That said what you said is absolutely true and in my projects idea folder I called this "Inner knowing". The main problem is that note taking apps are marketed as a replacement for human memory ("brain dump", "second brain", etc). Hence they create a dependency on them as they decrease the ability to remember. When infact what we need is the opposite. Also I believe it should be an OS/DE feature thightly integrated with file management/search.
Yes, i've tried obsidian, it somewhat works but it's always an electron nonsense.
I definitely think the physical action of writing in response to stimulus is critical to initial comprehension and memory.
My new note rewriting workflow is in obsidian. I’m really liking the way it comes together with the links and tags. I’m basically building a personal wiki highly relevant to me. And the final notes are way more accessible.
I'm also guilty of just jotting quick notes into iOS Notes. It's always there, and "good enough" for most quick note taking tasks. I prefer plain text for longer notes (which i assume has a longer shelf life), but if i'm just jotting down a quick list of things i need to get done today, iOS notes is more than enough.
Straight forward OpenSource notetaking app with Markdown, sync Backends for your prefered cloud service (incl. WebDAV/Nextcloud) and smartphone apps. https://joplinapp.org/
I find that at the end of the day, the only thing that works over long periods of time (and a large number of notes) are hierarchies with a regular structure that can be applied consistently. The pain point with this system is that hierarchies are hard to change and the way we think of things does change. This is why I ended up creating my own note taking tool built around the idea of flexible hierarchies (https://dendron.so)
This is what I realized as well—organization is the hard part. I kept struggling to find notes when I wanted to reference them. In my case, my notes are usually (but not always) captured in a meeting. I would struggle to find content because I might remember a person, a rough date, or some topic discussed… but if I put it in the wrong folder, tag, or physical notebook I was out of luck.
I put together a simple prototype that pulled all the metadata off my calendar included it in notes. That was really helpful.
We liked it enough playing with it internally that we built a product (witful.com). In 2.5 years of real world use I’ve almost never struggled to find stuff. Really has been a game changer for me, but my content is meeting centric.
I think simplicity is the key for any long lasting system. One of the ways to ensure that my zettlekasten system doesn’t get too complicated is to “discard” most of my writing.
I always put everything into Obsidians daily notes and leave it there without any processing. I process the writing into cards only if I look for it again or it’s interesting enough.
That's my Helm org-Rifle shortcut for my org-notes over 10ish org files in Emacs.
Works pretty well so far
I’m reading a book called “How to Take Smart Notes” which espouses the Zettelkatsen method, and I spent all weekend going down the EMacs + Org-roam rabbit hole to implement what the book espouses. However, it became too complex, and became too burdensome.
The real user pain point here is “it’s difficult to remember what I write down,” and “associating thoughts, and notes from disparate sources is too time consuming.” No software has solved these two pain points, I’m afraid.