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Keagan Van Rooyen
Keagan Van Rooyen

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How do you make notes?

I recently wrote a post titled "Why I use Markdown to take notes", the tl;dr is: I started using Markdown for meeting notes, and the benefits for me. Now I come to you with the question, how do you take notes?

Let me give you an example: You are working as normal, and then someone says something important to you. This is something you either need to complete or make note of for the future.
How would you take note of that? For me, I have post-it notes, and I will write the note on them. I then stick it on my desk in front of me. I have also tried using a To-Do application, like Microsoft To Do.
I guess I am trying to find a happy medium between the two 🤷‍♂️

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Top comments (29)

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adrianmarkperea profile image
Adrian Perea

I use a variety of tools:
・Kanban: used for my office tasks (dev or otherwise)
・OneNote: used as a knowledge base. All information I get from tutorials, books, blog posts, articles, and, my own ideas, go here. It helps to have a 2-in-1 laptop since I can use a digital pen.
・Google Keep: used for quick, one-off notes
・BuJo: for day-to-day personal tasks. Also doubles as a habit tracker

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kvanrooyen profile image
Keagan Van Rooyen

When you say BuJo, do you mean bullet journaling? If yes, I have 2 questions:

  1. How effective is it for you?
  2. Do you write the notes in a physical notebook/paper?
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adrianmarkperea profile image
Adrian Perea

Yes!

  1. It's very effective. It's easy to see what I need to do for the week.
  2. I'm using a Moleskin Notebook 📘
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zilti_500 profile image
Daniel Ziltener

I'm using org-mode. I use it to take notes, set deadlines, keep todo lists, even managing my kanban board, and syncing with Trello. And with Orgzly I have everything on my phone as well.

I'd say Markdown is a terrible choice. Markdown isn't made to represent a data structure, it is made to format text in certain ways.

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Shani Fedida

When working I have 2 notebooks. One for "put my thoughts on" and one for near future tasks that come up while working like Refactoring and understanding how something work. The second nootbook helps avoid context switching.
Beside that I use Google keep for small unorginzed thoughts and documents when I have something bigger to document.

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Chris Woods

I use a mix of note intake mechanisms.

I use pen and paper in some contexts like meetings, phone conversations, and lectures where it's quicker to jot down some notes (hybrid of outline/bullet style and Cornell style, which I've recently started trying to adopt more, often with some scribbled diagrams or pictures) and then transfer to electronic format later.

Digital format is in markdown. I use a markdown plugin in my IDE and keep most of those in a git repo (the exceptions being private things that I don't want exposed in a git repo).

Until about a year ago, for some 15 years or so, all of my digital notes were kept in org-mode because I used emacs extensively, but I've really stopped using emacs over the past 12-18 months and markdown is "good enough" (although with just a sliver of the capabilities of org-mode).

For a quick note or URL that I want to share from my work device to my personal device(s) I use Google Keep.

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JesperBylund

I used to use Bear, then switched quickly to Notion but it's too slow to be comfortable.
Then Roam Research hit the scene. So now I'm all in on Graph based notes, and personally use Ting.

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kvanrooyen profile image
Keagan Van Rooyen

Ting looks very interesting. I signed up for the beta, hopefully I can test it out

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akdeberg profile image
Anik Khan

Taking notes is important than ever as we are sitting on a pile of information. We need to find a way to organize them and make them useful. Thats why I always felt the urge of taking notes.
I went to asking people about this. Many recommends using the note taking app called Notion.
I liked it; feature-rich and powerful

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kvanrooyen profile image
Keagan Van Rooyen

I've seen a lot of good things said about Notion, I think I will give it a try. Thanks for the suggestion.

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waylonwalker profile image
Waylon Walker • Edited

I need to take more notes. Mine are in markdown and end up on my website.

waylonwalker.com/notes

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kvanrooyen profile image
Keagan Van Rooyen

Looks good! Before I decide to put notes on my website, I need to finish re-doing it 😂

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Devstories Playground

If I do have a pen and paper, I prefer to use it to take notes most especially in meetings and pair programming. I also use Google Keep for personal stuff, google docs for easy collaboration with a teammate or simply pin on my sticky notes. I would love to try Stackedit. Thanks for the suggestions.

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Vico Biscotti

Everything in two places:

  • Evernote: general notes and errands. Extensive use of notebooks, tags, saved searches, and shortcuts.
  • XPlan (my own product): todos. Extensive use of stages, tags, saved searches, and hierarchies.
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Cesar Aguirre • Edited

I use Markdown too. I keep three files: todo.txt, later.txt and done.txt. I've been trying Zettlekasten recently with pen and paper