1. Running todo list or quick combo-list of todo's for a specific project.
This is basically throw-away but has some historical interest in that it can be fun to flip back to todo list pages and see what a previous week looked like, in general. There is also interesting signal in the notes itself ... for instance, the more stressed I am, the large and more illegible my handwriting grows.
2. Notes taken on paper from a meeting or class or lesson.
These are often taken on paper for a specific reason (for one thing, when I talk to clients in person, I hate to have a laptop in front of me, even though I could type much quicker than I can write.) These notes I will generally photograph with my smartphone and upload directly to an online note taking system (Evernote has gotten a lot better again recently). I find that Evernote and presumably several other note taking systems are actually pretty good at basic OCR / I can generally search text that is written legibly on these notes. If I add some basic tags or other information to the note after it is uploaded, this pretty much fulfills my needs to be able to interact with the note digitally after the fact.
I know the orthodoxy of ZK states you shouldn’t write something until you have sufficient notes to do so, and some will even go so far as to say you shouldn’t research a specific topic, but having a purpose for my note taking actually makes me stick to it.
$ wc -w wiki/ratf/src/notes.adoc
The "wrap-ups" (the distillation process from daily -> weekly -> monthly -> yearly) is of potentially enormous value and are a direct result of the daily logging. I stand by that.
It's hard to put a value on the notes as a capture system because it's difficult to know what I might have lost without it. I do know that if I don't write down great ideas, they're often lost forever, "Dangit, I had a clever little solution to Fermat's Last Theorem in the shower yesterday, but now I've forgotten it!" I am convinced that capturing them has increased my total idea retention.
Plenty of technical ideas I've jotted down also make it into my wiki and/or website, and those things are potentially referenced many, many times. I have absolutely searched for and found things in the digital daily logs. But as I say in the article, searching is really hard because I remember the "wrong" keywords later.
As you say: "the act of taking the note is of value" and I guess an additional benefit I'm just now thinking of are all of the ideas I have NOT acted upon. By writing them down, I feel more confident I won't forget them. Which means I'm more comfortable about not acting on them "Right now before I forget!" Which means when I see the note again (even just when transcribing the next morning), I've had time to cool off and make a better decision about pursing that thing. (ALL ideas are written down, and 99% of them get transcribed even if I have no intention of pursuing them.) I'll add this to the article.
Finally, once I stopped logging brushing my teeth and that sort of thing, the effort-to-value went way up. :-)
I take notes as I work, and if I write something down that I refer to often or modify and build on, it'll probably get migrated-and-refined to a later page so I can continue to reference it there.
If it continues to be useful beyond that and outside of its original context, it gets moved into my digital, searchable notes. Which is more like a personal snippet library/documentation thing than notes.
But anyway yes I reference them, but absolutely not in the way you would reference something that came up in a text search, and I don't go looking for them in a comparable way or expect them to behave like that. It's a different system with different uses I have a car but I still ride my bike most places you know?
Or just linking them into big trees of cards like a wiki.
There are time when I search for information only to realize that they are already in my notes already.
But having made these notes, and gained the benefit of actually taking the note, do you ever reference them again? Using digital note-taking systems means that notes can be cross-referenced, searched, and used again in the future. These are additional potential benefits beyond the initial act of bringing it to the surface.
Do you ever refer to the notes again?
I ask this because I take notes, although not as comprehensively, and I'm intending to ramp up my efforts. But I'm converging to a system where I don't just take the notes, but have them migrate into a system where I can find them again, where I can pull them out and synthesise articles, papers, and other forms of output, so I'm interested to know about your context, and how you use your notebooks, beyond the initial creation.