In the mean time the note taking apps help with:

Working memory - a page can hold far more information than I can retain in my working memory. Having a bunch of information helps me build a working model without having to retain all the information while I'm building. Spot patterns - by organising information it's easier to spot patterns.

Long term memory - your brain just isn't very good at retaining information long term. Maybe you have a company wide wiki but the act of building your own notes is enough to form some connections in your brain so that when you come back you have far greater familiarity and insight associated with the information.

But most of it is selling that next productivity upgrade that we communally all seem to obsess over here. People sharing their note graphs is the same as the guy on youtube with a sixpack promising a new and revolutionary 5 minute ab routine.

And while the 5 minute ab routine certainly won't harm you, that body was built from months of discipline and required a full fitness routine, as well as careful calorie counting.

Just like actual productive note taking and creative thinking is about spending time with your notes every day, and not the software.

This is very cynical reasoning. I’m not sure what this passage means.

For example, ‘productive note taking’ is a fraught statement to begin with, and the passage ends with the suggestion we’re wasting time—my guess.

I’m not making this minor point to have an argument, rather, to highlight a curious idea. Learning is arduous and a mixed bag. The cynical take down, or the undercutting joke is a bit of a psychological trick to snap us out of difficult decisions for spending too much time practicing and not enough time actually doing. Some might say whatever sport you make of learning, in the end it’s just ‘work’ … and doing nothing is also good use if our time for mental health.

So THEN, all this focus on note taking and learning how to learn is maddening and seems wasteful—not working and earning, not learning more of what employers pay money to do, and not just using the time to do nothing and be healthy. So the cynical argument (I’m starting to think this also could be a ‘joke’; XKCD) is to say all these note taking efforts are simply money making schemes.

Maybe some are. And, my personal take, maybe the note taking problem is just an interesting language/computer/information problem at _human_ scale.

True, this is the "tool fetish" that is associated to any activity, for example obsessing over sneakers when the objective is the routine job (and maybe, not jogging at all); the same principle applies to notes taking.

One could even extend it to being "excessively interested" in programming languages, when the objective is actually building products.

This is the key thing, I think, and it's why most methodologically-heavy notes apps fall by the wayside, because they get in the way.

*Slight plug. I built a side project that tries to get at the early stage of the "working memory" part. I do a lot of short-term remembering during the day - taking calls, reading docs, or flipping between tabs. I made this chrome extension that adds notepad in your tab, so you can toggle, make scratch notes, toggle off, before you commit stuff to your notion/google doc/etc.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jotter/icdbglcdnjo...

As for vocab, for example I would go for a walk in the park and create memorable mnemonics for the vocab words I saw and the park itself would be a memory palace. Later when I wanted to say the word "vending machine" I would pull the Heisig mnemonics for the vending machine I saw in the park and recreate the word. Today when I'm speaking Japanese I don't have to think about about mnemonics unless I've forgotten a word, then I kind of "look it up" in my memory palace.

The thing about the memory palace method is that it's not really fast recall, it's more like keeping a notebook in your brain until it has been adjusted to your working memory.

But for arbitrary random lookups (by some associative key), does it also work?

That's also what note taking software is about, to easily search through the notes, and find related notes. I'm not sure if such interlinks are supported well by memory palaces.

I'm afraid this won't work with Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia :(

Just as a quick exercise, try to count the number of windows in your house, with your eyes closed. Even if you have Aphantasia, you can probably still do it, even if you don't see the windows themselves in your mind's eye.

(Oh you can't query your notes for todos and have the result parsed into an agenda? How I moved from Zim to Logseq and back to Orgmode in an afternoon and became 20.6% more productive.)

Even if I don't share it with anyone it helps me figure stuff out. I don't read back 90% of what I write, the writing itself is what provides most value to me. Although it can be handy to dig into the archives to understand my thinking of months back.

Tooling wise; I like handwriting, as I can draw arrows and quick sketches. I used to always carry an A5 notebook around, now I use an iPad with Apple Pencil (recently upgraded to the new mini which is perfect A5'ish size).

Apps I use on the iPad are; GoodNotes for actual notes and Concepts for more visual sketching and such.

If I need to take notes that I need to share I generally use https://nota.md which is imo by far the best markdown note taking experience available. Think of it as a markdown editor with code editor features (e.g. multi cursor). It also works with normal markdown files so no lock in.

When on my phone I use the Notes app on.

Yes, lots of tools, but I find different tools are best for different things. It does means everything is spread around, but it works for me, it's sort of an organized chaos, I can find stuff when I need to.

I think the joy comes from the idea of maintaining all information, of "getting your shit together" in a way. I think most humans truly enjoy collecting and organizing things. Notes, similarly to todos, bookmarks, lists etc are just tools to scratch that itch, the more the better!

If you ever decided you want to go full digital, I highly recommend checking out the tablets from https://remarkable.com/. My wife has the same approach to handwritten notes and loves it! I can confirm that when writing on the reMarkable 2 tablet, you can forget that it is not pen and paper. I particularly enjoy being able to take notes on it in the margins when reading a book...

The main reason I went for the iPad mini was the size (and apps maybe). Before I had an iPad Air 10.5 inch, and it was just too big for my use, it made it inconvenient.

I'm still debating getting one anyway. It has that "coolness factor", and I want it haha.

If they ever produce a smaller version I am pretty sure I can not resist.

The main differentiator between the RM and other tablets (such as iPad), besides the excellent "write on e-ink" interface, is that the RM device is very committed to a minimalistic approach. There are lots of "features" that would be trivial for them to implement (notifications, email, messaging, socials, etc) that they have deliberately chosen not to support in the official software. Instead, the RM is focused on only providing the cleanest approach to reading and note taking. This approach is perfect for some people's desires and use cases, but not for everyone...

But for you, it might be perfect

Can also recommend an iPad btw. Besides being an excellent note taking device it does all sorts of other cool stuff.

(If for note taking/drawing; I suggest get one that supports Apple Pencil 2, it's a big improvement.)

Also what I missed in Obsidian when I tried it. I will also simply not use all of its fancy features, not to say they aren't useful, just that I'm not that organized haha.

