[endisneigh]

How are people using tools like this and Roam, Obesdian, etc. etc. etc?

Personally I could see the use if you were writing a book or something, but I feel like in practice for normal notes I would just have all of these notes that I'd never look at again or spend so much time traversing my notes and not getting things done. As someone with distractive tendencies I'd love to hear the situations where this is useful so I stay on track.

I hear the term "second brain" used a lot. The thing is with your brain, you don't actively spend time searching and traversing your "notes" consciously. Generally your mind brings things to be recalled just as you need it. Is there something like that?

[thomascgalvin]

A big part of my note-taking is just to get stuff out of my brain. I might never revisit any of it, and that's fine. If I write it down I know I can always go back when I need to, but if I don't, it's going to be an annoying distraction in my subconscious.

A lot of my note-taking therefore becomes an excuse to successfully ignore the things I know I don't need to pay attention to.

I do have a bunch of notes that I use for everyday stuff, however. My engineering journal is a hierarchical notebook, allowing me to go back and see all of the contributions I've made to $PROJECT, which is great come review time.

I also have a tech notes section for problems that I seem to have to solve over and over again. For example, every time we have a power outage, my Mac Mini gets stuck in a reset password screen, and I need to reset the NVRAM to fix it. I don't remember the keycode to do that, so I have a note called "Fix mac mini password reset" that tells me that it's `Cmd-option-p-r`.

Lastly, anything that might be good in a self-hosted wiki goes in my notebook; basically, my own little set of `README.md`s.

[kstrauser]

That first paragraph is exactly my experience, too. When I read "Getting Things Done", the lightning bolt that struck me was learning that simply getting stuff out of my head and into a trusted system is enough to let me stop obsessing about it and concentrate on other things.

Last week I had one of those dreaming-about-writing-code sort of nights, where I half woke up and was thinking about the stuff I'd been dreaming about and couldn't go back to sleep. I tossed and turned until I grabbed my phone, opened my notes app, jotted down some of the idea, then closed it. That alone let my mind say "ok, now I won't forget it" and I was finally able to go back to sleep.

Some people go full-on Zettelkasten, which is awesome and I'm happy for them. Turns out I really don't need all the organization. I just need somewhere to offload my thoughts where I know I can find them later, and just the process of writing them down usually gets me 99% of the benefit of having such a system.

[epiecs]

Same here. The combo that seems to work for me is onenote combined with zotero.

- Onenote for ideas and scribbles - zotero for bookmarks and documents. Supports tags - physical notebook for note taking during meetings

btw you can easily connect zotero to your own nas via webdav and you have unlimited storage. Works fine for me. The only drawback of zotero is that you dont have a native mobile client.

[kstrauser]

I love Drafts for the Mac ecosystem. It has two giant things going for it:

- It opens instantly to a blank window ready for me to type into.

- It's extensible with built-in actions and JavaScript so that I can automate things like posting the text I just wrote to Twitter or Mastodon, or add it to OmniFocus, or text it to my wife, etc. etc. etc.

[gofreddygo]

I believe this does not work well. At least it did not for me.

We routinely conflate todos/plans ('need to do this') , observations and patterns ('this is what i see happening when...'), events ('this happened...') and learnings ('this is what i did wrong, right...') as "notes".

I started with dropping everything in notational velocity (till it broke on my Mac upgrade) and / or 'email thyself' and like you said, it builds and its there but of little or no use. Unless its in my brain, I can't make connections. Without connections I cannot recall when I need it. It really does not help. Its actually net negative with the effort that goes into putting it in there.

I now use Google docs. One doc for each topic I am currently working on (e.g interview preparation, home purchase research, kubernetes, etc..) This builds topic wise documents which are exponentially faster to navigate/guess without needing text search or any filing system. I can skim through 1-2 documents and it provides context, history, insights, quotes in 1 place that I try and read more often which tends to stick in my head. Also given that I am more a visual learner, the place where something particular was on a document also brings in what was written next to it simply because I've seen it so often.

[corytheboyd]

I’m with you, tried it but couldn’t keep up. I didn’t commit to it for very long which isn’t a fair trial, but I just didn’t see it panning out.

One thing I realized was that most of my notes were links to pages on the internet with maybe a few extra words as context, and the rest were chicken scratch step-by-step things I did setting up something nontrivially complex. For the links, now I just use bookmarks in Firefox and add tags religiously to make them searchable. For the step-by-steps... I’m not really sure what to do, thinking of running a WebDAV server on my LAN and using Joplin as a client to just contain arbitrary markdown docs.

