Posted by MrVandemar 3 days ago
I just use Apple Notes and almost never reread my notes. The search functionality is almost always enough to find what I'm looking for. If I really need to dive deep/search deep, then I just open up the SQLite db that's somewhere on my Mac to find a very particular note. That's only needed if I have 100s of notes to sift through.
I guess I don't need to know all the link between what I know?
The reason I write my experience is: I never got it. Why make things so complicated? How do you write stuff up if you're severely sleep deprived but still have a fun thought? I just become a mess of old habits and even can't be bothered to open my Apple Notes so I just WhatsApp my thoughts to myself, to sort it out later what to do with them when I'm not sleep deprived.
Can anyone relate and did they make the switch to something like Obsidian? If so, I'm curious what I'm missing out on or what it is that I'm not understanding.
I'm currently around 2500 notes, I started 2 years ago. I wanted a note taking habit for years, none ever stuck. The Apple Notes habit is the only one that really stuck. It's a very KISS-style approach, on purpose. When it becomes more complicated I can only follow through 50% of the time. Now I can follow through 98% of the time.
So if the only habit that sticks is Apple notes - keep doing that. At least in my experience hyperlinking was never that useful, because the act of remembering what to hyperlink where was about as difficult as just remembering the what other notes exist - in which case, what do I need hyperlinking for? I also find hyperlinked text hard to read because you end up in Wikipedia style 3 pages deep hyperlink hell - a fun way to spend an afternoon, a terrible way to work and understand.
It has helped me make some sense of it all.
With Apple Notes, I used the Shortcuts app to append some text with a timestamp to a note where I log those random thoughts. I use this shortcut on my phone to type stuff, I use it with Siri via CarPlay to capture stuff while driving, and it works decently well. I have a list in Reminders I can easily throw stuff into as well, via Siri or whatever else. It looks like iOS 26 will make some of this better as well.
With Obsidian, I do something similar. I currently also do it with Shortcuts, but have made similar solutions in bash, Hammerspoon (lua), and AppleScript. I have a daily note in Obsidian, and while I always have that open, I also have a keyboard shortcut (and desktop widget) where I can quickly bring up a text prompt, write something, and have it go into my daily note (or a shared log like I do with Apple Notes). I mostly use this to keep track of what I actually did each day so I have a record of it. I need that to be low friction or I won't do it.
It actually works a little better with Obsidian, because it's simply appending to a text file, so I can use markdown really easily to format things. I'm hoping the better markdown support in Tahoe will allow for me to add some better formatting to Apple Notes. Shortcuts has a markdown to rich text converter in it already, but it didn't work for what I was trying to do (or I did something wrong). Shortcuts has a way to add to a list in Apple Notes, so that way can look a little cleaner than raw text, given there is no formatting. I swear I got formatting to work once before, but I deleted the Shortcut, so I don't know... maybe it was in Obsidian and I migrated the note back to Apple... I spent way too long messing with it.
Apple Notes also has various other capture methods, live OCR from the cameras, speech to text, etc. I don't use this that often, but I try to remember they exist for when they would be useful.
I've gone back and forth between Apple Notes and Obsidian for personal notes, and I've told myself I'm going to stop this. The draw of Obsidian is having plain text notes that are effectively future proof. However, dealing with media is very annoying. I don't have a lot of images in my notes, but with Apple Notes it's easy to just drop something in (and I can search/copy text in the images). With Obsidian I usually end up trying to distill whatever information was in the image into text, so I can search it, and I also don't have to deal with coming up with a system to manage how and where images are stored, so they can be referenced, that won't be a nightmare in the future. These are things I don't need to think about in Apple Notes.
If Apple Notes works for you and has been the only thing that has stuck, stick with it. Getting into the game of trying to find the "perfect" note app will send you on a path to madness. The perfect app doesn't exist; they are all a collection of trade offs. I once watched an Ali Abdaal video on his note taking system and it was insane. He convinced himself that it was a good idea to have 4 different apps for 4 different kinds of notes, or something to that effect. This is not a place anyone really wants to end up.
I do have a personal Notion, but the things I keep in it are like list of restaurants we want to try and haven't yet, list of travel destinations we want to go at some point, the trash collection schedule, things like that. Basically references/bookmarks.
I don't keep reading lists, knowledge I learned, or anything like that in an archive. I rely completely on my own memory in my brain for those. (I also don't open up tabs with intentions of "I'll read this later". Either I read it and close it, or don't. If it feels semi-interesting but long, I just skim it, then close it.)
