness over the past year.
I work in a similar Staff Engineer position and jump between lots of teams, immediately required to go very deep with each team. Then a few minutes later I need to jump to another team and dive deep into that team's problem.
One day, I was talking with my AWS rep and I said "hey do you remember this thing you told me related to X about a year ago. I can't remember what it was, but it helped me solve Y problem...". I had only a vague memory of it, and I didn't really expect him to remember much of it either. But within seconds, he started rambling off, what felt like near-exact quotes about the conversation and the links and documentation references he gave me on that day. It literally blew my mind! He had impressed me with information recall a few times before, but this was god-tier memory recall. So I asked him how he could possibly do that, and he explained LogSeq and how he records everything so that he doesn't have to waste mind-space remembering things that he would certainly forget anyway.
I tried it out, and it took a few weeks to get used to it, but saw the same benefits immediately. I find myself less mentally taxed each day because I am streaming information into my log sequence and not trying to store it in my brain. After you trust in the process, it relieves the stress on your brain to perform more powerful tasks or give you more energy. As corny as it sounds, it actually was life-changing because I instantly had more energy at the end of the day and started performing better.
There is a learning curve in the process. For example getting in the habit of using things like hashtags on anything you think might be worth searching later. But this quickly becomes second nature. There is also a secondary benefit of how scanning through your notes after or during a call can help you identify connections or ideas you may not have thought of in the moment.
Brains are good at finding patterns, expanding on ideas, and thinking creatively. But they are terrible at remembering large streams of information. By learning to harness a note tool to manage the remembering of large streams of information, it opens up our brain to do the things it is good at like expanding on ideas or being creative instead of handicapping it by trying to remember a minor tasks someone asked you to complete after the meeting wrapped up.
I've been using omnifocus since before it came out. It was supposed to be a GTD strategy for me, but honestly it just captures a lot of things, many of which just enter the inbox but never get used.
I'd say it is 90% unused.
But the other 10% really supports the important things I need to do or remember, even if I have to pull stuff out of a pile of other stuff.
I never forget things at the store, ideas for an active project are always recorded, I always have a list of movies I need to see captured from many sources, and yes... I empty my mind immediately and don't have to stress for the forgotten.
I wonder if this is how I'll avoid the ravages of age that affected the old people I knew when I was a kid. "I forget what I was going to the store for" or "what was that person's name?" etc...
Someone said "Brain is for ideas, not for storage". So I learned to not try to remember everything, but to compact them to indices (in a digital notebook - Orgmode in my case). When I need information, I simply search the index and refer back to the information. It works wonderfully.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadNotes apps are where ideas go to die, and that’s good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30344237 - Feb 2022 (158 comments)
Org-mode can't be beat, IMO, if you live in Emacs all day long, as I do.
Does such a thing exist in emacs?
Even a simple para oriented fuzzy search might be a good place to start.
E.g. TextEdit.app (change default to plain text in settings) + saving text files to one particular directory with reasonable file names + regular maintenance (like twice a year) + Mac full text indexing/search works pretty well for me.
The thing is: After 6 months it's actually interesting to go through your old notes. The Finder preview makes it a matter of one keypress per file.
Bubbles up relevant notes automatically without having to link them like in Obsidian or something.
I think apart from that or an Anki like system there’s no way to solve this.
On the other hand maybe note taking is more about thinking and catalysing an idea and less about using in later
Why let go of old ideas? in a year you'll have a different perspective and a bad idea can become good or inspirational. I believe in quantity.
The app is for ideas only, so easy to retrieve. Most if not all my 'pet projects' started inside that app.
We think we write to remember, but it's really the act of letting go as the article gets into as a theory, that really lets those notes become effective to us. We can revisit these notes at a later date, with fresh eyes, having forgotten about it entirely. It adds value, not because the original idea or note was particularly great, but because of what we are then combining it with (action and experience).
This is also why blindly making notes isn't effective as a form of memorizing. You are writing just to write, you have to revisit them blindly in a new way for them to become effective with a new combination. As if you are a chemist creating a new concoction previously thought impossible.
