[tsmall]

All of the comments here seem to be about which tools are used to take notes. That's an interesting part of the problem, and it may be what the OP was looking for, but I'm more interested in finding out which notes you keep and how you organize them and use them later than what format or tool they're stored in. When you're reading or learning something, when do you stop and think "I should make a note of that"?

[Mz]

At work, there are some bits of information I fairly frequently need but which aren't readily available in any of the manuals and such we have. We get email updates saying "This procedure has changed. Henceforth, the new procedure is..." and you can't find it anywhere in the manual or anything. I have a folder to put those types of emails in. For some things I need to access fairly frequently which are also fairly lengthy, I save a copy to my desktop, even if I have to create a different document in a different format to do so. For shorter things, I use the "notes" function available in the microsoft suite of applications I use at work.

When making myself outlines of things at work, I focus on stuff I need to know but for some reason am having difficulty with it. If I get certain types of requests to correct a particular type of error repeatedly, I focus on trying to figure out why I am doing it wrong and how I can stop doing it wrong. Then I note the stuff that I feel I personally won't feel is intuitive or obvious and expect to have trouble remembering to do. If I think the instructions we have suck, I rewrite it in a format that makes more sense to me and run it past my superior to see if my re-interpretation is still an accurate depiction of things.

Am I happy with all this? Nope. But they don't really give us a better method and I am making this stuff up as I go and it is getting to the point where team-members email me and say "do you have a copy of...?", so I have the general impression that my slap-dash, thrown together approach is more effective than whatever other people are generally doing. For at home -- working on my websites and such -- I am not really at a point of "production". I am still surfing HN and talking with my adult sons a lot and trying to nail down a more concrete idea of where to go next. My big focus for a long time was getting well. That still takes a lot of my time, so hopes of figuring out how to support myself as an entrepreneur are still almost a "hobby". That is changing and I may soon need to get a lot more organized and focused. So far, just collecting links to articles and information and emailing stuff to my sons is working okay.