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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

My deep dark secret is that I never take notes. Not for lack of trying, I just don't know how to do it. I never did it at school, never did it at work, never did it outside of work. I'm in my mid-thirties now, I just gave up on the concept.

Every time I see a post on HN about how somebody manages to organize their lives around a personal wiki or org-mode or whatever I get a bit jealous.

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Same, but I never tried. Back in school we were encouraged to take notes during lectures, but I found that if I was focused on note taking them I wouldn't take in any of what was presented to me, and my notes would be useless. No note taking software even comes close to how my brain works either. Of the few notes I've actually taken I've never gone back to read them again. Sure, I will forget stuff, but I feel like in most instances I can just go back and relearn them faster than the time I would have wasted on taking notes, categorizing them and making them searchable.

Yeah, I take lots of notes (https://dercuano.github.io/ for example), but I can't take notes during lectures. I figure the people who are taking notes during the lecture must be a lot smarter than I am, because if I try to take notes during the lecture, writing distracts me and I lose the thread of the lecture.

Same for me. I never took notes in classes. It interferes with listening. It's usually quite unnecessary, since the information is in the textbook, or other readily accessible references.

The one time this policy was challenging was for a numerical analysis course I took where there was no textbook. So I had to go off to the library to find books that covered the topics discussed (this was back before the internet). This actually teaches you more than taking notes.

FWIW, like everything else in life, you only learn how to do something, and get good at doing something, by doing that something. You say you tried, but then follow up with "I never did it at X".

Take notes. Fuck it up. Figure out why your attempt wasn't useful to you. Take more notes. Rinse, repeat, and you too can eventually take notes that are valuable to you.

EDIT: One thing I forgot - taking and reviewing notes takes time. Dedicate time to both steps, and to identifying how to improve.

I'm on the same boat, I managed to work with GTD method on trello for a bit, but I gave up.

Thing is, after all these years, I actually think I don't need to take notes, that's why my mind doesn't feel like it's worth it in the end to organize everything into notes, when I rarely forgot about something.

I just use one physical calendar at home, and flags in outlook at work, and I'm fine.

Every time I set something up I later forget to actually use it when I get the info that should be saved.

One thing I'm able to successfully track are meetings and appointments in google calendar.

Work stuff is usually tracked on jira/github issues, and when I see the issue I usually remember all the context that was established when creating the issue - if it was internal, so I have no problems there.

Me too, I can't imagine the discipline, skill and time it takes to be organized like that (or at all tbh).

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