So let your notes app become a giant trash pile. It's better for you, and they should do their job with proper search anyways. Don't spend time optimizing for note link graphs or any of that BS that doesn't help you and you absolutely will stop caring about those "features" in 5 months anyways. Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind.
I revisit old notes maybe once a month, and every time I do that I wonder why I still haven't migrated fully to Logseq.
> Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind.
Don't forget that everyone has a different workflow and what works for you might not be ideal for someone else. Also Obsidian/Logseq are both free vs Roam/Notion/etc -- some people just intensely incorporate notes as a part of their workflow.
I do agree everyone has a different workflow, but also you're a really good example of why the productivity is so massive despite the very little improvement to productivity brought on by these additional services: everyone is so desperately trying to convince themselves a better workflow is right around the corner. That someone else has a superior workflow, you just have to use that new app or service. Repeat every time a new gimmick comes out.
Isn’t that the goal — to process your notes, so as to come to new insights and connections?
I mean, given that you pose this question and leave it entirely unanswered, the rest of your response reads pretty condescendingly to me. A knowledge graph in markdown is not propped up by Big Notetaking, what an asinine stance.
I have ADHD, and I couldn't function without my notes.
I myself have a huge OneNote notebook, with all kinds of interesting projects or snippets that I've collected from HN or Reddit over the years. Being able to query that like a super-smart friend ("what was the error I ran into when I tried to implemt a self-hosted Synapse instance? How I can I fix that?") would be insane for personal productivity.
It's explore vs exploit (or hash table vs graph lookup); keywords are faster if you know what you're looking for. But reviewing linked notes leads to more exploration about related topics, and walking the graph can still be a reasonably efficient way to find what you're looking for. If you adopt networked notes, you get both at the cost of some notetaking overhead, but it's typically pretty small.
The one thing I hate about some of the notetaking apps is (and I understand folks need to make money) notes are really personal and private and need to stand the test of time. I can't have my notes locked away in a proprietary format or held hostage by some company charging $/mo so Notion is a no-go for me. I also don't really want to get locked into a workflow only to find out that the app is discontinued and then have to reinvent my workflow.
But yeah, networked thought is still cool and totally unrelated to why I don't use typical networked thought tools. Logseq came closest to converting me.
I've sucked it up and use a ton of electron apps. I can hardly blame anyone for doing that given the terrible fragmentation of hardware and lack of easier to use unifying APIs. Sometimes we just don't have time for that shit :)
I’ve found this to be true with writing music as well. Prior to recording stuff I found I’d play stuff that I had written a lot. The act of recording lets me forget those things and write more (and usually better) song ideas.
Like was thinking about a fully virtual avatar, not a person. But the tech wasn't there, and still ain't, to generate decent conversation, virtually rendered body with humanistic movements and facial expressions. Not to mention being able to select an interest field, Ie likes tech, hence tech conversations.
Back then I thought it was a brilliant idea. Now, it's quite impossible and better left sometime in the next 10ish years.
I get to see page views. The pages I'm really proud of nobody reads. The pages with the most page views are boring stuff (related to process, navigating my company's org structure, etc.).
More broadly, I've noticed that the things you do which have massive impact aren't always what you'd think. I once wrote a VBScript (long enough ago, it predated powershell) for a friend of mine to just run a program if there was no already running process by that name. He worked at an engineering firm, where for some inane reason some engineering software was always exiting and requiring a long init time to restart. The script kept it more or less always ready when you needed it.
Years later, I'd forgotten about it when he mentioned that it was a massive productivity boost. Every engineer at his company who had seen it in action, wanted it for themselves. Dozens of engineers were saving hours of productivity every week because of a throw-away script. Madness.
I do exactly that.
The act of writing helps me solidify that information in my brain - I have to process it to commit it to words. Paper works better than a text file, but a text file has the advantage of being faster and searchable. Once I've taken notes, I rarely go back and look at them. (Conversely, if I don't take notes, I'll wish I had)
I definitely do not take notes to abandon the information. Information I don't see the value in, I browse the web while listening. Some of that still sticks with me anyways.
I do diligently record things in Apple Notes, since they finally added categories (or groups, or whatever). I used to use Outlook notes the same way. It's really all I need. And I DO truly refer to them, although sometimes it's a long time later and I find way more detail and cool ideas than I remembered having come up with.
