My note taking history
I’ve always taken a lot of notes, it wasn’t until my early 20’s that I started converging on centralised note systems though. Until that point, most of my notes were either academic, which would be handwritten and split by things like module or lecture or subject, or tech based relating to project work, which would be just typed up readme type notes in the project folder.
As I became an adult, I then got adult things to take notes on, like bills and my own thoughts, and I started to recognise my note taking as one common activity across my life, rather than an individual activity done differently in all parts of my life. I’m still not sure if this is the best approach: I do feel like I’ve lost some of the richness in my typed notes as they’ve homogenised - but here we are.
software
- Onenote was one of Microsoft’s best kept secrets. I think it’s heyday was around 2011 - 2013, it had it all. private notebooks + dropbox.
- Mendeley was useful for tracking reading and referencing whilst in academia
- Mayan EDMS is interesting and fun for managing and digitising physical docs
- Onenote had sharing sync issues with mobile and got converted to rubbish cloud app, feeling burnt, I switched to markdown and syncthing
- I used vscode with some themes and plugins to make it different from my daily IDE worked for a bit
- messed around with notion, and other markdown editors
- settled on obsidian as tradeoff:
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- markdown based
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- fast
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- allows some fancy stuff with basic code block query plugins
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- but isn’t really open source (although has very opensource feel to community, and plugins generally are)
methodologies
I learned about David Allen’s GTD when I was young. The idea of an inbox or a place or a system to facilitate dumping thoughts and ideas, knowing that they will be processed is useful for me.
More recently, Tiago Forte’s PARA also offered some useful insights for me on formalising my personal knowledge structure. Making a distinction between projects, areas of interest, resources and archived materials presented solutions to challenges I’d faced with my notes.
I think having conscious systems and methods and time dedicated to organising my own thoughts is necessary for me. I often go for periods where I’m not as on-top of my note taking and task management, and although I often regret those times, I think accepting them as part of the process of learning is also necessary.
The most important element of note taking methodology that has presented itself to me over the past few decades is the need for change and growth. There have definitely been times where I’ve felt “I just need to find the approach for me, and then all my knowledge management problems are solved!” I’ve then found many systems, but clearly still have problems, so this way of thinking is clearly flawed!
the future
My note taking will continue to evolve. I go through life actively seeking out different knowledge and ways of thinking, and that necessitates evolving my systems to capture those new thoughts, insights and experiences.
This is why I now favour open and plain text based solutions, as they somewhat limit complexity, whilst facilitating change, growth and migration.
Markdown is my preferred plaintext format, and Obsidian is my current preferred markdown editor.