I also really like how Nota looks; neutral, under styled, minimal. This is oddly important to me haha.

Nothing against Obsidian though, it seems to really excel in its purpose of knowledge base building.

I make specific exceptions (especially for things that may be of use to others) but I become too addicted to the act of collating and organising.

Gmail with it's "search don't sort" was an eye opener back in the day. I stopped filing emails and realised with a decent search, I saved so much time.

- Stuff that has a lot of details that rarely change (all my insurance policies, what they cover, the policy numbers etc.

- Details that are “hot” in my mind right now that I might need in the same detail later (the steps to refill my boiler, the exact type of door handle I bought for my bathroom door when it broke, so I can purchase the same one once my kitchen door handle breaks)

With anything else (like, notes on books I read, notes on work I did) I either:

- Make too detailed notes which take too long - Make too short notes that don’t hold any value - Never feel a need to recall them - Never remember to recall them if a situation arises

Still interesting to read how other do it.

I have a paper notebook that lets me be more present in different scenarios and only capture stuff like actions or critical facts. Likewise key data around policy numbers, cost codes, etc. go into a markdown file.

I used to be a voracious note-and-knowledge capture type between Standard Notes and Obsidian. I'd keep both a daily rolling log of everything I did + cross-ref and expand key items into broader knowledge capture.

It probably has some intangible benefit I didn't pick up on but overall it just felt like a waste of energy compared to letting stuff go, sometimes having to google stuff again, and putting effort into building things and talking to people.

I also started to wonder, what is the value? Documentation, code comments, communication all help to take an idea or understanding from Me -> People. Hoarding notes and digital content for myself really didn't accomplish much other than demanding attention.

- cognitively offload things for later and preserving work in progress; - archive things without processing (like a data lake); - build a corpus of knowledge to both improve my understanding of a subject and have a reference material that I can later look up.

I have spent a significant share of my life organizing my notes in a mnemonic tree and also writing code to improve it's usability but the dividends are starting to pay off.

It's good to have a functional 'external brain' to perform in a digital world that is filled by 'trash'. A decade ago you could find a good answer for 'everything' on Google. Today, besides a few islands of knowledge, you mostly find SEO optimized machine-generated stuff.

That's because the tools to exploit that collection suck. If we had processes generating statistics on your data and organizing them in practical streams of attention, it would be worthwhile to take that extra step in compiling them.

> "search don't sort" ... stopped filing ... with a decent search, I saved so much time.

Similarly, what notes I do keep long term are in a bunch of text files which I can search easily or Google Keep (more the former ATM, Keep I use mostly for short term lists & reminders now).

step 1 is have a bunch of stuff to be able to search (a la google). I hate organizing notes, but jotting down "throw away" notes into Roam in a daily note later serves the purpose of being able to search for, e.g. "#movie" and see all the movies I watched last year

However, often when I actually search for sth in Gmail, I have trouble finding it because it is all unorganized. I only use tags very crudely so that often does not really help me.

I think you're onto something here. There's definitely some magical thinking involved. We all have a hidden genius that could be unlocked - if only we would find a method to put all that mess in our heads together in the right way. We conveniently forget that if 90% of everything is crap[0], then it should apply to our own thoughts too :)

My take is that notes are overrated. Almost everything I write down becomes outdated in as little as a few months. Anything older than 1 year seems ancient and is only useful for entertainment. I have my digital notes going back to 2014. I never look at them.

What's not overrated is note-taking. The result doesn't matter, the act itself does. It's a thinking tool. A way to offload ideas from your head and let it do some actual thinking.

If that rings true to you, then it makes sense to optimize for writing, not organizing or reading. To me that means a simple paper notebook and a gel pen. I haven't yet found anything that can beat paper in writing experience [1].

Might be an ipad or org-mode for you - literally doesn't matter, as long as you use it with pleasure.

As for evergreen content, my rule is that it should be public. That's what blogs are for.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

[1] I wrote a blogpost about my primitive paper journaling system https://tadas.blog/posts/paper-journaling-system/

As with anything, yak shaving can creep into what you do. Certainly I need to stop myself from further refining my Emacs init from time to time. People yak shave by trying lots of different note taking systems, sucked in by shiny promises. It's much easier to start something than to expand and refine what's already there, like deciding to refactor an entire codebase rather than tackle difficult bug fixes and feature requests.

There's also the feeling that we're not good enough, that others are better because we only see the end-product of their organization, not the struggles they went through.

All of us were trained in many disciplines, and in one (or two) disciplines in depth.

It is very easy to wrap your head around the idea that you need training to manipulate numbers, mathematical symbols, etc. We also take for granted the fact that we need prolonged training to understand the history of the Civil War or the Roman Empire or understand the geography of regions.

But nobody notices that there is one thing largely absent in our curricula- self-management. How to think, how to make decisions, how to manage your time, how to make yourself be efficient without driving yourself mad, and so on.

Our brains, our bodies were not evolved for knowledge work. We we hunter-gatherers a few thousand years back. The industrial revolution, and the ones came after the first one did not change our bodies or brain. We need to actively learn how to do knowledge-work and learning efficiently.

And this is not modern. Many accomplished individuals had well-thought-out systems to do work. These are detailed in biographies of the likes of Einstein, Da Vinci, Feynman, etc.

Why this was not the phenomena?

Before, a very small percentage of the population even needed to think about these. Because the sheer number of knowledge workers were very very low. Now, knowledge work has expanded beyond the few with no large scale training program available for everyone.

So, this craze on note-taking is merely a symptom of people seeking to solve modern problems in a structured manner.

This is why the Getting Things Done book or Deep Work book gets a lot of mentions in Hacker News books lists. People want to solve these problems.

Is it likely you have some resources to these details?

Feynman: Biography by James Gleick.

The counter intuitive thing is that these apps are thought of as something that helps with attention disorders. But wanting to "organize life", "track thoughts and ideas", "never forget what you learned", etc, are symptoms, not cures.

It's not a symptom of ADHD. It's one of the coping strategies for people with ADHD who have problems memorising things.

The usual way to track knowledge and tasks is within a project. You come to a road block, do research, overcome, and continue.

