I don’t think there’s a correct answer here. Whatever floats your boat. Do you want to scribble things by hand into a physical notebook? Great! Want to use Notepad on Windows for .txt? Or create a .docx using Word?

Don’t follow trends and seek the “next best way to hack your productivity”. Most of those things are snake oil and a waste of time. Just use whatever you have available and build a process yourself. That’s what most people have done that are successful in applying this. They just use the tool they are comfortable with, and don’t over engineer for the sake of it

I like the digital note-taking tools, Evernote and Onenote - actually, used to use Evernote, but it started slowing down after my notebooks became too large, so switched to Onenote.

And eventhough Onenote is MS product and Evernote was the original that OneNote copied off of, OneNote is a better engineered piece of software (I have tons of notes and a few of them very large documents), and Onenote rarely has problems.

Depending on the task the most effective way I found sometimes is a hand-written paper stuck on a wall.

Why so? It is always in front of you, it reminds you what you need to do and does not get out of sight, which helps keep the focus.

When you bury it or set it somewhere else it is very easy to bury it.

Switched to Apple Notes recently. Used to use org mode, but the apps on iOS ... just bad.

But, I use different things for different situations.

For work, I use text files in a "howto/" subdirectory of a main repo.

Txt files are hard to beat

I use Apple Reminders