My notes track knowledge, they are referenced as-needed so I store everything because there's low/no cost. I've also found that writing things down improves my recollection, so there's value even if I never reference the note again.
My calendar / omnifocus track future actions, I minimize these and keep them very well curated - no "todo", only "do". Externalizing some cognition takes time in exchange for efficiency... less overhead from context switching or remembering unrelated items.
The tradeoff is loosely analogous to scheduling in computing - inefficient for an isolated single thread of work, but beneficial when coordinating lots of concurrent work.
I'm curious about what this means. What are "do" notes (as distinct from "todo" ones). If it means that don't calendar, and you just do that task immediately, how you plan and (more importantly) remember future tasks?
I keep the two separate: good notes describing the state of the world, and a calendar to schedule future actions.
When it comes to software, that means all code must have good documentation and known flaws are scheduled to be fixed. If it's not worth scheduling, it's not worth changing.
My personal life follows the same pattern, although much less formal... there just isn't enough time for every possibility, so I always work backwards from my calendar.
Grep any large code repository for "TODO" comments.
However, I think code and life are slightly different contexts here. I get what you mean about separating aspirations from near-term actual intents but I generally use the word "todo" to refer exclusively to the latter (which still doesn't help a whole lot with ensuring execution as the list still grows quite large).
I have system of using "top" tags to define my working view for a project. Say I'm working on project Foo. At any one time I'll have about half a dozen notes tagged "foo-top." I can take any note from my past and bring it front and center by tagging it "foo-top" and then delete the tag when I want the note to disappear again. Say, for example, I want to see if CouchDB will be useful for Foo. I used CouchDB for a personal project several years ago, so I can search for my note of CouchDB concepts and commands, tag it "foo-top", and then remove the tag if I decide it won't be useful. It's a beautiful way of carrying around a lot of baggage without feeling the weight. It's nice that if I want, I can write down notes and thoughts about something without worrying that I'll clutter up my journal and make it unreadable, or worrying that I'm mixing up the wheat and the chaff. It's not like I spend a bunch of time rummaging through a bunch of junk to find what I want, forcing me to think carefully about what I record. I can record anything that seems like it might be useful later.
A journal would be nice to have, too, though. One note in each project serves as a journal of sorts, in the form of a quick summary of what I've done each day and a quick summary of what I expect to accomplish next. (For work, I find it more convenient to keep a single note for this instead of breaking it out by project.) Evernote isn't great for keeping chronological notes. I only use it because I haven't seen an alternative that is compelling enough to make up for the convenience of using just one program.
One thing I really wish for is a program that could automatically present me with a diary of sorts based on my note-taking. Versioning would be nice, too, so I could see how my notes evolve over time.
Is there not an API in Evernote to query the notes? Seems like getting the last few weeks’ worth, sorting, and dumping to html or pdf would go pretty far for your diary use case.
I read my notes every now and then. But what the notebook does mostly is make me focus and concentrate on my goals and remind me what's important. As the parent said, a notebook enhances your long term memory. You re-iterate lessons learned/forgotten. It's not a bookmarking tool.
The importance of the 'reset' has helped me a lot too, and calling a lot of recorded things 'baggage' is very true. If everything I had recorded was wiped would I be disappointed? Definitely! But life would go on. :) I'd re-discover things, my tastes and personality would change so those recorded things aren't relevant, etc.
I've mentored enough colleagues that I've come across those who take extremely detailed notes, and are successful, and a fair number who do this and don't find success in their work. When I try to find ways to get them to question their approach they are often resistant to changing because the have an ingrained belief that detailed note-taking is of fundamental importance.
I spent my entire education and most of my software career taking few notes, and they did the job well enough. Despite my shift to taking a lot more for various reasons, I agree that there is no moral or strategic value to taking nice notes just for the sake of having done so.
Which makes me think there is something not so obvious that accompanies effective note taking.
Taking notes about routine everyday stuff is boring and worse than useless, because the notes are full of duplicated information that makes searching slower. I imagine the people who take notes for it's own sake are basically listing everything that they do, whether they gained any new insight or not.
As part of treating my notes as a code project, I even keep them version controlled, which leaves me a little more free to just delete things or "refactor" stuff. A lot of the value I get is going back through things and synthesizing them into clearer and more useful notes. TODOs in particular are dangerous -- I try to treat files of that nature as extensions of my long term memory, rather than a curriculum which I feel obligated to follow.
That being said, there is an element of this project where I feel like a am building a piece of "my life's work". I've built a number of software projects, and part of building them over time and organizing them leaves them in a state where I am proud to have built them -- I can point out a piece of the system, and understand why it works that way, and remember the choices that led to its current state. At one point, I realized that I had no such project for my life, and it was a little weird that I had so clearly documented software systems that were hardly used, whereas my life and action and ideas and knowledge were, for the most part, just in my head. So in a way it's more than the practicality of having notes, although in the practice of it I have found it to be practical. It's a way of adding meaning to the course of my life -- now the ten minutes I spent reading an article can also become a gift to my future self due to the one choice quote I grab from it.