But many of those note taking posts talk about personal "wiki" projects and tracking _everything_. I suspect that with ADHD its hard to filter out the important things from background. And based on my observation wth these apps people start organizing and remembering this "background". When background noise is reduced the need for complex apps is no longer there - there are a lot fewer things left that are worth remembering. (exceptions apply, of course)

You're kind of implying that failing memory is unusual/exceptional and that it needs particular attention.

Here's the cold hard truth of memory: your memory isn't as good as you think it is. No one's memory is as good as they think it is. And nothing you remember comes back out of your memory quite the way it went in.

Writing good, complete notes that could be read by someone else (complete sentences) helps you design the prompts for your future recall of something complicated. Because one day you'll be that someone else.

When I write code, I try to write code and comments that a version of me that is ten years older and persistently two hours short of sleep will be able to cope with at 10pm. My tireder, older self. Because one day he'll have to read it, understand it, and change it.

I try to write notes the same way!

That might be your personal experience/bias speaking.

For many creative endeavours there's not a "single project" where you do research, finish, wrap up and that's it. You need to track lots of pieces of information across many projects, domains, and across time.

There's really only one thing you gotta know about note-taking: you either optimize for fast writing or for fast information retrieval. Since I rarely read my notes, I optimize for fast dumping them.

All apps and organizational schemes like Zettelkasten try to optimize the information retrieval aspect, which imho, is probably not that important for many people.

Why do you feel the need to "structure thoughts" and "get it out of your system"?

Asking as a way to point out that feeling the need to do it is not a forgone conclusion.

Well, because the alternative is for your thoughts to be unstructured. Lots of people live their lives that way: reminiscing about that time they got so drunk or really told that guy off, repeating funny lines they heard on some TV series, rehearsing ethnic or religious stereotypes, complaining about the neighbors' loud music, trying to get laid, and heating up some hamburgers at dinnertime. Lots of people are content to be consumers and to repeat what they've heard. Then they die.

But it doesn't have to be that way. You can structure your thoughts. You can be a creator, not just a consumer, and to a significant extent you can direct your life to a goal rather than simply floating at random. Notetaking is helpful for doing that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098854

I give you a simple example. If you play Wordle and you stop to think about your next guess, you can make all the possible permutations in your brain. This is possible with the downside that you might start to think in loops and consider the same word-pattern over and over again.

Or you write them down and solve the next guess by doing all permutations on paper (or a text editor).

Note-taking is somewhat similar. Structuring thoughts for me means that I write them down to avoid looping around the same thing all the time. I get it out of my system, because my brain isn't stuck in the same loop. Note-taking helps to speed up the passive brain processing task in some cases. Not always. Not for everything.

Unless one has extraordinary mnemonic capabilities, note taking is a way to structure and store concepts.

Even if this wasn't the case, personal notes are still a more efficient/effective way than googling, for two reasons: 1. on the notes, one puts the processed version of a concept, so that it's safer/more stable/improved/cleaner/adapted etc. 2. personal notes follow the mind of who writes them, so the concepts are faster to find.

It's the inverse.

Note-taking might be a symptom of OCD or autism disorders (that can make people compulsively take notes or enjoying collecting information in itself), but they are cures (or, rather, coping strategies) for ADHD.

ADHD is not manifested as "tendency to take notes" for note-taking to be a symptom.

It's manifested as tendency to be disorganized, to have trouble tracking thoughts, forgetting, etc - which makes note-taking a way to manage symptoms.

It's looks like you fell for the "correlation equals causation" fallacy, not in a study, but in a simple real life observation that should have been trivial to see the right casual direction!

My day can be ruined by positive and negative ruminations. Writing stuff down really helps me let go of them.

1) a symptom of being a freelancer with multiple clients who revisits projects sometimes a decade after doing them. It is the only way to proceed -- even if you were to assert that persistent "documentation" of a project is distinct from "notes" about it, those notes are still essential.

2) a route towards making that documentation; it's easier to assemble documentation from things you've noted than to start with a blank page.

3) a way to know, deeply, what it is I actually think about something. Not just what I think right now in that moment, but why. What facts I took into account; what facts I disregarded, why I disregarded them, and why I might need to revisit that next time.

If I really care about the meetings I attended being useful (not often), I will take notes on what is discussed and decided.

I also need to take notes to raise the important things above the useless things that I remember.

Now that my brain operates more closely to my neurotypical peers, I've found myself not needing to take constant notes and review my day in order to remember things.

Clover: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/clover

Athens: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/athens-research

Dendron: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/dendron

Heptabase: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/heptabase

My current favourite tool is the whiteboard feature of Diagrams.net (https://sketch.diagrams.net/). It is similar to the philosophy of Heptabase, which is centred around organizing notes and images with a whiteboard. But I like the openness and portability of Diagrams.net (Although I'm a big fan of the Heptabase team and product!).

I organize my notes in an outline/mind-map style similar to Amazing Marvin (https://amazingmarvin.com/) left to right connection is parent to child while top to down connection is older sibling to younger sibling.

Clearly, it is not the lack of great ideas that is holding me back...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist

[2] https://superlist.com/

There really isn't anything more to this, people enjoy being productive and meaningful in their lives, and it is one of the fundamental drives of the human condition.

I'm reminded of a response to another thread on HN a few weeks back about organizing physical documents. Many commenters had very sophisticated processes with scanning, OCR, indexing etc but there was one commenter who organized their documents as a stack of paper, divided by year. The use case for documents might be a bit different because the number of times you're likely to need a document is probably quite different the number of times you will benefit from reading a note.

A more concise reframing of the above: for those who have adopted a disciplined approach to note taking (geared towards retrieval and linking) do you get enough value from the disciplined approach to encourage us unstructured notes-everywhere to invest the effort of adopting a better process?

