Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I don't get people who keep refining their "notes" (They go from a personal wiki to OrgMode to whatever it is the next year). What I don't get is what they make notes OF.

I get that people might need to keep a list of things to buy the next time they go grocery shopping. But what is it that makes some aggregate page after page of notes week after week? Is it both private and professional notes? Is it more a ritual of organizing thoughts than creating a lasting document? If so then I can understand it. Some people don't think clearly until they write. But are there people who also revisit these notes?

The topic of "notes" keeps popping up on HN periodically and I feel like I'm of a different species when I don't get what (after 20 years of running a family and software career) I ever missed to take a note of because I made none!

I have a TODO list and notes about Linux and Bash and similar stuff, which act like personal knowledge bases. :p I also keep very detailed work notes for whatever task I'm doing that I'd be lost without. But they're all just TXT files I have aliased so I can open them in an editor with a shortcut command. I don't understand the need to get fancier than TXT.

I initially starting writing ideas down because I kept forgetting them, but then I found I was able to improve/add to those ideas, instead of coming up with the same forgotten idea over and over.

Most of the time I just add another entry, instead of cleaning up the original one, so it's a bit of a mess. But if necessary, I can scan through them, keeping the good ones and deleting the rest.

The majority of my notes are my journal entries and my thoughts. I treat it as sort of a digital "time capsule". I do have other kinds of notes, but I weed them out when they're no longer wanted. For fun, I like making the digital equivalent of scrapbooks (documents with photos and text arranged in a creative way) on subjects that interest me.

Mine are not super organised (folders in Notability), but to answer your question:

- Meeting notes

- Daily journal with related doodles

- Project ideas and UI sketches

- Research notes for new articles

Meeting notes are the most valuable, because I wouldn't remember what we talked about a day later.

Notes are a good way to dump an idea and revisit it later, because there's always a million things going on in my life and I can't keep it all in RAM.

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