Keeps my thoughts in order while I'm switching tasks etc.
I do use a rocketbook which is a little reusable notebook with a companion app you can use to quickly scan and upload the pages.
I only scan the things I think I might refer back to, but it is seldom I actually do refer back.
That way I’ve got a dedicated dock icon and context just for writing notes, but no other overhead. It’s important to me that it not feel like a product, and search works effortlessly (although subject to typo misses).
My only tweak on the text editor is a shortcut to insert a timestamp and a chunk of new lines, which I do periodically so I can separate moments in time and see what I was working on when, how I fixed something, etc.
I used obsidian for a while, but for my purposes it felt like work to organize and get “right”. I ended up writing a script to join all the files into one.
Looks like you can download from the App Store now, too.
It’s dead simple and I’ve never found a bug in 6 years of daily use. It’s pretty awesome and shows a lot of restraint and skill on the author’s part.
It is super helpful when we notice something strange has been going on since a specific date. I give my coworkers access to it and we will regularly refer back to it to try to figure out what was going on on a particular date. I also use it monthly to summarize for my 1:1 meeting with my boss.
I also have a Kindle Scribe e-notebook that I use for my daily todo list. The writing experience with the Kindle is very good, in that it's very paper like, but the access and retrieval is pretty meh. I described it to my coworkers as: It's exactly like paper, only more expensive. I'm basically doing bullet journaling of my tasks, things I need to circle back with coworkers about, and stuff to chat about over lunch or shows people have recommended.
I did this too - obsidian's daily note feature is fantastic, and you can extract out pages from it if you want/need to dedicate a document for a specific thing. Since it's just markdown, search is quick - and being able to use regex if I need to is awesome. The graph view, showing connections between notes is great if you create notes on specific subjects, and link them together, or pull sections out to explain more in depth - but it's not really that necessary unless you're building your own knowledgebase, which like all documentation suffers from rot over time.
As long as your note-ing tool supports a good enough search that you can find things again, then I think it doesn't really matter what you use - as you said, writing it down is the important part.
Very true words. Thank you.
I use the Obsidian TimeStamper plugin with a nice shortcut (Ctrl + .), and then just have an append-only log of thoughts that each start with a timestamp on its own line. I'll throw in a tag or two if I'm motivated (#tickets/DEV-1234) and create a new file every month (e.g. 2024-07).
It makes it very easy and fast to just switch to Obsidian and do a brain dump before lunch / end of day, or any time a thought hits me.
I have the OneNote icon in the notification area configured to create a new quick note and use it liberally. Occasionally I look through all the pages, especially the recent ones, aggregate and reorganize some, move others to an “archive” tab, and that’s it.
The faintest - and most disorganized - ink is more powerful than the strongest memory.