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by codazoda 1821 days ago
I've never gone back and logged old notes but I did start doing something that's worked well for me...

I log, "stray thoughts". I put these in a physical notebook but Google Keep or Apple Notes works just as well. Anything goes and everything goes in the same place.

At the beginning of my day, I "translate" my hastily written thoughts into more complete notes in a flat text file. Each thought is written on a single line in a way that I could read and understand it out of context.

I use hash tags to categorize and to link other ideas (by line number).

I also created a biblio.txt file that has URLs, names, book titles, and other references in it. I use curly braces to link a note to a reference.

Example:

Pencils are longer lasting than pens. #324 #327 #writing {26}

The real magic happens when I use my text editors search feature to research all my previous thoughts about something in my flat text file.

1 comments

How do you handle multi-line thoughts?

Can your system do hyperlinking and filtering by one or more tags?