[stevesimmons]

I found Zotero (academic reference software) with the browser plugin to be a simple and very effective way to file general information, web bookmarks, Arxiv papers, conference materials, PDF books, etc, etc. My basic workflow is:

* Keep Zotero open, and navigate to one part of its collection (topic) hierarchy.

* Click on the Zotero button in the browser, to save the current web page, PDF doc, paper in Semantic Scholar etc into the currently selected place in the Zotero hierarchy.

* Zotero saves all the metadata about the object.

In parallel, I keep project specific markdown files in the folder I create for every project.

I tried Roam-like hyperlinked Markdown files for a couple of months, but found I kept wanting to keep them alongside other project-specific files.

[cxr]

I also use Zotero, and it supports notes, but I don't think it's very good at them. IMO, Hypothes.is takes the right approach for this. Zotero should probably overhaul its notes subsystem and add direct support for Hypothes.is (and Web Annotations) out of the box.

https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-protocol/

https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standar...

[ncallaway]

I use Obsidian pretty regularly. I started in earnest about 6 months ago, and I've been really enjoying it.

I like it because it's a wrapper around a folder of markdown files. I really my notes being just a folder of markdown files, so that's the selling point of Obsidian to me. I can open my notes in VSCode just as well as Obsidian, if I'm editing. Obsidian gives me some nice functionality (backlinks, hotkeys for different notes formats mostly, and just being a separate application from VSCode), but it could disappear tomorrow and VSCode would take over as my notes.

I setup a cron job to `git add .`, `git commit`, and `git push` every day, so I have my notes in a github repo that I can pull down if I ever need to switch devices. Or if I just want to look at my notes from a device, I can just browse the Github repo.

I use it for two different things:

- a daily log of my work for the day, including notes of what I did, and where each branch left off. All of my "four little things to finish this jira ticket" end up in the daily log. - notes on various personal projects. For example, if I am looking for a contractor to prune a tree I create a note for that. I put in all the contractors I'm contacting, their bids, etc, into the note.

> The thing is with your brain, you don't actively spend time searching and traversing your "notes" consciously. Generally your mind brings things to be recalled just as you need it.

Maybe your mind does! My mind will often come back with: "there were _definitely_ 5 little todos that you needed to do to finish the branch, and I have 3 of them here ready for you. Maybe do a `git diff` to try and remember the other 2?", or "Hey, I was looking for a contractor to prune the tree. I called three of them, I think. Maybe four. Who knows. A couple sent in bids, but I don't remember which ones. Let's check gmail and see if we can find any there?".

So, personally my use of notes isn't to stop my brain trying to _come up_ with a task to complete. My notes are basically an index for when I want to resolve a task, to all the information I need to pick it up again. Or, alternatively viewed, it's the context when I put a task down, to help resume the task when I context switch back to it.

[Groxx]

>... it could disappear tomorrow and VSCode would take over as my notes.

Yep. This is why I've been enjoying Obsidian too. I've been able to organize how I want, and it works just fine... and it keeps working, without not-so-subtly forcing me into a new structure that I don't want, just to work with it more smoothly. (e.g. Notable)

On mobile I just use some other markdown app (Epsilon is marvelous for reading). Nearly every single one works great with a folder of md/cm files. If I can't even do that, just opening plain text files works fine. The lack of lock-in is wonderful.

[slightwinder]

Software can't read your mind, so how should it know what you need right now? It's up to the user to build a system that works for him, and the user must stick with it. Software can only supporr you there, but not replace you.

Though, you can use the system of someone else and cope with it and use this person tools. But usually this does not really work well long for most people.

[singhrac]

I use it a few ways, and I can be specific:

- I will create a folder for a topic with multiple ideas (e.g. transformers), and then put inside it a few separate files. One might contain a link to a paper or blog post and then my notes from reading that (really the most important snippets, occasionally a summarizing statement by me). Another might contain a list of ideas to try, or a pros/cons list.

- I have a folder called "book reviews" in which I put a single file per book I read. I try to write down a single sentence about each chapter, and I copy quotes I particularly like. I don't refer to these often, but it's reassuring to know that I won't have to reread the entire book to regain my state of mind.

- Very often when putting together a written document I write drafts inside the editor. I know there are "better" tools, but the writing feels organic here, since it's adjacent to notes.

- During meetings I'll sometimes make a document for the meeting, and then write down a todo list while we're discussing. This usually gets sent out as an email to the meeting participants (a very useful habit).

I use Obsidian, and have really started this in the past year, when note taking apps took off on Hacker News. Fiddling too much is kind of a distraction (I spent a few too many hours tweaking themes).