1. Someone calls me with a project. I take notes about what they need.

2. I look at my notes to figure out what to research. '

3. As I do the research, I take notes about the results

4. I look at my notes to draft an e-mail or memo about the research

5. I look back at my notes from the call to make sure I got what they wanted

Another task I often have is having a call with someone (sometimes a very long call) and then writing an e-mail about it:

1. Take notes on the call

2. Draft e-mail based on notes

3. Review notes to make sure the e-mail encompasses everything

I definitely refer to old notes less. But here are some examples where I constantly refer back:

1. I have a note with the terminal command to strip Mac OS system files from .zip files. I refer back to that a lot.

2. I have notes about my wife's favorite takeout orders that I check before I put the orders in.

3. I have a long note called "Python Dev Stuff" that describes how to set up my Python environment, that I look at whenever I get a new laptop or do a major OS update.

4. I have a "blog post ideas" note where I write down ideas for blog posts. When I want to do a post and can't think of what to write about, I look at that note.

I regularly refer back to procedural notes (I'm a contractor with multiple projects on infrequent maintenance for years), almost never refer to thought processing notes, and rarely refer to non-code documentation.

However, while my rate of reference to procedural or documentation notes is fairly low, the value I get from that reference tends to be very high - for instance, "how did I solve that problem with the database that took me an entire day to resolve, because online docs/examples were sparse?" or "my client is asking why feature A was implemented in such a silly way; it's because they insisted it be that way, five years ago". For me I think the trade-off of regular note-taking is worth it.

I suppose I could delete my thought processing notes after I've used them, but they're already archived and don't clutter my note space, so there's not that much point.

For arbitrary links and bookmarks, probably quite low, so I rarely bother with that sort of noting (never managed to make pinboard an essential part of my life).

If I am specifically researching something deeply, like a personal project, I am much more likely to go back to a link I've noted, because I've usually gone to the trouble to describe that link in a searchable way.

For work-related notes, close to always. I _start_ by reopening the note relevant to the job (Apple Notes search is so fast this is easy), and I modify/append to it as I go along; those notes are "workbooks" effectively and they are essential to my process now.

Second is writing my current thought processes as I'm working on stuff, once a task is complete these are rarely if ever references again but they're very handy for if you're working on something, get interrupted and need to get back on task.

I use Roam Research for both.

I think for people who heavily link and organise notes by subject, they're more about getting back within a specific context area and getting the brain firing on that context area than necessarily finding specific answers.

Maybe I need notes of the notes I took.

https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/

For me the notes are my long term memory and all I have to actually remember is what I’m currently working on. They are organized for easy retrieval (hierarchical, topical and searchable), and I do regular refactoring on my notes to improve retrievability and archive outdated material.

I think the "best process" is driven by goals — my husband gets by just using notepad and plaintext files, because he and I have very different goals with our notes. He's a software developer, and I'm a nerdy scifi author.

As long as his code is documented clearly, he mostly doesn't need a system more complicated than some .txt files and browser history search. Me? I've got way too much going on, and I need to be able to follow reference chains so I can figure out what the heck I was thinking six months ago when I wrote the thing I'm trying to publish.

However, I love flipping through old notebooks. They're a personal diary made of schematics, sketches, lists and recipes.

I'm now a bit more conscious about dating each page, because I combine those with other data to form a personal timeline [0].

None of this is about productivity. It's closer to an artistic hobby like calligraphy.

[0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline

I'm a fan of this approach to users owning their data: it enables things that are interesting and valuable for the user, rather than making it something that necessarily requires an audience.

I hadn't previously considered incorporating notes into a personal archive as I often see them as being of a fundamentally different class to journaling, but I'm starting to reconsider my biases in that regard.

There is also enormous inefficiency caused by covering the same ground over and over again, but it happens quite frequently as nothing survives from one discussion to the next. In addition, lots of decisions get made in side Slack channels.

There are some massive gains here to be had if this can be solved.

Obviously there’s a middle ground between the above and the “amnesia” that many orgs seem to suffer from, but digging into the actual causes of the amnesia and confusion often reveals it’s not due to missing tools (off either the software or organizational variety)

Individuals sometimes take notes to collect random ideas. That's fine. I do that too. No one other than myself could ever make sense of my notes though, and sometimes not even I can.

When organisations take notes in prose form, it is unlikely that anyone will ever have time to read them in order the extract the parts relevent for a particular task. There are of course exceptions. Someone will surely read the FOMC minutes.

There has to be a deliberate process of modeling and collecting structured data so it can be queried and transformed into something that facilitates specific decisions. At that point, it's no longer called note taking.

In my view, it is this sort of ad hoc data modeling that is too inefficient right now. It's something I'm on working on, but I can't claim to have found any silver bullets yet.

This is one of those aspirational things that should exist, like automated testing. In practice, many places are just reliant on people knowing stuff.

- Note-taking (only by hand, mind you!) helps with learning [1], and thus it's recommended by many specialists. Unfortunately, "note-taking" vs "keyboard typing" is quite often lost in context for those situations

- It adheres to kinesthetic memory. Some people need to have physical activity to remember better

- It might be a coping mechanism for ADHD - those can include doodles, colorful tags, etc.

- It scratches the "collector" itch for some (data hoarding is a thing)

- It allows for externalization mechanism (ever had this feeling that you won't be able to get back from somewhere after driving there with GPS? - similar thing but with notes)

But in the end, it's relatable since almost every person with internet access had to take notes at some point in their life, and - as you mentioned - that's dopamine, so a fun thing to check out to something that relates to almost everyone.

As for me, personally, I use the act of writing itself, as I never revisit the notes. A long time ago I caused quite a stir in my school when I went for concept maps instead of having full-text notes (which were required at the time).

[1]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0070... (Sidenote: there are more studies about it as it's quite researched subject)

People often take a shot at this problem, which makes for the monthly or bimonthly thread on HN, but I think there's still a lot of room for innovation.

1. The gap between how many things human brain can reliably and easily keep in mind (bringing up every time it is importantly relevant) and how many things do we have (for optimal performance, suboptimal performance means failures and stress) to keep in mind today is mindboggingly huge.

I even believe an average person would be orders of magnitude the Einstein (or whoever you like better) genius if they could simultaneously recall and relate everything they ever learnt (let alone read/heard/seen).

2. Note-taking software can potentially help a lot. Some note-taking apps and some methodologies help some people in some extent.

