Comment by getnormality
1 day ago
> But there’s one main reason that I don’t use it anymore: when I write my notes the thought, ‘Where am I going to put this?’ plagues me every time. It’s a direct and immediate pain. And it sometimes gets in the way of me even taking notes at all. I have this sensation many times a day and it’s deeply uncomfortable.
I had a similar problem when designing my personal management system last decade [1]. Every system you use, you have to stick to in order to get results. Sticking to a system can be emotionally draining to the point where you give up.
IMHO, that sense of emotional drain you get with fancy note-taking systems is tapping into something true. Only a small fraction of what we think we need to remember actually matters and will benefit from so much care to structuring it. The rest is a waste and a drain on our limited cognitive resources.
My solution is to initially write in a designated place that allows for less structure. In the to-do system, the main doc has a "landing zone" for action items to be quickly jotted down, then structured and organized later. In the project system, I'll have a "dump" file where I dump project thoughts that I'm not sure are important. I trust that if the ideas I jot down are actually important, the structure they deserve will come to me later.
Is that trust always right? Maybe not 100% of the time, but it seems like a more useful heuristic than "everything I put into this system needs lots of structure I don't feel like providing, so I don't, and it makes me feel like a failure".
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/renormalize/p/my-markdown-proj...
Yes! Keep it simple. Start w/ a daily note. Write stuff as you go. Extract from DN into a dedicated (transcluded) note when you reach the point where you're later searching for it across more than a couple DNs, or if you're confident that's going to happen. By default, I recommend a strong bias towards simplicity, w/ chronological, low-friction entries. "Where does it go" becomes moot if you are in your Daily Note: just write it here, now, and optionally extract it later only if/when doing so provides obvious benefit.
the problem with any categorization is having to choose one and exactly one category. that's why i prefer tagging. i don't need to choose a specific category, instead i add any tag that fits.