Obsessive Compulsive Note Taker
Thats what I have evolved to over the years. I started (inspired from a friend) in 2012 who used to take notes for quizzing material and had a compilation built since 2006 which fascinated the fuck out of me. Then, as he aced quizzes from this, I saw the value it added. So, this FOMO drove me to start with notes for projects - how-tos, to-dos, progress and references. Immediate value this provided was quick context switching since as a student, we are juggling many things - opening the note for a project immediately got me in the zone to execute.
As this habit evolved, I have notes for everything - books I read, cool articles and blogs, news items, personal thoughts, my day-to-day logs and even my relationship thoughts and stories. As I have grew from managing multiple things in university to multiple problems in life and work, my note-taking also has improved. Now, I have a multi-tiered notes i.e. scribbling and documenting.
Scribbling
Instant notes and thoughts which go on the table I am sitting on or on a keep-note if I am traveling. My workstation table is full of scribbles by the end of the day. Scribbling on table also lets me have all my thoughts right in front of me all the time so that the sub-conscious mind can process it or when I am free, I can dwell upon something. This can include ordering grocery to repairing table to read on how to fix my 3D printer.
Documenting
EOD or more accurately when the table gets filled, I compile all the scribbles and then add to my notes. Though redundant but having tried direct note taking, this redudancy makes iterations and thoughts to come back to agile.
It takes seconds to note something from meetings or discussions or thoughts. Then when I get to persisting (The process of moving to notes from scribbles), I get to think of this again which forces me to question/understand/process it better - research/google/dig/think more and at times execute immediately.
What do I take notes on?
TLDR; Everything - Daily what I do - Personal and Work - Problem Statements [1] - Side Projects and Work - Personal Thoughts - Life, Universe and Everything - Reading/Watching - Books, Blogs, Articles, News, Courses, Movies, TV Shows
How do I organize them?
First level of abstraction for me is the context - personal or work - even for work its divided into the place I am working at.
I have notes from projects I did at every place I worked along with the daily logs. Along with this, a vertical for self i.e. my personal thoughts, beliefs and logs.
Then, there are side project verticals depending on if its part of Bayesian Conspiracy(What is this? You will know someday) or just mine own or with some group of friends .
Next vertical is for entrepreneurial attempts since there have been quite a few - some died at ideation, some failed and some died at different stages.
Now, within each vertical, there are multiple problem statements which has further projects per problem statement. Some running, some planned, some shelved, some just random thoughts. And along with this, each vertical has a log. Logs can be daily or weekly or whenever I am working on that vertical. For example, work logs are almost daily, self side projects are often weekly and entrepreneurial logs are probably quarterly these days.
What platform do I use?
This has been a life long iteration (~30% life actually). I started with using evernote in 2012 to organise things and then I hated the heavy UI with a laptop unable to manage another desktop application.
Next, I decided to move to sublime text. As much as sublime text’sflexibility, it was horrible for features but obviously, it is a text editor.
Next set of research went into using github repo READMEs itself but then the challenges came from rendering it to be able to see and add things esily. I want to see formatted, well presented data when I need to but text editors do not allow this.
As I aged, I got averse to allow my notes online unless I exclusively ask so. And markdown was something I got used to. I moved to inkdrop - markdown, optional sharing along with search and grouping worked really well for me. I used it for good 3 years when I got introduced to org-roam and org-mode in general.
Being an emacs user, this excited me. I deep dove into this rabbit hole next. I moved to using org-mode for notes for all purposes and even tried zettelkasten for around 3 months as an experiment to measure and understand value add. As much as I am totally sold at its value, I concluded my thought process and utility isnt the same.
It seemed more for creative high depth and breadth kind of notes which is not my use-case. I dont do that many levels of meta-research or note taking which it is is designed for so the trade-offs were not in my favor.
I even decided to have mutliple note taking platform depending on use-case i.e. one for resaearch based on zettelkasten and one for rest but two platforms and constant shifting was such a disaster on productivity that I almost got bald. (I really did to get rid of hair cuts during lockdown).
So, what do I use now if everything sucks? Well.
How did I decide what to use?
So, like all problems, I broke this problem down into metrics i.e. what are my expectations and weigh them for my use case.
- Multi-platform - Mobile and Web
- Productivity Features - Lists, Checkbox Todos, Search
- Formatting Features - Pictures, Deep links, Alignment, Text Formatting
- Knowledge Organisation - Tree or Graph like structure and search
- Collaboration - Ability to share and get inputs and allow collaboration
- Platform Independence - Lack of dependence on the platform followed by ease of shifting and offline usage
- Footprint - Heaviness of the application i.e. since I will always have it open along with a million browsers, IDEs, slack, Whatsapp etc.
Once, I listed down the above features, I had to evaluate the options from a myriad of them, shortlisted these - org-mode, notion, inkdrop and roam-research. Reducing this into a math problem.
So, basically everything sucked. :(
You know everything sucks when the highest score is 63% of total in absolute grading.
But accepting sadness, disappointment and with a heavy heart, I decided to go ahead with Notion. I so so wish I could access notion files on the disk and keep it local.
Sigh.
Edit: 24-08-2020
I wondered if anyone paid attention to the numbers so my first version of calculations (Gave equal weight to all features) is when I wrote this article. But, eventually, I changed the calculation to add weights but did not change the 63% number. Since, now each article has varying weights the highest score is not 63% but 77.5%.
Appendix
[1] I define problems as the high level entity and not projects because each problem statement can have multiple projects. Example being “Reduce food wastage and time to order grocery” is a problem statement and it might include projects like “Trying recurring ordering”, “Cook guidance to make less food!”.