I revisit old notes maybe once a month, and every time I do that I wonder why I still haven't migrated fully to Logseq.
> Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind.
Don't forget that everyone has a different workflow and what works for you might not be ideal for someone else. Also Obsidian/Logseq are both free vs Roam/Notion/etc -- some people just intensely incorporate notes as a part of their workflow.
I do agree everyone has a different workflow, but also you're a really good example of why the productivity is so massive despite the very little improvement to productivity brought on by these additional services: everyone is so desperately trying to convince themselves a better workflow is right around the corner. That someone else has a superior workflow, you just have to use that new app or service. Repeat every time a new gimmick comes out.
Isn’t that the goal — to process your notes, so as to come to new insights and connections?
I mean, given that you pose this question and leave it entirely unanswered, the rest of your response reads pretty condescendingly to me. A knowledge graph in markdown is not propped up by Big Notetaking, what an asinine stance.
I have ADHD, and I couldn't function without my notes.
I myself have a huge OneNote notebook, with all kinds of interesting projects or snippets that I've collected from HN or Reddit over the years. Being able to query that like a super-smart friend ("what was the error I ran into when I tried to implemt a self-hosted Synapse instance? How I can I fix that?") would be insane for personal productivity.
It's explore vs exploit (or hash table vs graph lookup); keywords are faster if you know what you're looking for. But reviewing linked notes leads to more exploration about related topics, and walking the graph can still be a reasonably efficient way to find what you're looking for. If you adopt networked notes, you get both at the cost of some notetaking overhead, but it's typically pretty small.
The one thing I hate about some of the notetaking apps is (and I understand folks need to make money) notes are really personal and private and need to stand the test of time. I can't have my notes locked away in a proprietary format or held hostage by some company charging $/mo so Notion is a no-go for me. I also don't really want to get locked into a workflow only to find out that the app is discontinued and then have to reinvent my workflow.
But yeah, networked thought is still cool and totally unrelated to why I don't use typical networked thought tools. Logseq came closest to converting me.
I've sucked it up and use a ton of electron apps. I can hardly blame anyone for doing that given the terrible fragmentation of hardware and lack of easier to use unifying APIs. Sometimes we just don't have time for that shit :)
I’ve found this to be true with writing music as well. Prior to recording stuff I found I’d play stuff that I had written a lot. The act of recording lets me forget those things and write more (and usually better) song ideas.
Like was thinking about a fully virtual avatar, not a person. But the tech wasn't there, and still ain't, to generate decent conversation, virtually rendered body with humanistic movements and facial expressions. Not to mention being able to select an interest field, Ie likes tech, hence tech conversations.
Back then I thought it was a brilliant idea. Now, it's quite impossible and better left sometime in the next 10ish years.
I get to see page views. The pages I'm really proud of nobody reads. The pages with the most page views are boring stuff (related to process, navigating my company's org structure, etc.).
More broadly, I've noticed that the things you do which have massive impact aren't always what you'd think. I once wrote a VBScript (long enough ago, it predated powershell) for a friend of mine to just run a program if there was no already running process by that name. He worked at an engineering firm, where for some inane reason some engineering software was always exiting and requiring a long init time to restart. The script kept it more or less always ready when you needed it.
Years later, I'd forgotten about it when he mentioned that it was a massive productivity boost. Every engineer at his company who had seen it in action, wanted it for themselves. Dozens of engineers were saving hours of productivity every week because of a throw-away script. Madness.
I do exactly that.
The act of writing helps me solidify that information in my brain - I have to process it to commit it to words. Paper works better than a text file, but a text file has the advantage of being faster and searchable.
I definitely do not take notes to abandon the information. Information I don't see the value in, I browse the web while listening. Some of that still sticks with me anyways.
I do diligently record things in Apple Notes, since they finally added categories (or groups, or whatever). I used to use Outlook notes the same way. It's really all I need. And I DO truly refer to them, although sometimes it's a long time later and I find way more detail and cool ideas than I remembered having come up with.
But browser bookmarks... these are mostly a waste. I have a big collection of them, again organized in groups. But it is vanishingly rare that I use them instead of just doing a new search.
However, one feature I would really love to have but never seen, is a combined todo - notes app.
I often jot down notes as in "things to note / remember", but also, in the same flow, I'd note thinks I'd need to do. I would love to be able to gather those automatically in a view, and be able to see them as done when I revisit the initial note after marking them as such from the "todo view".
The closest I've seen was some VimWiki, but I've found that fairly unwieldy (though I love the idea of taking notes in vim).
When I'm back at my laptop, I merge it into my Obsidian Vault.
I'm using that right now for both TODO and notetaking. I have syncthing set up so that it syncs my vault across 3 devices (including my phone). Very easy to set up (tho admittedly also easy to mess up the set up process). Have had minor hiccups the past 5 months but nothing that would make me want to stop using this setup.
All this is free. I feel like I've found a gold mine that nobody else seems to know about.
What do you like about LogSeq?
I don't feel like learning emacs and trying to shoehorn vim mode (evil?) into it (vim-style editing is much too ingrained in my text-editing muscle-memory).
TickTick comes to mind.
Then again, "notes" mean different things to different people.
Writing it down helps to solidify an idea into the heap from the stack, maybe even take it from hot storage to cold storage. It allows you to jot it down while it is still fresh and offload it to focus on it later. This is super helpful in ideas, jokes, thought streams, todos, one pagers on some projects, etc. It does help you remember but also allows you to move to the next thing for now.
Writing down ideas is like a sketchbook, ideas/actions/iteration of thoughts both good and bad. It is important to write thoughts down though because how many times have you had a great idea and you are like "I'll never forget this" and then a while later you are wondering what that was or you entirely move on because life moves fast.
Creatives, writers, comedians, developers, or just projects, are better when writing is involved in ideas to realization of those ideas.
Writing it down and notes is a form of brainstorming. Brainstorming allows ideas to be spontaneous and allows improvisation to get to better ideas. Even writing down bad ideas because somewhere in it is something good.
I use notes apps but more now just a repo (super easy with github.dev everywhere) and notes have easy history that way and you can freely add/remove without feeling like notes are lost. When I use notes apps or even Google Docs, yes they have history but it isn't as fluid/quick as github for that. The important thing is find something that works for you that makes the barrier to writing it down almost non-existent. It needs to be very easy to write things down in between busy days and to capture these fleeting moments.
We think we write to remember, but it's really the act of letting go as the article gets into as a theory, that really lets those notes become effective to us. We can revisit these notes at a later date, with fresh eyes, having forgotten about it entirely. It adds value, not because the original idea or note was particularly great, but because of what we are then combining it with (action and experience).
This is also why blindly making notes isn't effective as a form of memorizing. You are writing just to write, you have to revisit them blindly in a new way for them to become effective with a new combination. As if you are a chemist creating a new concoction previously thought impossible.
So let your notes app become a giant trash pile. It's better for you, and they should do their job with proper search anyways. Don't spend time optimizing for note link graphs or any of that BS that doesn't help you and you absolutely will stop caring about those "features" in 5 months anyways. Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind.