[kritiko]

I’m fascinated by the rise of the Zettelkasten concept among hackers (I don’t think I’ve seen it anywhere mainstream yet) and the fundraising that Notion & Roam have accomplished. Based on the title of the post, I assume you are inspired by Tiago Forte?

I’d be interested to hear more about how your notes are organized and what they help you accomplish.

The idea of moving notes across 4 platforms as described in this article makes me wince, which is why I’m on OneNote for now - maybe not quite as nice for linking stuff but included in O365 which my work uses, cross platform, etc.

[spences10]

For me it was about getting the notes in one place where I could manage them as I would in my text editor.

I always got frustrated with the implementation of Markdown and no being able to manipulate the text as I would in a .md document.

I have lost some functionality that Notion had, like for Kanban boards and such but being able to manipulate the plain text is where I want to be.

The only downside I have really is that I'm tied to using a VS Code now for writing notes, if I want to go mobile I can use something like GitJournal on android and make changes there, and there's now code spaces in GitHub so I could in theory use a code space in a tablet on the move, but none of us are out and about that much these days

[vhanda]

Disclaimer: GitJournal Author.

I've started using GitJournal a bit with my tablet, though it's a really old one. I would like to make GitJournal more tablet friendly in the future. If you happen to try to it, please feel free to to tell me about the issues. I'll be happy to fix them.

PS: For markdown + kanban, imdone.io looks interesting. I haven't tried it out though.

[AdamGibbins]

GitJournal is great, discovered it months ago and its significantly improved the way I reference my notes. Thanks for the time you've put into it, greatly appreciated.

[GekkePrutser]

Yeah I'm kinda surprised. Most people in the hacker/maker community I know are pretty disorganised like myself.. I know for me this kind of thing will never fly, it requires too much dedication. In this sense I'm not surprised it came from Germany as they love formalising things. It's really in their nature and I imagine this is also why they're so good at technological things.

But for me it'll never work, I know I'll start on it and then I have a rush project where I don't have time to keep the docs up to date and then I'll abandon it altogether :) I'm the kind of guy who fills up their desktop with everything they're working on and when it ends up being full just moves it to a folder "Old Desktop" (which is in fact a chain of "Even Older Desktop" folders :) :) :) ). Somehow it seems to work for me though, it really surprises me how I can find stuff back from 10 years ago just by seeing the icons of stuff I worked on around the time. And it's really zero effort which I like.

And really, I like relying on my memory.. If I don't remember something maybe it wasn't worth remembering. And discovering it once more may lead to other interesting discoveries.

But I'm glad it helps others forward in their goals! I didn't expect it at all though.

[kritiko]

Your comment really resonates with me. The people who seem to push and advance these systems seem to be (broad generalizations follow)

-Academics like Andy Matuschak who are trying to create better technology for learning or do work on really hard problems

-Productivity gurus like Nat Eliason and Tiago Forte who make money selling tutorials on how to use these systems.

For “The rest of us” there could probably be some gains from using these systems... but sticky notes, texts, notes app, Slack, wherever else you jot stuff suffice, and there’s a lot of administrative overhead & habit change required. I think I am gradually implementing more “linked notes” into my work as systems like Microsoft Teams make it possible to combine a wiki and a file directory easily. But I’m skeptical that this is going to become mass market in the near term.