Hacker News Reader

Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, based on my personal experience, maintaining a constantly growing archive of things, be it notes, bookmarks, emails, etc. turns out to be not very useful. Also, it gradually becomes something that you spend more time on than on other things. I now prefer to be more spontaneous, try to minimize the number of things that drag me into the past, start things as if from scratch, "reset" myself, dismiss the baggage that is often turns out to be nothing more than a dead weight. This "lightweight" approach seems to allow me to move forward faster, learn new things that I might have no plans to learn for a long time, because of a queue of other things on my "TODO list". But again, this may be personal.

View on HN

I had the same problem as you, but my solution was separating "notes" from future actions.

My notes track knowledge, they are referenced as-needed so I store everything because there's low/no cost. I've also found that writing things down improves my recollection, so there's value even if I never reference the note again.

My calendar / omnifocus track future actions, I minimize these and keep them very well curated - no "todo", only "do". Externalizing some cognition takes time in exchange for efficiency... less overhead from context switching or remembering unrelated items.

The tradeoff is loosely analogous to scheduling in computing - inefficient for an isolated single thread of work, but beneficial when coordinating lots of concurrent work.

> no "todo", only "do"

I'm curious about what this means. What are "do" notes (as distinct from "todo" ones). If it means that don't calendar, and you just do that task immediately, how you plan and (more importantly) remember future tasks?

In practice, most people's "todo" list ends up being the garbage bin for low-priority items that they'll never actually do. It's worth separating the things you actually plan to do next week/month, from the ones in a "backlog".

Grep any large code repository for "TODO" comments.

As someone who's worked on multiple teams that used TODO comments and then had a regular type of sprint in which they were grepped and cleared (these weren't perfect projects, there were other organisational problems, but this particular thing was handled well), I was actually quite surprised to get into a discussion recently here on HN about projects where this doesn't happen and TODO comments end up being largely aspirational.

However, I think code and life are slightly different contexts here. I get what you mean about separating aspirations from near-term actual intents but I generally use the word "todo" to refer exclusively to the latter (which still doesn't help a whole lot with ensuring execution as the list still grows quite large).

TODOs are crufty ambiguous notes that often poorly describe the current system and potential future work... and they're so easy to add that the average "todo" is very low-value, dragging down the perceived ROI of fixing any tech debt.

I keep the two separate: good notes describing the state of the world, and a calendar to schedule future actions.

When it comes to software, that means all code must have good documentation and known flaws are scheduled to be fixed. If it's not worth scheduling, it's not worth changing.

My personal life follows the same pattern, although much less formal... there just isn't enough time for every possibility, so I always work backwards from my calendar.

I think it helps to do only enough to be useful and not enough to be a productivity sink. I keep a general purpose plaintext file called notes and a handful of plaintext files specific to certain topics in ~/documents and that's it.

I like to separate notes from journaling for precisely this reason. I have hundreds of notes in Evernote that I will never see again. They're invisible, as light on me as a feather. Yet they're also searchable, so they're available in seconds if I ever need them.

I have system of using "top" tags to define my working view for a project. Say I'm working on project Foo. At any one time I'll have about half a dozen notes tagged "foo-top." I can take any note from my past and bring it front and center by tagging it "foo-top" and then delete the tag when I want the note to disappear again. Say, for example, I want to see if CouchDB will be useful for Foo. I used CouchDB for a personal project several years ago, so I can search for my note of CouchDB concepts and commands, tag it "foo-top", and then remove the tag if I decide it won't be useful. It's a beautiful way of carrying around a lot of baggage without feeling the weight. It's nice that if I want, I can write down notes and thoughts about something without worrying that I'll clutter up my journal and make it unreadable, or worrying that I'm mixing up the wheat and the chaff. It's not like I spend a bunch of time rummaging through a bunch of junk to find what I want, forcing me to think carefully about what I record. I can record anything that seems like it might be useful later.

A journal would be nice to have, too, though. One note in each project serves as a journal of sorts, in the form of a quick summary of what I've done each day and a quick summary of what I expect to accomplish next. (For work, I find it more convenient to keep a single note for this instead of breaking it out by project.) Evernote isn't great for keeping chronological notes. I only use it because I haven't seen an alternative that is compelling enough to make up for the convenience of using just one program.

