I am in the process of moving away from proprietary note taking tools like AskSam (more than 15 years ago on a Windows machine), Evernote, Bear Writer and some more). Got a long list of legacy systems that I want to migrate to markdown / file based system.
I keep date stamping files like so: `yyyy-mm-dd_topic-subtopic-subsub`
- giraffes.html
- giraffes_in_history.html
- natural_predators_of_giraffes.html
- grade_inflation.html
- graffiti.html
- genghis_khan.html
- grassroots_lobbying.html
grep -i giraffe *.html
What I do recommend is writing a little tool that produces filenames in a consistent way. (E.g. stripping out 'weird' characters, removing capitalisation etc.) I found that the more uniform filenames, file structure etc, the easier searching remains. Moreover, writing tools that mine / transform Zettel is also easier when the setup is uniform.
I also tried adding structures by subdirectories
- computer_science
- economics
- biology
I liked Gmail originally because it used tabs. I have seldom had an email that was permanently tagged with more than one tag, but I have imagined having files in a filesystem with multiple tags. Bloggers commonly use tags but I don't know if they're successful.
On a filesystem where tags were not native, you could implement tags as subdirectories, using symlinks to achieve that the same file had multiple paths giraffes/history.html and history/giraffes.html.
Did you try tags?
I use a "Travel ideas" tag on emails from cruise lines if they suggest a specific place, time and cost to travel somewhere. Those words aren't in the email. The criteria that qualify the email for the tag are easy to check in a scan of the message but I don't know how I'd grep for them.
I still do searches but for other reasons.
If you wrote a note about a neutrino-hunting instrument at the South Pole, how many searches would it take you to find it later? What about a science station at McMurdo, which is in Antarctica but not at the South Pole?
You could allow yourself to have or not have a line of free association, whose only purpose was to match future searches that would otherwise miss because of how the content was phrased.
Regarding timestamps: I have a Python script triggered by Alfred App on my Mac. The script creates markdown files based on a template. The template has a header section with helpful infos like `Created: yyyy-mm-dd`.
Here is my template (with filled out placeholders):
```
Created: Fri, 2019-10-11 12:27:18
Title: BOOK - METAPHYSICS - ARISTOTELES
Author: Ugur
FileID: fid-20191011-122718-440741
Base Header Level: 2
Tags: #ethics #philosohy
[%Title]
{{TOC}}
# WRITEHERE
```
This is a markdown template that can be rendered by `iA Writer`.
- Easy consistent styling through css
- No WYSIWYG, separation of content and styling
- Easy to include code, which sits in the directory associated with the index card
- Easy to cross link
- Easy to backup
- Everything is under git control
- Easy to write shell scripts / programs that automate various tasks related to my notes
- Search with standard tools like grep
- Edit in my favourite text editor (Org-mode for quick drafting is especially useful I find)
- High quality rendering through modern browsers
- Easy to cut and paste into emails, whatsapp skype discord etc which is how I communicate with students and colleagues
- Easy to include other formats like images sound video etc
- Since the emergence of MathJax I can use LaTeX markup which means I can cut-and-paste between my index cards, scientific papers and lecture notes/slides
In summary, I'm super glad I didn't go super-hi-tech and stuck with marked-up text. It was the right choice! As Graydon Hoare once wrote: "[A]lways bet on text." How much work is it? I spend 1-2 hours on average every day on writing. Is it worth my time? What are the advantages for me that keep me using such a system?
- Structured, easily accessible 'idea store' / second-memory for later refinement and reuse. Refinement is maybe even the core: when I come back to a subject years later I come back from a different angle
- Helps writing introductory sections in papers, because I will have sketched my understanding of a subject already on an index card
- Helps writing related work sections in papers, because I accumulate work related to any particular index card's subjects over years
- Makes reviewing papers much easier, because I can cut-and-paste missing related work (most scientific papers are written by PhD students and post-docs who lack a historical perspective)
- Communicating with students: as an academic I get new students every year, and since they got through similar stages and problems, it has become easy to reuse what I wrote in paste years
- The most important: cultivating a habit of writing down ideas, writing about ideas in a structured way, breaking them down into smaller parts etc, all of which helps me to understand things better, and to communicate them more clearly to others
Is it worth it? I ask myself this question every day. I found that in the first few years, I could always remember what I had written, so my system was of limited use. That changed after about 8 years, when I could no longer recall most of what I had written down, and then it became rather useful, since I got 'new' and already pre-digested ideas.
For me the biggest problem is that it has also become a procrastination device: I love writing. Whenever I am stuck with a work problem (and that happens a lot), I have a tendency to procrastinate by writing long entries on obscure subjects, unrelated to my work. It feels like work, in some sense it is work, but it lets me avoid confronting high-priority tasks head on.