One thing that wasn't working for me was storing TODO style things and "X I want to watch/read/learn/play/do" items in my notes. Eventually I found Trello and it seems a good fit for that style of task (for me)
Everything else is stored in my notes though, or sometimes in paper-based notebooks that I take pictures of occasionally for archiving.
Still need to get better at things I've done at the weekend/daily bullet points etc, I often forget or am too lazy
I.e., how often do you actually read the things you write down?
PS: Have you ever thought about using a "lifelogging camera" instead? :)
BUILD QUALITY RELATIONSHIPS - improve existing relationships, and seek out new good ones
MAINTAIN NEUTRALITY - approach things with a beginners mind
PRACTICE SELF-COMPASSION - admit pain, take kind and mindful action ")
Some files are just used a lot for both reading and writing. These include a todo.txt, event_planning.txt for planning logistics of whatever fun getaway or event I'm doing next, a shopping_queue.txt (reduce impulse buys by requiring I put things on that list for some amount of time).
I find that for taking notes on books or presentations, I will write them once, and then refer back to them infrequently -- maybe once a year. A bigger advantage is gained because it makes it easier to stop reading/watching things, because then I can always pick it up again and review the notes associated with it, so I can have a lot of educational threads going at the same time without fear of losing the context.
For journaling, I tend to review my journal and list of activities as a whole a couple of times a year, and typically will review the last week every week or so.
Much of this happens naturally due to the fact that the project is open -- it's often easier and more interesting to review my past work week or pick up where I left off on a book (stored as a pdf within the notes) than it is to jump onto facebook or whatever.
Since 2013 I started creating a text file almost every day in a directory structure of '../daily/2017/17-10-14.txt'.
I use it as a journal (I put the current time and wrote whatever it is down), a scratchpad, a temporary todo, habit tracker, etc. It's been super useful for me. I've thought about formalising it, using tags, etc. but have found myself getting along fine.
I used to use Day One (macOS/iOS) religiously but have found that this daily txt log mostly sufficient. What I would like is to expand my macros from getting the current time to getting my current location and weather.
For work, I have a 'log.txt' in which I have a section for each day and copy-forward the previous day's section. While we have our own company tracking tools, etc., this is purely for me and has helped me keep better track of everything I need/want to do without letting anything slip out.
I've found that doing each of these things takes up very little time too—partly due to not formalising it or making it fancy. I've thought about using a vimwiki which I'm a big fan of, and gave it a go once, but I stopped. It was no fault of vimwiki itself, but so far have found the text files sufficient.
For my phone (iPhone), I use https://ia.net/writer/, and I keep all these text files in Dropbox.
Another reason why I've stuck to text files is because of the fatigue of different apps and services disappearing due to whatever reasons.
When I need to find something old I use fgrep on that folder. Works like a charm.
It's plain text, no defined structure. I dont't use it for TODOs as that info would get easily lost.
I use it almost everyday, specially when something different happen: how to release an old piece of software that current setup dont support anymore or how to connect to a service that I only use sporadically.
I tried some tools and apps for this, even tried to track that for a few days in Trello. eventually I gave up and went back to the plain txt file.
The organization of notes in an accessible manner is a challenge for me - perhaps I'm doing it wromg.
Otherwise, since these notes in the context of a project, I can treat it the same way I treat code. So a mix of multi-file search, and directories that correspond to the knowledge in them (e.g. "finances/investing.txt" or "journal/happiness_project.txt", the latter containing any work I do on http://diurnal.st/2013/05/27/training-your-brain-to-be-and-s... -- which I don't do everyday by any means, but that's an example of the kind of thing that exists in my notes)
It's indispensable in meetings because I both take notes about the goals of meetings beforehand, take note of any important parts during them, and am able to succinctly review them afterwards as they relate to the original goals, and easily keep track of any action items.
I manage EVERYTHING this way now-- what I am currently working on, notes about what I've done in a day, notes about what I've done on the weekend, notes about books I want to read, movies I want to watch, have watched, fitness routines. It goes on.
At first it was a small but useful knowledge base, and a good plan for how to keep track of things better. Now it's a larger, and even more useful knowledge base, where due to review and organization the important concepts in it have mostly made its way into my long term memory. And the process of taking and using the notes has become a smooth and well-honed process. I keep the notes in dropbox so I have easy access to them on mobile also.
In short: I treat my personal knowledge base as if it were a coding project: using well organized text files. I am constantly adding to them and maintaining them. It is working very well for me.