3. The actual current capability and UX of existing note-taking apps is miles away from perfect (let alone fitting everyone). This means there is a lot of potential to explore.

4. Substantial activity in 3. has been taking place during the pandemic.

5. All the above ideas have became more visible.

6. People get more interested.

Bonus: the very act of writing a fact down (let alone structuring them) itself contributes to learning it.

You can certainly store some for future use, but when people get excited about fancy systems it's probably a sign that they should cut down their information input, rather than looking for fancier offloading tools.

It's analogous to a scarcity/abundance mindset. The abundance mindset realizes that all the information will still be out there when you need it, so there's no need to hoard. (Information that's specific to yourself is still worth recording.)

In practice effort is probably much more important than software features, but we blame the software we've tried instead of our own lack of effort at making good notes, and keep looking for that hypothetical perfect tool.

Personally I don't even put in enough effort to install these tools, but I look at articles about them anyway, and futilely wish I had better access to my information.

There's no open source standard. No LibreOffice or Krita of notetaking.

They all only have a small subset of features one might want.

And yet they are critical infrastructure for people's entire life. It's a pretty exciting space.

For those who just want a generic and easy to use app like OneNote, they’re not going to find it in Obsidian.

That's not an accurate statement. Obsidian can literally be as simple as one wants it to be, or as sophisticated in virtually any direction. The culty "Zettelkasten" emphasis is entirely coming from the community and can be totally ignored (as I do).

So for me as a long-time Mac user (and rather less long-time iPhone/iPad user), the realistic benchmark is Apple Notes: it is simplistic, fast, well-integrated and ubiquitous. It has just enough features to be useful and not enough features to be opinionated.

Absent the iPhone side of things, I'd likely use Simplenote.

I hope, at some point, something akin to another enhanced subset of Markdown will become the de-facto standard.

There's UTF-8 and JPEG.

It’s a hard problem to solve and that leads to many people “having a go” at it.

It’s professional pride.

Here is some of what I am personally looking for:

- a wysiwyg rich text interface, with embedding capabilities, with an optional markdown interface and (closest) representation

- integrated web clipper a la Evernote

- multidimensional categorization (i.e. not a single hierarchy of notebooks) that links to universal categories

- AI-supported automatic summaries and categorization

- Optionally encrypted when stored centrally, with finegrained visibility options.

- Optionally savable locally only, encrypted or not-encrypted

- Datahandling and coding capabilities, a la ObservableHQ/Jupyter/Datasette

- Linkable in various ways to other notes, my own or others

- and more!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've stopped trying to get it _right_ and I just focus on actually doing it.

Simplenote, Things and Apple Notes get the closest to doing what I need; I've used only the latter for several years now (despite the egregious alternate lowercase A and all the yellow).

My guess is that we all think that the right application can save us from the failings of (or failure to consult) our notes, when the truth is that it's note-taking discipline that wins the day, not functionality.

The main thing I took from all of my searches through the world of notes apps is that if you don't write almost all your notes (and especially your to-do actions) as complete sentences, you're failing right out of the gate, no matter what app you write in.

What's curious to me is how many note takers don't also talk about mind maps and concept maps, although they are talked about often on HN. I've developed my own ad hoc mind map, concept map and note taking system and one of my retirement projects is to tie it all together into a consistent application.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=concept+map

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_map

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mind+map

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map

Bonus: Note taking with VR and AR apps

https://www.google.com/search?q=virtual+reality+note+taking

https://www.google.com/search?q=virtual+reality+mind+map

https://www.google.com/search?q=virtual+reality+concept+map

i.e. I don't want to try to remember all the peculiarities of a system I implemented or installed or encountered during my life and get stressed about it. So, I write it all down with pointers on the web, or with all the documents I can find and, store it somewhere like Evernote in the relevant notebook with correct tags. When I need to re-use that information I just open the note and look up what I need.

I also take notes while learning something which starts as a simple and single entry point to the all knowledge and resources around it, allowing me to resume or improve much faster with less effort.

OTOH, if I'm going to transfer responsibilities, I make a copy of the notes and hand it over. Rarely any questions come after that, if any.

Lastly, organized knowledge allows me to see what I know and where can I go from there. I find this property immensely useful over the years.

* We operate on gigantic sets of data (not from CS perspective, average human consumes more data in 10 years than avg man in his lifetime only few decades ago)

* Reasoning about data is not easy, and storing what matters is crucial in being effective worker/citizen/parent/etc.

* Promo of zettelkasten

* Good money too? Making note-taking app is not as difficult as coming up with novel startup and takes less time and money

* Internet figures promoting it (David Perell)

* Feels like we've done something without too much effort (motion vs action by James Clear - https://jamesclear.com/taking-action)

* This is the way to create articles and papers - most of the tech are not writers and their writings had happened naturally and by some impulse/itch. To repeat that we cannot rely on these forces all the time

* You can make your own personal wiki which can be the new blog, feels sexy for tech (whereas other people are doing that by cultivating their ig/fb profiles)

How I experience those notes in Temin is different to other software, but my methodology is basically unchanged:

- Even if it's just text (I doodle/sketch a lot) I actively consider using a pen before a keyboard.

- If it's something external I'm trying to remember/integrate I experience it (listen/read/watch/do etc), then take notes.

I think some of the allure of note-taking software comes down to the idea it can eat your vegetables for you when it comes to methodology. It can't. Software can add value to your notes via how experience/relate/link/query etc them, but if you put garbage in, you will get garbage out.

- I gradually forget a skill if I don't practice, but dumping that knowledge in a structured form can help me recall it quickly if I need it in the future.

- Every note program/app that I've used, I've found it wanting in some way.

The last point is why I keep changing ways. My ideal note application would be hierarchical, multimedia, encrypted, cross-platform (desktop/mobile), and usable if offline. There are many note apps that fulfill some criteria, but not all. My favorite UX is with CherryTree, but it's desktop-only. The best I have used is Joplin, but it's not truly hierarchical or locally encrypted.

I've noticed if I really care about and love a subject I don't need to take notes. Those things are easy to remember and revisited often.