But browser bookmarks... these are mostly a waste. I have a big collection of them, again organized in groups. But it is vanishingly rare that I use them instead of just doing a new search.
However, one feature I would really love to have but never seen, is a combined todo - notes app.
I often jot down notes as in "things to note / remember", but also, in the same flow, I'd note thinks I'd need to do. I would love to be able to gather those automatically in a view, and be able to see them as done when I revisit the initial note after marking them as such from the "todo view".
The closest I've seen was some VimWiki, but I've found that fairly unwieldy (though I love the idea of taking notes in vim).
When I'm back at my laptop, I merge it into my Obsidian Vault.
I'm using that right now for both TODO and notetaking. I have syncthing set up so that it syncs my vault across 3 devices (including my phone). Very easy to set up (tho admittedly also easy to mess up the set up process). Have had minor hiccups the past 5 months but nothing that would make me want to stop using this setup.
All this is free. I feel like I've found a gold mine that nobody else seems to know about.
What do you like about LogSeq?
I don't feel like learning emacs and trying to shoehorn vim mode (evil?) into it (vim-style editing is much too ingrained in my text-editing muscle-memory).
TickTick comes to mind.
Then again, "notes" mean different things to different people.
Writing it down helps to solidify an idea into the heap from the stack, maybe even take it from hot storage to cold storage. It allows you to jot it down while it is still fresh and offload it to focus on it later. This is super helpful in ideas, jokes, thought streams, todos, one pagers on some projects, etc. It does help you remember but also allows you to move to the next thing for now.
Writing down ideas is like a sketchbook, ideas/actions/iteration of thoughts both good and bad. It is important to write thoughts down though because how many times have you had a great idea and you are like "I'll never forget this" and then a while later you are wondering what that was or you entirely move on because life moves fast.
Creatives, writers, comedians, developers, or just projects, are better when writing is involved in ideas to realization of those ideas.
Writing it down and notes is a form of brainstorming. Brainstorming allows ideas to be spontaneous and allows improvisation to get to better ideas. Even writing down bad ideas because somewhere in it is something good.
I use notes apps but more now just a repo (super easy with github.dev everywhere) and notes have easy history that way and you can freely add/remove without feeling like notes are lost. When I use notes apps or even Google Docs, yes they have history but it isn't as fluid/quick as github for that. The important thing is find something that works for you that makes the barrier to writing it down almost non-existent. It needs to be very easy to write things down in between busy days and to capture these fleeting moments.
I think if we look at note taking as a sorting / filtering function, then maybe this article isn’t that painful to read..
Everything these days is either archived, or gets lost in “the feed”.
I really miss the concept of a Desktop. A place where current work is done.
Unfortunately, people think that the filesystem is not for the endusers.. everything is solid per app, and hidden in it.
Ahh BeOS, where everything was a file.
It's just the old idea of relieving your mind of remembering everything.
A lot of my ideas are dependent on timing and that's why I write them down.
Like I have photography ideas for winter but it's not winter yet. Or something I want to do or eat the next time I go to a certain city but I don't want to fly to that city for that reason only.
Or vacation project ideas, but it's not convenient to take PTO right now, but when I can take PTO I hit a mental block about what to do with it, and it's nice to have a "menu" of ideas I had thought of before and pick one.
Timing-dependent ideas is one of my primary use of notes apps.
I'd be screwed without Notes. It's a repository of so many abstract thoughts that I have no place thinking about all day. There's simply too much going on.
Having things written down in shorthand like a prompt is so handy when I have some time to go back and browse the gallery of good and bad ideas.
However, I believe there is a benefit to notes kept over a long term which is being discounted. I believe that notes allow you to see how your thinking on a topic has changed over time.
They allow you to cast your mind back to your thinking when you first encountered a new topic, or back to a time when you were struggling with an idea that now seems obvious to you. They are a way to observe the progress and velocity of your learning.
I think that notes can be for active learners what a lifting journal is to a power lifter, or a mile and pace log is to a runner. Those logs are objectively not that interesting, but they allow you to measure and reflect on your progress.
