Notes on Notetaking

I’ve been taking notes for my whole life, and consciously for less than a decade. I have tried many systems, jumped on and off many wagons. Here are things that stuck with me, which are universal, I believe, for all notetaking systems.

Notetaking Process

• Don’t glue yourself to one particular system and don’t be afraid of breaking the rules. The system must work for you, not the other way.
  • It’s more important to create a habit of noting things down than do that in any particular way.
  • It is normal that proven systems stop working. Don’t be afraid to change them if they don’t work for you anymore.
• It is OK to have several note sources, like your journal, audio recordings, photographs, several notebooks etc., but it works best when you collect all these sources in a single, uniform In that case it is important to collect these notes from time to time in a single place.
• Outlining is the single most powerful techique for writing literally anything. Learn it today, start now. From now on start typing sentences and paragraps with bullets in front of them all the time.
  • You don’t need any fancy outliner applications. Just type bullets (or dashes) and indent subsections.
  • Outlining also works great on paper.
• Use headlines to visually and logically structure your notes.
• Don’t take digital notes when you’re face to face with someone. Do it on paper. People don’t like it when you’re staring at the screen. They like it when you note with a pencil of fountain pen. They might even slow down and repeat themself so you can note everything.
  • But you’re the best if you write digital minutes during a remote call and you share your screen with them. Meetings with visible minutes are just another level.
• Always have a pen and a notebook on your desk, easily accessible.
• Writing on paper magically helps you to remember things better. Still, it is useful to periodically move the most important handwritten notes to your digital storage.
• When digital, adding new notes must be frictionless. You don’t want your notebook application to start 2-3 seconds. 1-2 keystrokes and you should be inside the editor, writing. If you’re using heavy GUI program, keep it in the background and configure a shortcut to focus it.
  • One Big Text File works surprisingly good. I’ve been using it as a dump for my thoughts, so I don’t have to decide right away about note’s structure, title etc.
  • Simplify creating new notes or opening your One Big Text File so it takes 1 or 2 keystrokes and doesn’t require any decisions from you.
• Don’t stress about productivity. After all, notetaking is the process of dumping your thoughts in hope that you’ll be more productive in the future, not now. Predicting whether the notes will be actually useful is worthless.

File Formats

• Longetivity first. You don’t want vendor lock-in. For digital notes, plain text is the king. Systems which offer easy export to established formats are fine, but any additional step adds a painful friction.
• Just in case you change your mind, you probably want to choose a format which is well-supported by pandoc. Aim for one which doesn’t need any fancy tools and processing to be readable by humans.
  • Markdown is not that bad for notes. Although many rightfully point
    • There are dozens of Markdown flavors which sometimes differ from each other in particular features.
    • It also means that there are Markdown editors for all the platforms you can think of.
    • The core is always the same though, so stick to it and you should be good.
  • Asciidoc (coupled with Asciidoctor) is a good alternative for Markdown, but lacks tooling. It’s more powerful, but also more complex.
  • Org-mode is powerful, but Emacs-centric. There’s nvim-orgmode, which implements only a subset of Emacs’ org-mode, but it’s impressive nevertheless. Pandoc, converts org files quite well and there are mobile clients.
    • The complexity of org-mode is high and learning curve is very steep.
    • Agenda views are great though.
  • Caldav is great for calendar, not so for notes.
    • It is great for tasks, thanks to tasks.org.
    • It’s hard to find a desktop client which is on par with tasks.org.
    • Underneath, Caldav is text format, but don’t you dare believe that you can grep it.
  • Latex is too heavy for note taking.
  • Office suites are not well-suited for note taking.
  • Notebook applications which use sqlite databases for some metadata are probably OK, because it’s easy enough to dump sqlite to CSV, or to access it programmatically.
• It is OK to use more than one file format. Different things require different approaches. For example, Org-mode is probably better for a todo list than Markdown.

Pen and Paper

• It’s OK to have part of notes digital and the other part analog. Writing on a good paper is soothing experience. You don’t have to digitize your paper notes.
• When writing, don’t limit yourself to a particular template or topic (unless it’s a class notebook). Write, sketch, doodle. Think with your hand. Summarize your task lists. It’s all up to you.
• Write top-down in chronological order. Start each day with a date and use a new page if you need to note something on a particular topic.
• Number the pages as you go and leave the first 2-3 pages for table of contents.
• Bullet journal is not bad framework if you skip all the bullshit about “designing” day/week/month templates and making it beautiful.
• Don’t aim for speed when writing. Aim for readability. Accept that writing is slower. It is distraction-free instead and lets you collect your thoughts.
• Some tips regarding the “hardware”:
  • Hardcover, lay flat notebooks without useless margins are the best. Honorable mention for spiral notebooks.
    • When using a spiral notebook, you always want to write on the right side (if you’re right-handed). When you reach the end, you simply flip the notebook and continue from the last page.
  • A7 is a great format for todo lists and it’s easier to get than index cards.
  • I love my B5 notebook with Winnie-the-Pooh the most.
  • You probably want to avoid plain notebooks and choose a grid/lines instead. Dot grid is very popular nowadays.
  • Leuchtturm1917 are great notebooks, but they are too expensive. Same for all Rhodias, Moleskines etc. There are cheaper alternatives in your local store that feel almost this good.

Software

• Notes must be attractive this way or another. Being mostly text, they must be typographically attractive. You’re going to look at them a lot so the experience must be pleasant. Add some colors to your editor, use a nice font and pleasing, but unobtrusive color scheme. Higlight only important things, but use emphasis and bold. After all, books are black on white for a reason (or rather black on ivory).
• When you list your notes, it’s great to display their titles instead of file names.
  • You can use a small Python¹ single-file library I wrote: titles.py. (NOTE: it’s license is GPL3 only). It parses titles for Markdown (with or without YAML front-matter), Asciidoc and Org-mode and should be easy enough to extend if you need something else.
  • It also converts titles to their “canonical” form, i.e. lower-case with special characters and spaces removed or replaced by dashes. I use it as a part of postprocessing pipeline to rename files after I type a title.
  • Many notetaking tools also implement this feature, but usually only for supported subset of file formats.
  • Once you can display note’s title, you can generate any random file name for new notes. This simplifies the process of digital notetaking.
• Use grep or ripgrep for searching. If you couple it with fzf, you end up with insanely powerful interactive search.
• Web view/page rendering is overrated. It is nice for image-heavy notes, but they usually can be rendered ad hoc.
• Tags are overrated.
• Internal wiki-like-links are overrated and maintaining them is a burden.
• Structuring your notes in a directory tree probably isn’t worth your time. Just throw them all in a single directory and use grep.
• Do yourself a favor and store your digital notes in git Version control really saves your ass over and over again.
  • It’s probably the only thing which adds friction that I recommend. It’s that important.
  • Alternative is Syncthing (or Dropbox). Just remember backup your notes regularly. You don’t want to accidentaly delete them all and automatically propagate this change to all connected nodes (happened to me once).
• No matter what, make backups.