One of the salient points made in the book is the idea that externalising thought is:

1. Helps us with our internal thinking 2. Is difficult to do

Personally as a user of Obsidian, i'm here for it. I want to take notes, they help me in numerous ways and i'm interested in the structure and approach in which I take notes.

I'd draw a parallel between note taking systems and efficiency systems in the workplace. It's good to apportion sometime to getting better at stuff and I feel often there's a discourse on what the proportion should be.

I take notes to remember TODOs, to draft communication, to write random crap I want to come back to. Sometimes I don't even come back to it, but somehow writing it down still helps.

I started using Obsidian which has been nice, but feels a bit clunky in a lot of ways on Windows...I'm hoping to find something more lightweight.

However when I think about it this may be why notepad still works for me, it doesn't become overwhelming. I've tried to use quite a few systems over the years and the trajectory is always the same - it starts great but the unresolved tasks accumulate until the whole thing seems inefficient or pointless or just overwhelming.

In a round about Notepad along with occasional data loss solves that problem for me :D

We'll see if I stick with it for more than a few days.

> The extended mind model suggests that cognition is larger than the body of the subject. According to such a model, the boundaries of cognitive processes are not always inside the skin. "Minds are composed of tools for thinking" (Dennett 2000,[23] p. 21). According to Andy Clark, "cognition leaks out into body and world". The mind then is no longer inside the skull, but it is extended to comprehend whatever tools are useful (ranging from notepad and pencils up to smartphones and USB memories). This, in a nutshell, is the model of the extended mind.

Note taking is my 'other brain' that I use to get things done. I casually glance at past notes, and am often shocked how much progress I've made all due to these notes. I don't get everything done, but that's not the point. The point is to get thoughts out of your system and into notes so you can organize your life better.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exobrain

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalism

I use Google Keep at work on my work phone, tablet, and laptop and I love it. Simple to use, clean UI, I can attach photos, I can add sketches, and color and label each note. It's completely replaced my Engineering Log Books.

In my personal life I've been trying to go Google free for years even though I love Android. I've been using NextCloud for my files and notes for a few years but I've found the Notes app too basic. I can't attach images. It has markdown support but not much else.

So, last Summer I decided to look for a good note taking app for Android. Instead of figuring out my needs first, I just dove in and downloaded a whack of them and tried them out.

I've tried 80 Android apps and counting!

As I used the apps, I kept finding the different ways people designed their apps, what functions they included and became amazed at the creativity and interesting approaches (not all good). With each app my wants started diverging from what I thought I needed. I found myself wanting checklists, labels, colors, audio recording, and text highlighting to name a few.

As I shared my notes with the Developers, it started conversations with a couple of them.

If you share this passion, join my ride: https://www.noteapps.ca

My thoughts on this is as tools for thought, there can never be a one size fits all solution for the reason that there are many thinking styles and personalities. Todo lists, project planning and time tracking, programming languages, note taking apps, UI frameworks, game engines all fit the pattern of tools meant to organize complex mental processes and artifacts and where everyone settles for what best matches them though never fully satisfied. Meanwhile those who can find the time and ability to make something better suited to their taste do so, also bringing something to those most aligned to their tastes.

> Ask HN: Why the Obsession with Note Taking?

Is this some sort of social experiment? (I shall not be suc-- oh, damn!)

For me it's notes but more the closely related to-dos, and I'm always interested because it's something I want to be better at doing (from a very low starting point of almost never having anything up to date written down) but never quite manage or find myself happy with methods/apps/sites I can find.

A while ago I decided/realised my personal preference would be GitHub issues, trouble is I need them to do two things:

1. Implement 'projects' in the mobile app - https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/5609

2. Option to auto-add all my repos to a project - https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/6258

then I'll be happy, shall stop obsessing over it, and stop upvoting and participating in these threads. /s

- Having a trace of what I've learned that I can go back to. I consume loads of content (books, articles, etc...) and want to be able to use their insights in my future discoveries and general creative process. Being able to go through my ideas in my notes helps with this.

- that point links back to the idea of optimizing for discovery. I find that I can find much better ideas when I have a nuanced perspective and can oppose different content, so having an organized knowledge base allows me to link and discover new hierarchies in my thinking to enhance it. It's also why I'm building tools to automate connections between notes with AI, and it's why my knowledge base is heavily integrated with content I consume online, for example this post that I can now search in my knowledge.

- I think there's untapped value in sharing notes and tidbits of knowledge with other people. Blog posts take more time and have different aims than notes, but notes are also valuable / can be useful for others. My public wiki is at https://knowledge.uzpg.me

- having a time-logged track of what I've been learning: I like tracking my goals / progression (for eg yearly reviews https://www.uzpg.me/general/2022/01/01/a-year-in-review-v2.h...) and going through my knowledge base helps with this

Some people do daily journaling - not me, but possibly many here. Some see it as therapy - laying out what bothers you, or what you’re grateful for, to share with someone or put it away. Some use it as a way to get anxiety and stress out of your head by extracting down what needs done where and taking it out of your active memory. The Getting Things Done method.

A lot of people have writing as a way of relieving FOMO if your mind is much faster than your ability to articulate all of your thoughts. Call it ADHD, or a way to brainstorm with yourself - you surface your thoughts in front of you and can then edit and manipulate them - see if and what parts make sense, or if it’s just a nebulous cloud of general ideas that melts down when you read it as if it’s told to you by someone else. For that you need a really fast, possibly visual tool like Figma or Remarkable (I find figma easier to re-organize) or Visio (expensive) or a white board.

So the use cases are very wide range and no single tool yet can cover them - mostly because you need either low latency, or high ability to organize, or ways of manipulating data visually, or search, or ability to ensure your external brain software will be alive in 2 years (aka open source), or available on all of your devices to capture anywhere anytime. One requirement steps on the others usually.

However, all we got are lame attempts to replicate pen and paper in terms of annotation, with the only real improvement is instant text search, with very limited capabilities for incorporating meta data into queries. Where are the automated mind maps, statistics about how frequently you use terms in your discipline, inference of the times of day where we think about each topic...?

