[davismwfl]

I use a 5 subject notebook and write notes down in that throughout the day, during meetings etc. From that I will usually, once or twice a week, take the things that are important and put them into my Apple Notes (used to use OneNote).

I do this for a few reasons.

1. Taking notes on a computer during meetings is disrespectful IMO. Every time I see people do it, 80% of the time they are checking email, checking a site, looking up stuff instead of paying attention to the speaker or meeting. I get pissed when people spend the meeting looking up alternatives just to challenge the person speaking. It isn't that challenging an idea is bad (it is critical in fact), it is you need to listen to comprehend and not listen to respond.

2. The vast majority of notes are worthless after a few days. They were relevant to complete a task but not noteworthy for my career or to learn something I need to keep forever as a reference.

3. Writing something makes me personally more likely to remember it.

In the 5 subject notebook, I keep the sections as "Meeting Notes", "Active project(s)", "Design", "Personal notes" and the last one is usually open for just misc crap that I don't need to categorize right now. The design part I almost always take pictures of and put in my notes app, but I only take the pic of the final design and the notes on why. Design here is typically software architecture type design, product design, UX etc. It is faster for me to sketch it then to try and put it in an app.

I've done this for my entire career, 20+ years now and just refined over time. I also am a huge fan of note cards during the week while I am working. For example, I'll write my plan down for the day/week/month on a note card and then work through it. The time period is chosen based on what I am working on at the time, and sometimes I have one for a day, one for the week, one for a month etc. Just helps me keep myself organized, and again, writing it forces me to remember better, personally.

As for using it, I have gone back and used stuff in the past year that I wrote down 15 years ago. Typically this is more design concepts or how to solve an interesting problem, or what were issues I ran into using XYZ design or module etc.

[taylodl]

I'm stealing this system! I too have found I tend to remember things better if I write them down, but some things you need electronically in order to be able to easily search. I love the idea of waiting for a while to translate over to your notes app because most notes are ephemeral.

Thank you!

[raman162]

I agree with points 2 and 3, but I think it's easy for people to be attentive and take notes during the meeting, especially if they are part of the discussion. My handwriting is too illegible for me to consider this option. I only resort to handwritten notes on my ipad if there isn't enough space for me to pull out my laptop.

[davismwfl]

I get it and respect that some people can do it respectfully. I have seen some people do it respectfully and still participate etc, it just sadly isn't the norm. It also can be distracting as you are trying to present and you hear 10 people typing away on their keyboard when you know chances are none of them are taking notes. Again, definitely my own pet peeve but I have heard many others say the same.

[raman162]

I agree, I think most of my meetings there is a designated scribe/chair and they speak out loud when they are documenting the important details. It's kinda useless to have a second to second transcription of the whole meeting.

[fuzzfactor]

This is very traditional and I do it too with handwritten notes which I expect to let age then mostly discard before filing only the good references in cabinets.

For the typewritten stuff or things which are good references to begin with, I went digital fairly traditionally as I'll explain.

So far no one has been able to convince me there is anything better than a secretary.

As an executive needs leadership documentation, I think it's best to have a full time operator who puts their focused effort on the notes I need taken, the selection & crafting of those to be destroyed, confidential, released, or published as well as their organization, filing, retrieval and backup.

At the opposite end of the spectrum without any staff you want to minimize or eliminate all of these same efforts without fully compromising the advantage you would have if there was a specialist doing this for you.

Even when I am an executive, during a time when I'm making progress at a scientific bench the only way to get complete documentation is to spend at least half the time sitting down to document where you are, instead of making more progress at the bench.

When that sitting-down pose can not be attained for the duration of a project, that's when somebody has to sit down afterward and that's not always the most useful documentation, and never complete enough.

You can get to the point where the only reason to make notes is if you will certainly go back to look at them, or if they are an essential element of otherwise unobtainable documentation.

This may have some similarities to engineering projects where you are sitting down for both the progress-making & documentation-generating efforts. Either way what you need is someone standing there with a clipboard & audio recorder who will type it up and file & retrieve it for you. You can probably imagine how you would be able to leverage such a conventional system better every year.

Without that you are almost always going to have to settle for less-than-ideal documentation, so truly optimize for this instead. Then take a few years to get better at leveraging what you really have to work with.

Until you get a secretary, at least use your PC text editor & file manager as a substitute for their typewriter & filing cabinet.

These are two of the business machine essentials that IBM wanted all offices to be able to use an early IBM PC for instead, as a high-tech alternative. So they offered printers and hard drives, and you should probably still hang out in your file manager yourself if there's no one else doing it for you.

Make yourself a storage partition on a HDD and create your own folder for each subject manually as needed, giving the subject a short meaningful name like a secretary would do on the tab of a real manila folder. Then take notes right into text editors no differently than DOS, and file them into your desired folders manually. There will be a creation date, modification date & access date associated with the files & folders and the text can be some of the most rapidly searchable.

It's OK to make a folder for a single worthwhile text file, since you will sometimes want to search by folder, other times by filename or contained text. Try to stay organized and don't make too many subject folders though in case you want to be able to search them easily manually sometimes. In real filing cabinets there was usually only one layer of subfolders, which are supposed to be much more familiar today but sometimes I wonder.

With 4 primary partitions addressable by DOS, these were supposed to represent the four drawers of a filing cabinet. A common arrangement would have been one drawer with a main folder for each product, one drawer with a main folder for each customer, one containing each month's invoices, and one with each month's correspondence.

Storage for one's personal notes is not usually a large requirement, and you may not need a database to be helpful.

Comprehensive snapshot/backup can be made by easily copying the entire organized partition contents of small universal text files, uncompressed.

Tagging and word processing can always be done after initial note-taking.

If all the notes even turn out to be worth it.

Make it easy on your secretary.

[jonnycomputer]

zoom meetings mean me taking notes in org-mode is quite unobtrusive.