Topic

Notetaking

A collection of 8 posts

No longer keeping my notes in a Git repo

For many years I’ve put every new folder full of anything into a new Git repo. I never questioned it, I just did it because that’s what you do. I’m thinking about no longer doing this. This morning I was daydreaming while waiting for a folder to

Plain text can’t save you if you lose the files

Derek Sivers suggests, in a much-linked-to post , that all your stuff should be in plain text files, and I (almost) agree with him. Most of my notes are in some form of plain text format, but not for the reasons Sivers lists. My notes are in plain text because I

The Daily Notes Dilemma

You see, I have a nice wiki , and for a couple of years, I have written a new entry in it (nearly) every day. These “daily notes” have been interspersed and interlinked with the rest of the wiki’s content. It works, but I don’t love it. Writing in

Highlighting in notebooks

One valid criticism of using paper for notes is that searching through notebooks is rather difficult. With my poor handwriting, scanning for certain information in a wash of squiggly lines can be painfully slow. For a couple of months now I’ve been going back through my notes periodically and

reMarkable is sleeping

I’ve been using the reMarkable 2 tablet for almost three months now. I’m often asked what I think of it. The short answer is this: I use the reMarkable tablet every day. I love writing on it, but it won’t be replacing my paper notebooks. If you

My new note-taking system: Don't take notes.

It feels like the entire world (or at least my corner of) is consumed by the “how” of note-taking. Tools, workflows, processes, backlinks, and on and on. Obsidian? Roam? Paper? I read it all. It’s fun and interesting and there’s no end of things to distract myself with.

Are automatic backlinks useful?

When I started using Roam, I found the way it handled backlinks to be a revelation. Other software does backlinks, but Roam’s implementation made it feel new. Suddenly, backlinks felt necessary. I started writing everything in Roam’s Daily Notes, and I’d link things by putting brackets around

TiddlyWiki is more fun than Roam

I fell in love with TiddlyWiki almost exactly 2 years ago . I wrote in it almost daily until late August, 2020 , when I moved full-time into a public Roam database. Roam is great and I love it. I’ve tried everything else, and nothing beats Roam for easily taking, linking,