A note about taking notes (part 3)

Ideally, there is an app note for that, so every time that you need to do something that requires some knowledge beyond what comes to mind right away, take a look at your notes before searching on the web. If you have a note for that, use it. If you don't, create one. Particularly if this isn't the first time you would have used this knowledge. If the note doesn't help enough, make it better.

If your tool has a simple implementation for some or, even better, all of your workflows, learn how to use those features. For example, if it can search in all the files of a directory for a regular expression and show previews of the candidates, learn how to do that.

Shortcuts are your friends here. It is hard to remember every shortcut by heart, but I have a good way to learn them. I focus on one or two shortcuts of actions that I do often. During a week, every time I have to do any of those actions, I force myself to use the shortcut. Even if it takes me longer because I have to find the right key combination again. And if I realize that I had done the action without using the shortcut, I undo it and use the shortcut to redo it. Since the premise is that I use them often, a week is usually enough to learn them. New week, new shortcuts to learn.

I have a couple of shortcuts in Emacs that use the consult-ripgrep package. I enter a regular expression and it finds every occurrence of it in any of the files of a given directory and its subdirs with a live preview of the currently selected one. Out of the box, VS Code has a feature that provides a similar behavior. You just have to right-click on the folder where you want to perform the search –the one that contains your notes– and enter the text. It can also be invoked with a shortcut and supports file name globbing and regular expressions for the text to search.

If you are using a tool that doesn't do the things you need and that isn't as customizable as Emacs or VS Code, that's fine. Script your workflows. Use your preferred shell or write some simple Python code, for example. Don't make it too complicated. The goal is to be able to do those things fast. Well, fast enough.

One of the things that was most disturbing to me when I started taking handwritten notes, was keeping track of them. An index was the obvious solution, but how many pages should I reserve for the index? That really depends on the number of pages available and the length of each of my notes. It might be the case that I have a notebook, with only a handful of long and useful notes. But it is also possible that I have many short notes in a different notebook. Among other reasons, the task at hand, being in a talkative mood, or the number of images used will result in different note lengths and there is no way to know in advance. But then I learned from somebody who was in the known¹ that there was a better way of doing this.

The method is quite simple. You need to have a page number on every page of your notebook. You can buy one that comes with the numbered pages or add them manually. No fuss. Then you use only the first page for the index. When you are going to use the last available line on that page, you add an entry called "next index" or whatever you prefer and use the next free page number there. On that page, you add the pointer to the next entry that were going to create and continue from there.

I have been writing computer programs since I was a teenager and I had to re-learn single-linked lists on paper. 🤦

Back to digital notes. Finding the right notes should be much simpler. And if you are using a few directories and have a standard naming scheme, as I mentioned in the previous article, listing them should be trivial 😎. However, it might make sense to have notes that provide some structure to other notes. For example, let's say that I know the bare minimum about maintaining my car² and I want to take proper care of it. I could have a note on how to check the tire pressure, another one on how to check fluid levels, and one more for testing the safety equipment. Then I can have a checklist that lists all the tasks and refers to those other notes that explain how each thing is done.

That same concept applies to other topics without involving a checklist. If you are using a very customizable editor or IDE, you don't want to have all of the customizations –that you care about– explained in a single note. It is a better option to have a note for each of the things that can be customized and have another one that explains things like what is the minimum set of modification that you want to have in place and refer to the individual explanations.

If you are a developer, most probably you have heard about the boy scout rule: "Leave the code better than you found it." This rule applies to your notes too: Make them better when you visit them. Add what's missing, improve the text, fix typos, connect them to other notes… This way, the notes that are most useful to you, the ones that you visit more often, will also be the most up to date and better maintained ones.

Especially for the notes that are about ideas, concepts that you have learned, or even third party sources like videos, articles, or books, it is extremely useful to keep connecting them to other notes. The better you understand something, the easier it is to figure out where it can make sense to use it or to try it. Learning and thinking is as much about knowledge and understanding, as it is about establishing relations³. Hence, include "adding links to other notes" in the list of tasks for "note maintenance."

Your notes may also be different in a different way. While most of them should be focused and to the point –i.e., a how-to should just explain that, and maybe some necessary context,– long term logs, by their nature, will contain different types of content.

I frequently capture things that I am trying or solutions to the problems that I face as part of tracking the progress of a project. But, once this content has proven to be effective and I want to reuse it, it is better to move it to an external note of its own and refer it from the log. Then, I know what I did in that entry, but the knowledge that helped me there is easier to reuse.

It can also happen in other situations. For example, if you started with a simple note, but you made it grow over time to cover multiple scenarios, you may come up with a note that contains too much information. Don't be afraid to split it into multiple notes and keep one that defines the main structure.

Keep in mind that maintenance goes both ways. Sometimes you have to act like Wreck-it Ralph and split the notes, but some others you have to be Fix-it Felix Jr. and combine them in a way that they are more useful to you. There is no one-size-fits-all for notes and the ultimate motivation is that they suit your needs. Experiment as much as you need, because no persistent damage is done here, particularly if you have a versioning system in place, as I explain below.

I use a Git repository for all my notes. Just one repository, a monorepo⁴, and all the information is there. I can also keep track of what I have add or changed and even come back to a previous version of a particular note if needed. This requires some familiarity with a (distributed) version control system, but it is worth every minute that you invest in it.

This setup could also be helpful for synchronizing them across your devices. You put them in a git repository in one of the service providers in the Cloud (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, …) and clone it in every computer that you use. You push the changes and they are available to the other computers. And if you don't feel like trusting your information to any of them, you can self-host any of the available options (Forjejo, Gitea, Gogs, …) and use a VPN to access your personal service from anywhere in the world.

The 3-2-1 rule is a very sensible thing to put in practice.

• Have 3 copies of your data.
• Use 2 different media. For example, a external hard-disk and a storage service.
• Keep 1 of the copies off-site, to avoid that if something happens to your place all of the copies go with it.

Add your notes to your backup policy and remember that backups are only as good as your ability to restore them. Testing that you can recover your data from your back up is a must.