If anything interesting comes up, I talk about it, typically in a group chat (I have about half a dozen group chats with various friend groups or ex-coworkers groups that are active). If a discussion took place about something, I will likely remember it. If I remember some key points, if something comes up in the future about it, I will remember enough to look it up, whether by Google or by LLM. *
I've lived this way for decades professionally and never found myself missing a piece of knowledge in any context that I wish I had. In other words I don't find a use to keep a personal knowledge base.
For those reading this, maybe it helps you think about whether you need one like this as well. Perhaps like the article author here, you might feel more relieved not having one.
* I also want to note that I operate this way at work / in meetings as well. I find that if I try to take notes during meetings, I can't pay attention fully, and can't digest the information being discussed. It works much better if I don't take any notes at all, pay attention in the meeting, and if there's anything important from the meeting, I try to write it down afterwards (typically in a Slack message) from memory. 99% of the time it works fine and once in a long while I might miss something (but someone else who reads my Slack message would fill out what I missed).
I’ve heard this concept described as the “external brain”. If I don’t talk about something or write it down, it’s more likely than not getting flushed out of my brain. My friends or calendar app or sparingly few notes will be there to remind me if it’s actually important! I only write to make/check-in on longer term plans
I’m a cable hoarder. It’s pretty bad. I have cables for tech that’s been dead for a couple of decades. “Just in case.” Need a FireWire 400 hub? Got you covered. Even better, how about SCSI?
Every now and then, I go through them, and toss out a few, but many remain.
I’ve also been in Recovery for a while. Suspect the Venn diagram overlaps a bit.
Godspeed, but there’s no way I’d give any of that up.
I'm not big on note taking myself, but when I do, the things I capture is very different from the version I put into the official documentation.
There is a good article: A rational design process, how and why to fake it.[1] Basically how we reach our goal and how we present them are two different things. The personal notes have the details on failures, wrong turns and alternative ideas, the official documentation won't have that.
1) https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/david-parnas/fake...
To build upon this point, there's a problem that writing docs is a thankless job: those who benefit from it do so silently, whereas those who selflessly shared notes later can find themselves involved in issues they have no involvement.
It's a lose-lose situation.
> An infrastructure engineer, programmer and BJJ guy. In a past life, I worked on interesting aircraft in the military.
Abraham Lincoln
I'd love to have a universal shared notes system for the whole team, but it's proven unrealistic when seeing how things work over decades.
With my former team I wrote 90% of the documentation. A while after I left they had to migrate their docs to a new system, and used it as an opportunity to clean up. I went back to try and reference a 20 page doc I wrote, going very in depth on a topic during a period where I was deep into it. Gone. I wish I had kept my own copies instead of relying on the shared platform. There was still a lot of good and relevant information in that document, but the people going through it lacked the knowledge and context to see it. There have been many examples like this.
There are also things that don't seem like they deserve a note in a formal system. One day thing X broke and we found out we had to talk to person Y to fix it. No one else thought to write it down, but I did. It broke again yesterday, and I was able to quickly bring up the name of who to talk to, while everyone else just tried to remember and hunted through their chat history. Search of my local notes (in Obsidian) works much better than Confluence. The low friction also means it's easy to drop stuff in, even if it might not be that useful. The friction on Confluence is higher. I tried keeping all my notes in there once, so I could easily share them with others if/when needed, but it was too much effort, and only a matter of time before it goes away and we move to something else (that's happening to some degree right now).
a) how can you tell some random note you took today is critical project documentation?
b) why do you believe people read through project documentation?
Yeah I might link one topic to another, but it's so seldom used because if I did it properly I'd have to link everything to everything else or create some maddening time-consuming thought hierarchy, like I believe the poster did.
I also dont use my notes to think... they just exist to roughly categorize my updates on a project or topic, and once that project is over I seldom look at it again, or, I simply archive it.
Having this virtual briefcase full of hastily tagged and indexed notes sounds chaotic, but it is immensely useful in unburdening my brain and uncluttering my desktop (firefox has maybe 5 tabs open).
I dont understand the need for thorough organization and consistent structure. Nor do I understand cradling every thought or whim like it's untapped genius.
Life is seldom like this, and an impossible ideal to enact. Linnaeus himself must have questioned his sanity when he saw a Platypus.
I switched to a directory of unlinked, tagged notes and I’ve yet to have an issue just searching for a specific note. I spend a fraction of the time I used to thinking about notes at all.