A programmer could built their own tools for that, but there is no standardized way to do them, it takes a lot of effort, there's no way to share the best practices that others use to their benefit; the best we've got is subchanels at Slack. And of course, all those capabilities are off-limits to end users.

Note taking tools are only now starting to explore those possibilities beyond the raw text file on hierarchical folders.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_cognition

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

I say this as someone as guilty of productivity app porn as anyone.

I think these systems appeal very much to certain kinds of people with adhd/adhdish issues looking to maximize their potential. And yeah a good system can really help with that when you don’t let obsessing over it get out of control.

And in that same vein, the actual physical limitations of what we can juggle in our minds is fallible. So with the leverage that we get with digital note-taking tools, we think that we may be able to cross that chasm with this technology.

Then there's this elusive HOLY GRAIL, which we all think can actually be realized if we find the right tools to solve this problem of off-loading our thinking — so we can do more thinking. Basically, if the notes can be remembered for us, almost automatically, then we can go deeper in ways we never could have imagined, because we're not the ones doing the juggling. We've made use of the digital tools, that are leaps and bounds more powerful than the scattered and siloed, handwritten notes of yesterday.

So as new ways of connecting our thinking through digital writing, such as bi-directional linking and transclusion become commonplace, we get glimmers that maybe it's possible now. And the hunting down of just the right mixture of this primitive, and that feature-set, may turn over the right stones to help us juggle that which used to be impossible.

And in my experience leading and coaching people through implementing a digital Zettelkasten (simple, lightweight note-taking system) it doesn't take a genius to see a pattern from the response to "what do you want?"

The answers all circle around this idea of "leaving something behind."

I think the answer for me is actually to share what I write with my team more. I'm quite good at documenting things, and the reason for that is because I'm writing docs for other people. If people mention seeing something in the docs then I tend to write more docs. If no one mentions them for a while my documenting dies off until I need to write more. If I could easily apply that mechanism to notes I might be more inclined to write things down.

The American Competitive Debate Community has quietly "solved" note taking using MS Word for Windows and Mac. This is done using a really neat plugin called Verbatim: https://paperlessdebate.com/verbatim/

Ignore the stuff about debate and think of it as a note taking app which exploits already built in hierarchical features in word (the navigation panel) and creates hotkeys for rapidly creating notes. See this video for more details: https://youtu.be/AkoYLBgChQw?t=393

I used this tool for note taking (and also extensively for debate) and everyone who saw me use it was flat out jealous. I had a few friends actually start using it in their own daily experience.

We all recognize the importance of learning from experience, and we all recognize that we cannot reliably remember everything important. So the question becomes - where to store it.

Then the question becomes how to organize it. Do we optimize for quick writes or quickly finding things? Do we optimize for space? Is appearance important? Syncing to mobile devices? Reminders? Right-to-Left writing support? Must the data be in plain text files? Must there be multiple implementations of the technology? Does it run on Linux / Windows / Mac? Does it leak private information? Can I recover it? Does it support embedded images / video / audio / flowcharts / etc.

Etc etc etc

[0] https://joplinapp.org/

My brain doesn't remember full facts, it's more like the old school card index from a library. I retain information on where I can find things, not the things itself.

Note taking speeds this process up by letting me store all the things in a single place . With the added bonus that I know my notes won't just disappear from the internet one day.

I use Notion for stuff I need to share with others and things that need a bunch of embeds or images. Obsidian for text-only notes and more private stuff. Pinboard for bookmarks with the paid archiving feature enabled.

I treat bookmarks as mostly ephemeral, I can't usually be arsed to configure bookmark syncing between all the computers I use, Pinboard is mostly enough for long-term storage.

And you are right, trying something new is exciting. I remember when I first discovered Evernote, I thought it was super cool, then Roam, then Obsidian.

But I think the following will happen at some point in your journey (at least it happened to me). You will find a system/approach that works for you and you will not want to try other things. The workflow that I have configure for myself with the use of Obsidian, Readwise, and a couple of other tools, that the hustle of moving it to some other stack is just too big. It is so big in fact, that it trumps the novelty card completely.

I'm also terrible at identifying which information to note down, and inconsistent in even attempting to identify it.

So I'm following the topic out of curiosity that a tool might appear that will truly argument my disorganized mind with the skill and dicipline of organization.

I've found Dendron interesting, and have started using it a bit, but I feel it's not "ambient" enough, I need something that interacts extremely well with my phone, home computer and work computer, and is not cloud based.

Most of the notes you carefully and "secretly" took, are nothing more than some useless information for others, but it helps you to understand the things you're taking or just make yourself to understand your own idea better.

From my perspective, I do not think some note taking procedure would help me to become a better person, to become better, one has to put hard working and generates good ideas, not just pass the exercise or get an A in you exam.

But I bet Stephen King types his novels, rather than dictating them to his editor from memory. Jay Z is said (by himself and numerous collaborators) not to write his lyrics down. He writes them in his head, and recites them from his head in the studio.

I can't remember any ideas that originate in my head, that I haven't seen with my eyes. Except for those thrice-in-a-lifetime level ideas. I've tried the "if it's good I'll remember it" approach literally hundreds of times, and maybe retained three of those. I've had more than three good ideas in my life. I don't only want to remember the A+++ ones. I want the A++ ones, the A+ ones, and so on, so that I can work on refining them. Note taking apps are really handy for refining.

Everyday I put on my tasks, and notes.

Easy simple, classy :)

[1] - https://www.moleskine.com/en-us/shop/notebooks/the-original-...

[2] - https://schneiderpen.com/en_ng/fineliners-and-fibrepens/topl...

I think what makes it obsessive for me is that I always want to improve my thinking, even if it's a tiny increase. That's why I always check out other people's note taking methods and software, in the hopes of finding a little nugget of optimization.

As for my method, I use plain text and vim to store my notes. If I need to think deeply about a problem, I use a paper notebook and pencil. This is because that combination is good for visualizing a problem.

That’s a problem I’ll have to solve before I ever get around to trying any new note taking software.

And I do want to think better.

Currently really happy with Slack, Org-mode and Roam Research, each for its own use.

Also something about it helps me "relax" particularly with regard to finance tabulation/burn rate, like no I won't be homeless anytime soon.

