Comment by mikestorrent
1 day ago
There's a great meme with the classic intelligence bell curve setup where the "grug" and the "elite" sides both use a plain text file with their own ideas of how to do things, and only the "midwit" in the middle is using a huge pile of tooling to accomplish roughly the same thing.
I too went through the phase of using Dendron and Obsidian as well as more common todo list tools (and tickets)... and here I am back at Apple Notes, whose sole advantage over a text file is that it has enough capabilities to store a screenshot. That's all I really needed. My notes are like the classic notebook: a lot of the time it's write-only, a lot of the time it only has to be able to be understood for a week or two before the information is too old to matter anyway.
Don't overthink it.
>There's a great meme with the classic intelligence bell curve setup
This meme has taken on the character of the "Einstein was bad at math and school" urban legend. Yes, you can overthink it, but you can also under-think it if you picture yourself to be some romantic-era genius sitting in a heap of notes. If you want to go meta you might as well put the usage of that meme on the middle of the curve.
You don't need 15 note taking apps but it does pay off to invest in at least a bit of a system (I'd recommend https://johnnydecimal.com/ because it takes about an hour to set up), because you're not actually the 150 IQ guy and you probably benefit from a bit of structure (as do most very intelligent people in real life)
> it does pay off to invest in at least a bit of a system
Sorry, but the whole point of the meme is that you get stuck in this mindset and you think you're talking to the grug side making your argument, when you might actually be talking to someone who's emerged from the far side of this particular Dunning-Kruger test.
As I said, I've been through the systems, I've been mindful, I've made connections and structure, I wrote my own wiki software half a lifetime ago... and in the end... there's just not that much value to it, I found. I don't really find much in my old notes that ever helps me enough to be worth the additional effort.
For a while, when I had an office, I enjoyed a post-it note based "system" where I'd just stick notes in places around my monitor, which is ugly and I hate seeing them, so they get done in order to help me clean up. I'd do that again if I had an office again...
Why is capability to store a screenshot useful in a to-do list?
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I have several TODO items on my current project for fixing HMI screens. Those will be performed by one of my teammates. I could easily embed images into the org-mode document I use.
Unfortunately for him, the HMI is air-gapped so getting screenshots is cumbersome. He'll have to make do with my notes.
TODO: Fix this <screenshot of thing>
Takes like two or three seconds to add; then I continue doing what was more important, and flip back to this with a decent context jumpstart later.