Ask HN: What are your note-taking techniques?

It's not digital, and it'd be tricky to OCR my lousy hand writing.

My method is Notepad++ with either a cloud storage solution, or a shared network drive. I take my laptop to all meetings and take what notes I need, then store those in my cloud/network storage. (In certain situations, I'll use my phone instead of my laptop)

I use Excel heavily, and it's a great tool for many uses - managing and manipulating lists of servers and data quickly, better grid formatting than Word/Outlook, script generation automation (using VBA to create Powershell scripts), and other uses. But it's a terrible note-taking platform to me.

I've had a love-hate relationship with OneNote. It works best for me from within Sharepoint. Others make much better use of the tool than I do, and hopefully you'll be able to do so too.

I keep track of everything in Evernotes with The Secret Weapon. (http://www.thesecretweapon.org/)

It is email + evernotes + GTD.

Takes a little bit of effort to set up/ get oriented with but worth it.

currently I organize notes by having a .txt file for each project, but sometimes that still doesn't work because stuff adds up, so it's hard to find the how-did-i-do-this-last-time steps

https://gingkoapp.com/p/note-taking-app/

I first used my Gmail Drafts folder. This was actually really good for a time. Accessible via web or phone, the Gmail app automatically syncs the drafts to any device. However with many notes this gets messy.

I moved to some startup note-taking app after that. I can't remember the name now but it was fairly perfect. Unfortunately they closed down. This was the time I really started lookin triedg and trying many different things.

I settled on plain Markdown files stored on Dropbox. I use the excellent Draft app on Android to edit on my phone, and vim on PC. The only drawback with this, Dropbox's text renderer doesn't do fenced code blocks, so it looks funny on the webpage if I share a note with those.

I have a note-taking nerd friend and he settled on a private git repository.

I've tried Evernote but I hated it.

One example of a feature that Org-mode has that the other solutions I evaluated didn't was support for plain text spreadsheets[3]. This feature is very helpful to me because many of my notes include small sets of tabular data that I strongly prefer to include directly in my wiki documents rather than in a separate Excel or LibreOffice spreadsheet.

[1] http://orgmode.org/manual/

[2] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/ido.e...

[3] http://orgmode.org/manual/The-spreadsheet.html

My setup is on OneNote, which does a really great job of indexing everything you throw into it.

- Start with one notebook, call it "Work" or "Main" or whatever. Put it on OneDrive or some other web-accessible location if you want (or don't - OneNote may be proprietary, but it's file-driven and you own your data). Create a section in it called "Unfiled". Create another section called "Unfiled Archive."

- Customize the system notification icon to create a new quick note when you click it.

- In OneNote Options > Save and Backup, set the Quick Notes Section to the Unfiled section you just created.

Need to jot something down? Click the notification area icon and you get a new note. Most of your day-to-day can live in the Unfiled section until you get a little down time, which you can use to organically sort and organize as you see fit. If something's old and you're not sure if you need it, drag it to the archive section. Over the years I have grown one huge notebook called "Learning" with tons of sections on every conceivable subject. My main "Work" notebook primarily consists of the Unfiled section plus a few others that have some long-lived stuff in them.

A few other OneNote-specific tips:

- Win+Shift+S freezes the display and lets you draw a bounding box to take a screenshot. I configure this to send the screenshot to the clipboard; super handy.

- OneNote has a printer driver. I print stuff to OneNote all the time.

- Interesting web pages have a habit of disappearing. Use IE's "Send to OneNote" or the OneNote printer driver to capture them. Bonus: the entire text of the page gets put into the OneNote full-text index.

The number one problem with note taking for me is keeping track of all the notes. In the past, I'd make all these great notes with Zim then never read them. With anki and spaced repetition, that problem is solved. When the memory of the note is on the verge of decaying, anki reminds me, keeping it fresh.

Anki has a web, android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and iOS client, it features online syncing, supports html markup and has extensions support with python. Works for me!

I know this doesn't work very well for i.e. discovery meetings with clients, but I don't have those anymore (and when I did, I just recorded the audio). You asked what MY techniques were ;)

In this time, I have never been able produce legible or useful notes much less come up with a personal note taking system that works for me.

My studying habits in school boiled down to showing up to class and pretending to take notes and then going home to spend hours outlining textbook chapters until I had everything I needed to do well on exams.

At work, I take notes in meetings for the exact same reason I took notes in college - so I won't be judged for not taking notes.

When something's done, put a confident line through it. Flick through the book every day for what's not done.