An aside: I personally find that audio recordings are the best form of notes. Hearing your own voice explain an idea or concept carries so much more information than can easily be captured with text.
I now actually go back and curate my notes into a kind of wiki that is meant just for me. I've tried running a wiki for my self, but it doesn't work offline. And I tried just using plain text or OrgMode, but they were impossible to deal with on my phone. It just strikes that perfect amount of customization and cross-platform support that I needed to make it somewhere I trust storing the information. And in the end it really is still just a bunch of markdown files in a git repo (thanks Working Copy!) so I am not really locked in like I was with any other apps I've used.
Why not use a tool that is specifically made for that?
TiddlyWiki works both online and offline, and is both a note-taking tool and a wiki.
As a showcase: I turned the notes I was taking for myself in preparation for my ADHD diagnosis by uploading the single HTML file to my website, and many people found it useful:
https://romankogan.net/adhd
I’ve long suspected I’ve had it and so much of what you’ve listed speaks to me.
Honestly, the "cure" for 90% of ADHD symptoms is fixing our society that expects everybody's brains to work the same way for no good reason.
Most people are expected to be happy getting educated the same way, going to work at the same hours, and generally fulfilling the same sort of expectations.
We don't expect a racecar to be a great vehicle for hauls to home depot, but we expect all humans to be good with coming to work on time, filing taxes, paying fines promptly, etc — even when a lot of this can be automated away.
Then there are stimulants like Adderall which help people with ADHD manage the symptoms that affect them, like executive dysfunction.
But overall, the way ADHD is diagnosed is, remarkably, by how much inconvenience it causes to others.
Which is more of a you-problem than a me-problem ("you" here refers to society).
>which tools and programs would be needed to accumulate and distill all relevant information and let people with ADHD discover and implement that cure?
Tiddliwiky and social networks to raise awareness.
Frankly, that's going to get most of us about 90% there.
Most of "cure" of ADHD if changing the lifestyle and expectations.
Other than that, repeat after me: ADHD is not a disease, and does not need to be cured. Neither is autism.
Both can be a great asset too.
There is more than one neurotype.
That is an actively harmful statement. It is akin to saying losing a leg is not a disease and can be a great asset. ADHD is executive function disorder where person is unable to manage time and memory which is required for basic living. It may also come with issues in emotional regulation and other problems.
It is NEVER an asset. People maybe able to manage it and succeed despite having it never because of it.
You-problem becomes me-problem if you want to keep job/friends/partner or simply you want to keep track of the keys and turn off the gas.
Well, it's not. Losing a leg is losing a leg. It is not a disease.
It is, however, a disability, which is something ADHD may be.
But, unlike losing a leg, ADHD is not just a disability. It comes with a different set of abilities. Understanding that is key for a fruitful life and relationships - and that applies to both people with ADHD and without.
>ADHD is executive function disorder where person is unable to manage time and memory which is required for basic living. It may also come with issues in emotional regulation and other problems.
Note that we are not in disagreement here.
A disorder is not a disease. And executive dysfunction and time (mis)management are not the only ADHD traits. There are many others.
ADHD traits become symptoms when they impede one's life. Those can be treated and managed, but not cured (unlike diseases).
>It is NEVER an asset.
This statement is patently wrong and harmful.
People with ADHD are known to handle emergencies better than neurotypical people, for example. Having an immensely diverse set of skills and interests (which ADHD people are amenable to) is an asset.
So is hyperfocus[1].
There's a reason why you are more likely to find people with ADHD among software engineers and musicians.
It would be wrong to say that ADHD is an asset in today's world. But it can be, if you understand how your brain functions like, and have the right expectations.
What you say is akin to saying that a racecar is NEVER an asset because it gets stuck in the mud, unlike a tractor. Well, duh! It doesn't belong there.
>You-problem becomes me-problem if you want to keep job/friends/partner or simply you want to keep track of the keys and turn off the gas.
Sure, but again, you are not evaluating ADHD from the perspective of the person that has ADHD. Of course if you only look at how it inconveniences others, you will arrive at the conclusion that ADHD only inconveniences others.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Also, your comment is just the example of the society having idiotic/unreasonable expectations that creates a problem. Let's look at it again:
>or simply you want to keep track of the keys and turn off the gas.
