Taking Notes

I’ve long struggled with remembering details of things over time, so I take a significant amount of notes to give myself something to reference in the future. I use digital tools to store my notes about research topics and reference material, and moleskins to record my personal thoughts and feelings.

Notes

I take notes to create a knowledge base that can be referenced in the future. This way there’re less things to relearn when a recurring problem needs a resolution. Summarizing content that you’ve learned also has the compound impact of strengthening understanding of concepts. Digital notes work best for me here, since they can include photos, links, and can be easily reorganized for proper access. I choose to use the Apple Notes app for this, and tag all my notes based on a strict ontology of tags. These tags determined by content and structure. Based on the content, I tag it with an appropriate virtue. Using the virtues as a source of truth for tagging avoids creating an unwieldy list of tags where some are seldom leveraged, and also gives a clear definition of how to sort notes so that everything is in a predictable place. I also have a set of tags related to the structure of documents that allows for convenient sorting.

Notes app that shows tag usage and folder structure

I used to write these by hand in my moleskin, and for certain things I still do. I take a lot of notes about music production and programming, and digital notes serve as a much better place to store pdfs, code snippets, and links to youtube videos that aid with these pastimes. When I study Bulgarian however, it’s essential to write by hand in order to understand the language. For this I take notes on paper, and scan them into my digital notebook for safekeeping and future reference. This was the main reason I switched to digital notes for this type of information, as it was not productive to find a note from many moons ago by searching through my notebooks and trying to guess when I would’ve written a particular idea down. With Apple Notes, you have a much more conventient search and indexing solution.

Journaling

8 notebooks I've filled with personal reflection since 2016

I’ve been journaling regularly since 2016. This is a practice I’ve grown quite fond of over the years, as it provides numerous benefits. It’s a great outlet for mental steam, simply writing down thoughts, feelings, and ideas, feels good to get them out of my head. 30 minutes with a few sheets of paper and a trusty pen is free therapy if you allow yourself to be honest with your thoughts and feelings.

These don’t have any particular reason to be searchable outside of time. It is fun to go back to a particular time period to see how I was thinking, but I rarely have a need to go back and find a particular entry or piece of content. The purpose of journaling is more about creating a personal log of the unique experiences that occur over ones life.

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