Working in management, OneNote is my second brain I couldn't do without. Pages of meeting notes everyday, documentation of internal processes etc., all of which I regularly look up.

In your experience, how is OneNote more useful over a simple markdown file with your daily notes? The latter is what I'm using and I wonder if I'm missing something by not using OneNote or even Miro.

I imagine attaching files in-line is one of these things, but maybe there's other stuff you can't do without?

I'm mostly using it because our company uses the Microsoft Office stack. I put in lots of screenshots and have many different sections, such as a tab for meeting notes with one page per individual or meeting series. Also, it integrated well with Teams

I don't delete files. They are put in directories, and at some interval, the directories are put in other directories. I've kept everything that didn't die in sudden catastrophic failures. I can access files that I got before there was even a harddrive in my computer. And I love it, like browsing an old photo album, I once in a while take a stroll through my life, but, unlike the photo, which only captures one angle of a situation, I have entire installations to look at, what was on my desktop 20 years ago, what had I downloaded, oh, that movie, yeah, I remember it now! those funny pictures a long-forgotten friend send to me over IRC DCC, the chatlogs of our cringe teenage banter..

Yes, this is hoarding, but, as opposed to the physical kind, where it goes from some neatly displayed trinkets, to inaccessible rooms and biological hazards, computer files allow us almost infinite room, and almost infinite structure.

While it is probably not healthy to entertain the idea, I believe most hoarders, given sufficient physical space (infinite, really, is sufficient cannot be determined before they're dead and no longer amassing objects), their collections, their order, would look somewhat neater (although not any less pathological).

Whereas physical objects are a burden both in weight and volume, a few hundred terabytes of data does not take up significantly more room in the physical realm.. A file server, and its backup, is really all it takes..

So I don't think they're comparible.. At least, it depends, also, how it affects you, is it a source of stress and negativity, or simply a peace of mind, or a mad obsession..

I don't delete stuff, but I don't fuss over it either, it's not a big deal, once in a while, I move everything out of sight, it's a very small effort, and, so far, 30 years later, current me is grateful for past me for leaving those little breadcrumbs to spark my memories, and so, I will continue this tradition, in honor of future me.

I don't think that is reasoning in itself for not holding on to data. Do I refer to old notes? Not as much as I'd like, but it's not because the information isn't useful. It's that it isn't properly accessible. Our search technology isn't up to par yet. I have a lot of things I'd love to just google again, but they are lost to time. I could have a conversation with gemini, but where does it pull the information from? Less is not more.

Yep. Agreed. I do keep notes on people & recurring meetings (as a leader) using Joplin which helps me to recap for the next meeting.

Very lightweight bullet-points. That's it.

Gemini doesn't know that the second circuit breaker from left to right turns off the central heating (or something). Of course in this case the ideal is to add a sticky label there on the circuit breaker...

Before stackoverflow and chatgpt/copilot we had man pages and physical books. I guess some notes are still useful for some things, but like you I rarely refer to them. What I do find annoying is when someone asked me about something I designed/wrote a year or 2 ago and I don't have access to it as I've moved to another client/virtual machine. Officially I'm not supposed to retain this information after leaving an engagement.