Or you can simply install a door with a code lock (or put a spare key in a lockbox) and use an electric stove with auto shut-off (or instant pot/air fryer/microwave) to cook.
Presto! The problem isn't caused by ADHD, it's caused by having an expectation to do things that are hard for ADHDers when other solutions exist.
Which is another perspective of how ADHD is an asset: ADHD-friendly devices, interfaces, and ways of doing things are, in general, more human-friendly.
ADHD makes it hard to remember to switch off the lights, and easy to invent the automatic shut-off sensor. Which, ultimately, is good for everyone.
See my point?
[1]https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Hyperfocus
I do most of my editing on my laptop, but a non-trivial amount is done via the phone. Mostly adding new links and stuff via iOS Shortcuts I made.
That said, I love this Wiki. I'll be adding it to my ADHD note :)
Indeed, I don't edit it on the phone. I use Google Keep a lot though, and then merge the notes on the desktop.
Now I'm actually surprised to have returned back to this HN thread.
Meta ADHD.
Now if something catches my attention, I'll read it immediately to the best of my ability, send some highlights directly from the browser (desktop and mobile) to my Notado archive (I'd say 90%+ of my tagging of whatever I save is automated with rules) and be done with it. Whenever I'm in the mood to look back through the highlights (and comments) I've saved, it's great to have that built-in quality+relevancy+interestingness filter that comes from RINORIN.
Life is much better now that I'm not living with that constant FOMO. Even if I could read, highlight and annotate everything (I can't, and neither can you, and that's ok), I would never be able to do something with _all_ of it (I can't, and neither can you, and that's ok).
It seems to work for me, but I don't use notes or tags and my list is about 20 items long at most.
My phones browser kept crashing. I thought I had about 80 tabs open so I went to close some.
I had 1200+ tabs open. Mostly HN stuff I surely couldn’t live without.
The next time it crashed and asked to restore.
No!
When I do read the printout, I highlight things I want to store permanently and put it in a different inbox which is processed every few weeks. However, this is the exception - probably less than 5% of documents have something I want to store permanently.
Details in the link:
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2021/Dec/consuming-articles-off...
I do the same thing on my work computer, iPad, and iPhone. So the files are synced using the iCloud backbone. I just point each instance of Obsidian to the same folder locally on each computer and the file is synced in the background, with Obsidian unaware of this, it just treats it as a local graph. And it works flawlessly.
This is effortless for people with Macs. For people on cross-platform systems you could use dropbox, google drive, or onedrive or similar. Plenty of solutions out there.
I did something similar in the past:
It worked, up to a point; it helped me discover that my blocker was not forgetting things, but focusing on things.So I made a different tool to help me primarily maintain focus. A secondary benefit is having made a note months ago that I now need.
What I like to do is read a chapter of a book, scientific article, or blog post, let’s say, and then write a summary in a note. I can distill the message down and integrate it with existing knowledge by noting similarities.
After that step, I create Anki cards from the notes to remember the key points. By this approach I go from reading material to permanent memory.
If you’re asking me about the stack exchange question, I don’t use tags for my notes.
I really on my old notes all the time. People mention "oh, I was going to look into X," and I do a quick search through my notes to send them some links to the investigation I did earlier on X. People ask a question "What are you planning on doing on Y?" and I find in my old notes "subject matter so-and-so says: Y? I wouldn't worry about Y." Especially in engineering, there are lots of things that I think are not important at the time because I lack context to understand it's importance, and I only understand it's importance because I wrote down unimportant seeming things, go back and read through my notes and realize "Oh, 3 different people told me Z is a big deal. I didn't realize, I should go learn more about Z."
Because as mentioned, some notes are evolving documents, and others are just scrap files. And I do get a lot of value out of shelving thoughts and ideas for many of the reasons the article describes. It's just written as an unnecessarily grand sweeping generalization.
I've been pretty happy with paper notes on this front because you can quickly give up on structure and write things as fragments. You'll "know" it's there, and end up finding it eventually.
