Ask HN: What notes do you keep if not a student or a writer?

[soheyl]

There has been a recent spike in HN discussions on the best tool for taking notes, as well as different note-taking methodologies. And I agree that there are good reasons to do so if you are preparing for an exam or writing a book on civil war (or a blog post comparing two JS frameworks). But for the rest of you, what notes do you keep?

I mean if I'm learning something new, let's say type embedding in Go, and I need to refer to it later, 1 - in most cases accessing it via a Google search is much faster than referring to my notes, 2- in 6 months, probably someone has written a better explanation for it, which probably will rank higher in Google results, and 3- in 5 years, it probably is obsolete anyway.

More fundamental types of knowledge are not going to expire, but the first two reasons are still there.

I see the need for a more temporary note-taking, say what actions the team is going to take after this meeting, but I think that is not what most people on HN mean when they talk about keeping notes.

So my question is: what are the topics for your notes, especially in the context of retaining knowledge for the long term?

Much appreciated!

[badrchoubai]

Lately, I've been using GitHub Wiki pages to keep notes on random topics I find interesting. Books I read, articles that I want to refer back to, a weird mathematical equation that helped me solve a problem, etc...

[soheyl]

So your notes on books for example, are they more like a collection of highlights, or like an essay summarizing or reviewing it?

[badrchoubai]

It depends on the book, and subject matter. I might turn notes on The DevOps Handbook into more of a technical format but a book like The Lean Startup might have just Chapter titles with bullet points. I don’t think I’d use it to review books though.

[tkainrad]

I feel like this depends a lot on yor tasks and use cases.

For example, if you have a blog, or if your professional role includes a lot of writing, you can benefit a lot from notes. Usually, when I start a blog post, I go through my notes on the topic and when I am done with that, my post is halfway finished.

I have a post about knowledge management that has a section specifically about when to take notes:

https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-ba...

[soheyl]

Interesting post. As I said, I see the use case if you have a blog. Your case for "Capturing information from audio sources" makes a lot of sense too, something that I hadn't thought about.

[satvikpendem]

I write daily, through a Markdown file for each day. The sections include:

- Dreams: recording dreams to enhance lucid dreaming

- Notes: daily notes about what I'm thinking

- Plan: nested todo list of what I need to do today

- Next: what I need to do tomorrow or later. This is copied into the next day's Plan section, so tasks roll over if not done

- Research: things I want to research. I write them down here so I don't waste time if I think of something interesting and want to follow up later.