A note about taking notes (part 2)

Use a tool that is convenient for you. It can be an app meant for taking notes, like Obsidian, OneNote, or Keep, or just a plain text editor, like Emacs –my favorite,– VSCode, or vim¹. Don't feel bad if you ignore anybody's advice –including mine– and focus on your use cases to choose your tool. Trying a few options for a couple of weeks each should be helpful here.

Hopefully the tools that you have chosen will be powerful enough to use templates and snippets. You want to use templates to maintain the structure of your notes, because that is very helpful for using them later, while avoiding to type all the boilerplate. The snippets are helpful for a similar reason, but focus on parts of your notes, like code blocks or inserted images. Having both available will make the note taking process more efficient and lower your resistance to take a new note.

In case you are interested, in Emacs I use Org Mode capture templates and tempel.

At the very least you want to have a clear idea on how to conduct the most common tasks: add a note, search for a note, filter notes, navigate the references… All of these should be doable using your tools and, if possible, they should happen in the least disruptive way, making it easy to come back to what you were doing before. Try to do those things when your choosing a tool and get to know those workflows by heart.

I use a shortcut to create notes that takes me to a new tab in Emacs, which I have open all the time. I also use shortcuts for finding and reading notes. Those shortcuts use ripgrep from Emacs to find the relevant notes, using text or regular expressions, and show me a list with previews of the candidates.

Taking notes while I have a computer in front of me is sorted out, but what happens the rest of the time? I often take walks, both as part of my physical activities and as a way of thinking about stuff in a different context. I'd say that most of my best ideas happen during those walks and I don't want to loose them. Some people use phone apps to enter text and synchronize that content with their computers. I have a few of those too. But typing while walking isn't ideal and could be very dangerous for your health as a pedestrian. I prefer to record audio on those situations. Then, I can be sure that I won't loose those ideas and that I can play them later. You can use an external mic if you want to improve the quality of your audio and reduce the background noise, particularly if you want to transcribe the recordings. To be totally honest, frequently I delete those notes without ever listening to them, but that is because most often I capture those same ideas in my written notes right after my walks. Anyhow, they are still useful because they help me in the process of thinking and, from time to time, having the ability to retrieve the audio is invaluable.

I got this mic for my phone some years ago and have used Whishper a few of times for the transcription with mixed results. Recently, I have come back to using "Just Press Record" that can both use that external mic and produce the transcripts from my audio notes. Not only that, it can generate the transcripts for many languages and I can confirm that if works well with Spanish, my mother tongue, and even with my broken English.

The other scenario when computers and keyboards aren't enough is when the idea is better of with some kind of graphic representation –a block diagram, a map, a design…– that is harder to describe than to draw. My solution here is very similar to the previous one. I draw it. Anywhere. I have a tiny notebook that I tend to have with me, but if I don't, I draw it on a paper, the back of a flyer, a napkin, or on the sand if necessary. Then, I take a picture of the result with my phone and use it later. I can attach those pictures to any note or employ them as the starting point of a new image.

If you ever had to write a long essay, you probably learned the hard way that focusing on format is not a great idea at the beginning. Just add the essential bits to define the structure of the text: the headers and maybe some emphasis where it is required to keep the meaning. Anything other than that will slow you down, make you loose track of your thoughts, and can be easily done later.

I use Org Mode, because my go-to editor is Emacs. You can think of Org Mode as Markdown on steroids. It was created before, there is a single canonical version, and it is well supported. So much so that Org Mode has been ported to other editors and environments. Even the page that you are reading now, has been written in Org Mode, and thanks to Hugo, converted flawlessly into this webpage.

But if you prefer Markdown, go with it. Or any similar format. You do you. Any of those markup languages supports basic formatting (headers, lists, emphasis). Some have additional nice to have features like code blocks, metadata blocks, or labels per section. I do recommend, though, using an open and text based format. That way you will avoid any platform lock-in and make your searches and additional processing platform independent.

The next hint doesn't apply to every type of note, but it is useful when you want to capture many things that are, at least partially, organized in your head.

You don't want to get into the details too soon. It is better to capture the main ideas first and work on the details later. Start with an outline that contains all of the main ideas, or as many as you already have identified in your mind. Then move to explaining the concepts at a basic level. And finally work on the details, while you fix and improve what you have so far. This is a very effective process and reminds me of the way progressive images are rendered.

Your written notes are valuable, however you know that a picture is worth a thousand words. At the current exchange rate, a diagram is around 780 words and a mindmap, 827. 😄 Don't loose all that value! Attach your graphical assets to your notes. If you use mindmaps often, or any other kind of diagrams, get yourself a nice application that suits your needs. I tend to use my iPad and its pen for basic drawing and an app for the mindmaps.

When you do this, I recommend you to keep two things in mind:

• Add a written reference/description of your attachment, because it will simplify searches. It is also nice to have some text that connects the image with the rest of the note.
• If you have generated that image with an application, insert a link to the editable document, not just the exported result, so you can improve that part of your note when needed.

Some people love organizing their notes into folders of a well designed hierarchy. I only have a couple of folders one for my project logs and another for the rest of my notes. I have tried in the past using hierarchies, but it didn't work for me. The limitation with this type of organization is exactly the same one that I have with my images or my email. Most often than not an item belongs to more than one class of data. If I have a picture of my three daughters enjoying dinner at the beach, where should I classify it? In one of the folders that contains the pictures of each of my daughters? If so, in which one? In the folder for the pictures of my summer vacations of that year? In a folder for family moments? How many searches should I do to find that data?

Labels are a more effective way to organize your data. You assign as many labels as you wish to each piece of data. And you just need a way of finding items that contain a given label. Searching by any of the labels will take you the desired items.

Org mode has a way to specify metadata and there is a place for keywords –i.e., labels,– that you can use for this purpose. You can also use Org mode tags for logs and apply them selectively to each entry. If you are using Markdown, some people use the YAML front matter that was first adopted by Jekyll.

When the knowledge that I am capturing in a note is based on some resource (internal or external), it is always a good idea to keep it as a reference. It will help you in case you want to extend the information, but also if you want to verify that the note is (still) correct.

Even when there is no actual source for what is captured in a note, it is helpful to make that explicit. "This is the result of my experimentation", "these are the conclusions of my reflections on this", etc. Outside of academia and with no peer review, it isn't a great idea to use your notes as the absolute truth without knowing that they had no further support.

Your tool should be helpful for adding links to your notes and for visiting those links too.