I think if you're using something like Notion or Roam, trying to keep stuff pretty flat (Search function exists!) is very helpful, as it lowers the cost of writing things down and means you don't get as burnt out.
"Old notes are worthless" is like... pretty glib though. I actually look back at notes relatively often! But it's often not a structured activity, so it's hard to say the notes are part of some generalized process. But there is a liberation in deleting some older notes, just like there is in deleting older projects.
Modern note-taking tools help our brains with their limited capacity to manage greater complexity, discover obscure connections and, of course, safely forget to free working memory for other things.
However, if you just write down some ideas from time to time that are not really related to each other or stash resources like interesting weblinks without making an effort to organize and connect them in meaningful ways, fancy new apps and features won’t really provide much value beyond just using a plain old notebook.
Overthinking really seems to be an issue with users of networked notebook apps and it can waste a lot of time and money. We should stop building elaborate systems or focussing on complicated workflows unless we really have a strong motivation, such as deep, long-term research and study. Serving this motivation will then be the actual focus of our efforts, not the tools or workflows themselves. It can be fun to explore “tools for thought” on their own, but they will not magically change our lifes if they cannot solve a problem that is meaningful to us.
If you’re just throwing notes into a note-taking app with no way of processing them, I can see how this would be true, but my system is constantly resurfacing old thoughts, and I make conscious choices about what gets archived and preserved.
I read the full article, and it sounds like the author hasn’t heard of these. Confident article. Not deeply researched in my opinion.
I use notes app to quickly remember what would otherwise be forgotten. I use notes apps just to make sense of what’s around me and not to have magical ideas.
I’m essentially a staff engineer, and my scope is very broad. I can pretend I have eidetic memory ( which I don’t have), or be lucid, and use notes as a way to not forget things, and be able to draw à meaningful plan.
Basically GTD wants you to have a "trusted system outside of your head and off your mind"
This allows your brain to do things the brain is good at, instead of keeping lists of new things which it really isn't that good at.
I work in a similar Staff Engineer position and jump between lots of teams, immediately required to go very deep with each team. Then a few minutes later I need to jump to another team and dive deep into that team's problem.
One day, I was talking with my AWS rep and I said "hey do you remember this thing you told me related to X about a year ago. I can't remember what it was, but it helped me solve Y problem...". I had only a vague memory of it, and I didn't really expect him to remember much of it either. But within seconds, he started rambling off, what felt like near-exact quotes about the conversation and the links and documentation references he gave me on that day. It literally blew my mind! He had impressed me with information recall a few times before, but this was god-tier memory recall. So I asked him how he could possibly do that, and he explained LogSeq and how he records everything so that he doesn't have to waste mind-space remembering things that he would certainly forget anyway.
I tried it out, and it took a few weeks to get used to it, but saw the same benefits immediately. I find myself less mentally taxed each day because I am streaming information into my log sequence and not trying to store it in my brain. After you trust in the process, it relieves the stress on your brain to perform more powerful tasks or give you more energy. As corny as it sounds, it actually was life-changing because I instantly had more energy at the end of the day and started performing better.
There is a learning curve in the process. For example getting in the habit of using things like hashtags on anything you think might be worth searching later. But this quickly becomes second nature. There is also a secondary benefit of how scanning through your notes after or during a call can help you identify connections or ideas you may not have thought of in the moment.
Brains are good at finding patterns, expanding on ideas, and thinking creatively. But they are terrible at remembering large streams of information. By learning to harness a note tool to manage the remembering of large streams of information, it opens up our brain to do the things it is good at like expanding on ideas or being creative instead of handicapping it by trying to remember a minor tasks someone asked you to complete after the meeting wrapped up.
I'd say it is 90% unused.
But the other 10% really supports the important things I need to do or remember, even if I have to pull stuff out of a pile of other stuff.
I never forget things at the store, ideas for an active project are always recorded, I always have a list of movies I need to see captured from many sources, and yes... I empty my mind immediately and don't have to stress for the forgotten.
I wonder if this is how I'll avoid the ravages of age that affected the old people I knew when I was a kid. "I forget what I was going to the store for" or "what was that person's name?" etc...