Ergo you’ll see a bunch of FOTM note taking/ todo list/ etc applications every so often.

It's dynamic and heirarchical and gives me: - Discipline for spaced repetition - Creative stimulation through re-reading - Generalized thought ordering

At some point the complex state machines, schematics and plans are too big to be held in my working memory all at once so I must decompose and interface them.

However, we forgot that just reached our natural constraints, and maybe its a good thing. So instead of buying into the next solution, maybe, just maybe we should just do less and filter more.

(And a good frictionless note taking system makes it easier to love studying.)

I frequently forget how I did some specific task or solved a particular problem or even how my own software libraries work.

Having something at hand (even doc comments) saves me the time of having to go through the same steps again.

More seriously though, it's a very central topic to the software world since many things in this world deal with how to work with information. And note taking is a very central thing when working with personal information.

For me personally, writing notes down is indeed the most important step. I don't read most of the notes ever again :)

A nice UX gives dopamine bonus points for this act of getting peace of mind.

It is similar to people chasing endless productivity by reading about it while actually not getting anything done. It feels productive, but you are just busy.

Seriously though, I think Hackernews is making up for all the notes they didn't take in college as they expected to breeze through on smarts alone.

Could anyone remind of the name?

There's also the novelty of it all in which each method or program may do it in a completely new way. This helps us build our own philosophy of the art of note taking.

Anyway back to the topic, I think everyone wants to create the simples, sleekiest, cleanest note taking app which is easy to use and also very easy to develop.

On the other hand I find the stock Notes.app and TextEdit more than enough for all my needs.

We're overloaded with BS information, BS demands, and BS business "requirements" non-stop, plus BS aspirations and BS role models (from Ferris to "wake up at 4am founders").

This is an (appropriately BS itself) attempt to cop.

Without the review and transformative writing curation of past notes its not very useful as it then mirrors someone focusing solely on getting good grades via route but never ever transforming that route into knowledge.

As such, when we don’t write an idea down, it feels like we are losing a part of ourselves.

So ideas don't come from god but from paper.

I don't think it's just a belief as some of us have personal evidence of quality-of-life improvement from being able to easily retrieve a saved piece of knowledge. We then wonder if whatever system we happen to be using (paper notebooks, emacs Org-Mode, Evernote, plain text files, Roam, etc, etc) ... can be improved or generalized to others.

Earlier in computing (i.e. 1980s DOS) the acronym "PIM" "Personal Information Manager" was the meme for note-taking. You had attempts like Borland Sidekick[1] and Lotus Agenda[2]. In the 1990s, you had PIM devices like the PalmPilot where enthusiasts tried to convince us that it was worth investing the time to learn its idiosyncratic stylus strokes to save notes.[3]

Today's recurring "Show HN" of the latest note-taking software attempt is the continuation of an unsolved problem for the general population. Each of the following functions have many degrees-of-freedom:

(1) saving notes in a friction-free way: local-first file or cloud? save in freeform text files (Markdown?), or JSON, or in SQLite? Or handdrawn pen input on a tablet and save the image files with OCR conversion? Sync data across all devices how?

(2) organizing and retrieving notes : hierarchies? tags? graph links? mindmaps? or no friction of organizing at all and just use full-text search?

We get a combinatorial explosion of tools instead of everybody converging on The One True Way.

Personally, I've settled on not using dedicated note-taking software. Just use a combination of text files with a text editor and folders hierarchy in the operating system. But I acknowledge that my idiosyncratic system doesn't generalize to the population and it doesn't have simple data sync so I can't retrieve my notes on my smartphone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)#/media/File...

https://bitespire.com/

2018 Show HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120483

Like search for perfect todo app etc.

When I want to remember who did that paper on implicit fractal rendering with reduced affine arithmetic, I grep my notes (Gamito and Maddock, cf. https://dercuano.github.io/notes/affine-arithmetic-newton.ht...).

When I want to remember when Putin said a third world war was imminent due to US precision-guided munitions, I grep my notes (at Sochi in 02014, cf. https://dercuano.github.io/notes/wwiii-genesis.html).

When some dumbfuck on HN is saying "Yes China is making big growth in renewables but they're making even bigger growth in coal" and accusing anyone who disagrees of "brushing off scary conclusions" because they "can't get their heads around" the reality of the situation, I can just paste my analysis of growth in the Chinese energy market from my notes, which demonstrates that the opposite is the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29843985

I learn more from fifteen minutes of taking notes on a book or a video than I do from an hour of passively reading it. Better still is taking notes as a way of contrasting two or three different sources of information, or using them to bring into focus inconsistencies or contradictions I wouldn't have noticed otherwise, or bring my attention to the information I lack in order to understand something.

I had read about configuring an opamp as a differential-to-single-ended amplifier (say, for high-side current sensing for a power supply current limit) half a dozen times over the years. But it wasn't until a few weeks ago when I tackled the problem with a mechanical pencil in my notebook (schematics, equations, paragraphs of flawed reasoning) that I really understood how to do it. After three tries. Maybe if I'd taken better notes when I was reading about it, it wouldn't have taken me so long.

Reading over my old notes, I see how incredibly wrong and clueless I was about so many things. Without notes, people tend to forget their past errors, which leads them to overestimate their judgment. I also see how I've changed, not always for the better.

Diagrams, equations, and data tables in my notes are much easier to show to someone than to tell them verbally in a conversation, and they're generally better drawn than what I can manage to sketch out on scratch paper or a blackboard during a conversation.

It would be great to have software that enabled better integration of my notes with databases and computer models, but the more important thing is retrievability. I want to reduce the chance I'll lose my notes, or that I won't be able to find things in them.

I think so. In the end I just use Google Keep for mundane things like grocery lists (haven't found anything better for that, checkboxes and autocompletes most common items so it's quick) or random ideas I have (it's easy since it's on a phone and cloud). For programming shit it's todos in a readme in the repository. It's more about the act of writing it down than any feature in any app.

A plaintext file is sufficient. I noticed every programmer who even mentions zettlekasten produces bad, verbose code. Fortunately, obsessing over note taking naturally limits how much bad code he produces.