Everyone has different needs and things that work for them, but some of these productivity gurus have 100,000s atomic notes, each note being like a single quote from a book, and you realize that taking and organizing notes is the only thing they do.
But I quickly realised what you described - it's a futile effort to maintain such a thing, and that the only people who do it are absolute slaves to the systems they've created.
Worse, they surely don't really generate truly unique insights from it all because the insights don't really come from addition and interconnection, but instead from subtraction and refinement. The cultivation of wisdom, in other words - which is the opposite of accumulation. I've seen various versions of this chart and I think it summarizes the situation well - though I'd go further and be culling the noise from it all. https://magniapartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Magnia...
I still use obisidan, as it's just great software. And mybnotes could absolutely benefit from better structure and discipline in filing them - I do almost none of what I mentioned above. Though, perhaps I'm just mentally doing the culling and just focusing on what actually matters. Full text search usually finds me what I need quickly enough.
And stuff disappears. Hopefully saved at IA, but not always.
That said, I have all my old note books with great ideas :-) whose time may come yet, etc.
The only notes I tossed were from years just prior to a divorce. Nothing useful, just griping. The other ideas are still interesting to review.
For example, lists of questions for games, and unusual names, such as Ebenezer and Florence, aka Ebb and Flo.
Photos are always saved, including ones I scanned from parents' prints and daughter's growing up prints. (Film days) A few old slides have been scanned, but I keep the originals. One more adapter ring, and those will also be scanned. My brother and I have Dad's original paintings and good quality photos (from the digital camera age) for showing off.
Would have been better to figure out how to prune 50% in a way that hits the right spots.
But this would make me so sad -
Its not that the notes are useful but every few months I love nostalgia tripping on old notes. Like looking at old photos but instead of places and people its thoughts. Like, "oh yeah, I did care about that back then!"
I'm going though something kind of similar now in that there are several boxes of stuff of mine in my parent's storage. I haven't looked in them in 20+ years. I basically told them to just chuck them in the trash. I haven't seen them, I don't want to see them. If I see them I'll just end up keeping them for another 20+ years without looking at them.
Yes, they will trigger memories. Things I made in high school, elementary school, college, etc.... There's at least 3 journals. But, do I really care? If they had just thrown them away with out telling me or if the storage and burnt down I'd have no idea what was in them and I certainly don't miss the contents or even think about them except when my parents mention, "you know, we still have your boxes in our storage"
I don't know how to choose between keeping them and getting rid of a pile of trash haha. I'm choosing to throw them away. I'd prefer not to know what's in them so I don't know what I don't know. I guess partly I just want to detach from the past. Others certainly make different choices.
Many years ago I realised I never do that. I find no enjoyment in going through old photos, so I stopped taking and storing them.
But like you, I don’t discredit the people who do it. More power to you if it makes you happy.
Balanced amount of personal and family archive is nice when revisited.
For me, I've found once I start trying to follow a system, like PARA or zettelkästen or whatever else, it just becomes tedious and time consuming and I feel like a slave to the system.
After going through 3-4 cycles of this, I came to feel like the main point of these systems is to sell books to people like me, who's brain craves structure yet struggles to create it :).
I also came to realize most of my notes are write once, read never.
I now just make quick and dirty notes and throw them in an "archive" folder once they are not active (one "inbox" folder for active ones), and rely on search.
No system, no curation.
Same strategy for email.
I do find the notes useful to keep; e.x. "when was the last time I got bloodwork done at the doctor" or "what command did I run to get the debugger to hit the right symbol server for that old old project", but I spend basically 0 thought cycles on them now.
I also find plaintext or markdown to be the ideal format for these notes.
There's a whole other category of notes, where you want to share information with others or teach. This is documentation. It is best suited to a wiki format with rich text.
I think a lot of people end up making wiki-style notes, but really they are never going to look at them again or share them and they could have just hacked up a quick text file and then archived it, instead of making something pretty no one will ever care about afterwords (including themselves). It's really hard to admit this though.
I have one note per topic. I write down in summary when I'm activity studying something. Most of it i end up remembering but its nice knowing where to look when i forget. (Especially a link to what i used to study it last time). Some of them could probably be printed as a compendium at this point.
I have one note per project, running as a log of quick paste dump or thoughts when i leave for the day. Usually never revisited.
I have some journal notes. But they're rare and only written for larger events (trips, holidays).
I was all-in on backlings and atomic notes for a while, but it ended up being unsearhable. The current method could survive without backlings at all.