One thing I really wish for is a program that could automatically present me with a diary of sorts based on my note-taking. Versioning would be nice, too, so I could see how my notes evolve over time.

Nice. I’m going to think about using ad hoc tags like this to tame my monolithic orgmode hierarchy.

Is there not an API in Evernote to query the notes? Seems like getting the last few weeks’ worth, sorting, and dumping to html or pdf would go pretty far for your diary use case.

I also used to keep tons of notes, references, cheat sheets and bookmarks to various topics around. I found the success rate of finding something there vs google was quite low and things quickly became obsolete. Not only did the topics quickly become irrelevant (I would never go back to CVS or SVN when i only use GIT today so why should i keep my old CVS-cheetsheat around, it's just dead weight and waste of time to organize it) but even for up to date technologies the landscape quickly changes, especially in the javascript world. If i re-google something vs read a note i wrote down 3 years ago i might hit an article teaching me a new better way to do something instead of being stuck in my old bubble.

I'm doing something similar. I prefer pen and paper. For someone reason digital notebooks don't have the same effect on me as physical notebooks.

I read my notes every now and then. But what the notebook does mostly is make me focus and concentrate on my goals and remind me what's important. As the parent said, a notebook enhances your long term memory. You re-iterate lessons learned/forgotten. It's not a bookmarking tool.

I just replied to the parent agreeing with their method, because I do something more or less the same, but I also try and keep a balance between this and what you just described.

The importance of the 'reset' has helped me a lot too, and calling a lot of recorded things 'baggage' is very true. If everything I had recorded was wiped would I be disappointed? Definitely! But life would go on. :) I'd re-discover things, my tastes and personality would change so those recorded things aren't relevant, etc.

A shudder went through me when I read the parent post you replied to. Based on my personality that wouldn't work for me, and over time I've had to learn to better understand and work better with people that work that way. I've had people comment on me as sloppy, uninterested etc. when they make the observation I'm not a detailed note-taker which is quite frustrating.

I've mentored enough colleagues that I've come across those who take extremely detailed notes, and are successful, and a fair number who do this and don't find success in their work. When I try to find ways to get them to question their approach they are often resistant to changing because the have an ingrained belief that detailed note-taking is of fundamental importance.

I would bet those who are successful have some pretty good reasons for taking notes, while those who are not do it as an end until itself (e.g. "because that's what successful people do")

Which makes me think there is something not so obvious that accompanies effective note taking.

For me, it's when I've expended some effort to gain a new piece of knowledge. I'll have to redo the (debugging process/google trail/staring into space thinking real hard) from scratch next time I do it, because it's too intricate to have memorized it.

Taking notes about routine everyday stuff is boring and worse than useless, because the notes are full of duplicated information that makes searching slower. I imagine the people who take notes for it's own sake are basically listing everything that they do, whether they gained any new insight or not.

One insight that I've come across is the idea that "writing is just thinking on paper". Detail isn't necessarily valuable when it comes to thinking -- it can add noise to the crucial signal. I think the same is true of notes.

I spent my entire education and most of my software career taking few notes, and they did the job well enough. Despite my shift to taking a lot more for various reasons, I agree that there is no moral or strategic value to taking nice notes just for the sake of having done so.

I think that's a really valuable mental tool. Sometimes past baggage is a hindrance to current goals.

As part of treating my notes as a code project, I even keep them version controlled, which leaves me a little more free to just delete things or "refactor" stuff. A lot of the value I get is going back through things and synthesizing them into clearer and more useful notes. TODOs in particular are dangerous -- I try to treat files of that nature as extensions of my long term memory, rather than a curriculum which I feel obligated to follow.

That being said, there is an element of this project where I feel like a am building a piece of "my life's work". I've built a number of software projects, and part of building them over time and organizing them leaves them in a state where I am proud to have built them -- I can point out a piece of the system, and understand why it works that way, and remember the choices that led to its current state. At one point, I realized that I had no such project for my life, and it was a little weird that I had so clearly documented software systems that were hardly used, whereas my life and action and ideas and knowledge were, for the most part, just in my head. So in a way it's more than the practicality of having notes, although in the practice of it I have found it to be practical. It's a way of adding meaning to the course of my life -- now the ten minutes I spent reading an article can also become a gift to my future self due to the one choice quote I grab from it.

It isn't about having the artifact, but about the reflective activity of creating the artifact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com