[jiggunjer]

Apart from the transfer aspect I identify two other reasons for taking notes:

The act of note taking itself may help structure and focus thoughts, regardless of intent to review or transfer the note.

It may also be cathartic. It gives peace of mind to know I own the detailed information on X, just in case. Or perhaps making a pretty list about something random lets me take my mind of work for a few minutes.

[WA]

For me it’s similar. I want to write it down to get it out of my head.

But I think it’s important to understand one thing about notes and organization systems in general: do you optimize for speed of writing stuff down or do you optimize for retrieving the information?

I know that I am in the former camp. That’s why my note taking system is as follows:

I have a folder called Notes in Sublime. I create a new file, use a text snippet to insert the current ISO date (2021-10-18) give it a headline, write everything down in free-form without a structure, save it as a plain text file and be done with it.

When I want to read a note (doesn’t happen that often), I mostly remember the headline I used: Cmd+O to open that file. If nothing comes up, Sublime has good regex search capabilities.

[jiggunjer]

agreed, thats often enough for text but what about tables and images. We quickly enter the complexer realms of rich text and database forms. I often write down the price of an item while shopping using a database input app, but there's no easy way to transfer this to a wiki or markdown file.