Ask HN: How do you take notes? - ZenoSchool
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ohjeez
Two ways:

* Preferred: On paper, with a pen. I can still write faster than I type. And I can doodle when the speaker is boring.

* In a text editor or word processor. That gives me spelling correction, lets me create bullets or numbering. And later I can copy and paste the notes into whatever the end-product might be (usually another word processing document).

I have two ways to take notes, depending on the context. One is to turn off my
inner analyst and just write down what the speaker is saying: treat myself as
a recorder. I don't try to evaluate or comment on the text unless my Muse
insists. (e.g. "rest of the panel looks dubious" or "this seems like her key
point") I do this when I have no idea how valuable the information or speaker
might be, such as at a conference panel.

The other way to take notes is to listen for the meat of each person's
message. That means I'm evaluating while I'm listening, and picking out the
relevant bits from the speaker. (Blah blah blah but what really matters to
this project is that everything is painted red blah blah) That's more
appropriate when I'm in a team wherein I know who the players are and what
they want. And especially where I know what I want.

...Is that what you're looking for?

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rcavezza
I have a 5.5 X 8.5 moleskin I always keep in my bag.

When I read, I get ideas and wrote them down. Maybe they're related to the
book or a project I'm working on, or maybe they're unrelated. Books I remember
I want to buy, an email to send to someone, a new test I want to run - all
over the map.

I also try to wrote down my thoughts in the morning and at the end of the day
in this psuedo-journal. Things I'm thinking about, what happened that day,
etc...

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alc90
Nice - I also started (but only a few days back) to jot down my ideas being
from a book or for an app or something but I found that there's still some
getting used to with this setup.

Also I'm interested of your morning/evening ritual of writing things down -
what were your main "benefits" you've seen since you've started to do so?

~~~
rcavezza
I've tried to do consistently many times, and usually fail. I'm trying to do
this consistently now. I'm reading the Checklist Manifesto, so I have a
checklist of things I want to do after I wake up and things I want to do
before bed. It's pretty simple, like write something and read something before
picking up your phone. I'm keeping it really simple and subjective so I keep
up with it.

In 2017, I want to improve my memory and be more thorough, and I hope this
will help.

This may sound trivial, but when I get into the office and someone asks me
what I did over the weekend, I don't typically have an answer on the tip of my
tongue. After trying this a few times, it's quicker for me to answer before
going to the copout answer of "nothing". Usually, my nights are pretty boring
though, lol - gym, reading, bath/reading, writing, coding, sleep - in a random
order.

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closed
I want to have a decent process, but suck so bad. The process usually goes...

1\. Resolve to take notes using {notebook, evernote, whatever}.

2\. If not a notebook spend a week thinking about how to do it right.

3\. Take a couple notes and feel dissatisfied.

4\. Repeat.

The method that ended up sticking was using nvAlt synced with Simple note. On
my laptop it's basically a small collection of text files, on my phone it's
rendered as if it were markdown. Most my notes are either things I only expect
to look at over the course of a week/month, or running logs.

Would love to find something for notes I'd want to revisit over years, though.

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jason_slack
Very recent, previous thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13218918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13218918)

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alc90
Up until about 3 month or so I've been using mainly Evernote - but for me the
app has started to be old, laggy and it's a lot of clutter.

Since then I tried a few different tiny apps but none of them seemed to do the
trick until I started using Microsoft's OneNote. I was a bit skeptical at
first but I found OneNote to be such a great way to take notes, tag, organise
all of it in different folders and for sure there are other features I'll
discover down the road.

Also - for 2017 I want to also start taking notes on paper - the old fashioned
way.

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cr0sh
I'm currently working on the Udacity "Self-Driving Car Engineer" nanodegree.

In the past when doing a MOOC I would try to take notes using a text editor;
this worked ok, but this time around I decided to see if I took notes "the old
fashion way" (ie - by hand) if it would help with my retention of knowledge.

For taking notes, I'm using 8.5 x 11 4-square/inch quad-rule spiral-bound
notebooks of 100 pages; I figured that for the class, this would be useful, as
there was certainly going to be graphs, charts, etc that might need to be
reproduced in some manner; the quad-rule would help on this.

When I started, I just took notes in my usual style - re-writing what was said
by instructors in the videos, taking other notes from what I read on other
pages (non-video). Very linear, paragraphical and full sentences. A lot of
writing, in fact. Charts and other stuff were interspersed throughout.

My wife noticed this and said I had a strange was of taking notes, and told me
I should try something she had done before - splitting the page. She described
the process, where one side (left) becomes "headlines" or "topics", and the
other side (right) becomes "details" \- where you right down terse small in-
your-own words details about the topic to the left. She couldn't remember
everything, though, so I did some research.

I found that the method is called the "Cornell System" \- and there are a ton
of variants, but all share a common thread similar to the above. In the true
system, you also have a header (for title and other info) and a "footer" (for
a summary description).

Ultimately I found that this style is working well for the lessons. While in
many cases I can't make things super-terse (try to make a description of back-
prop and partial derivatives terse while capturing everything needed to
remember the equations - unless you're a whiz at calc - which I am not - it
probably isn't possible - but if anyone has any suggestions, let me know!) -
but in others I can.

I've found that using this, as well as taking page-captures of the lessons
(and organizing all of my data for the class on my computer), things have
worked out well so far.

I would suggest looking into this method - I don't know if it would translate
well outside of handwritten notes (maybe using a spreadsheet? Maybe there's a
note-taking app that uses the method?) - but I think knowing about it might
inspire you to create something that works as well.

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ess3
If we're talking about lectures - Personally I don't really take notes but
instead try to write a summary of the lecture afterwards. I feel that this
helps my memory further than taking notes during and going back to them
afterwards

~~~
ohjeez
My fear -- which comes out of entirely too much experience -- is that the
speaker will say, "There are three really important points to remember..." and
later I look at my notes where I wrote, "#1 blah blah #2 blah blah."

...#3? I see no #3 here.

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gravidor
I use TiddlyWiki ([http://tiddlywiki.com](http://tiddlywiki.com)). Its all
kept in one html file and is useful for mapping disparate notes.

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justanton
All programming-related notes — Quiver

For daily research — Evernote (though I dislike it)

For brainstorm — paper moleskine

If anyone knows a good solution for organizing your own wiki — I'd very
grateful!

~~~
maremmano
You can try tiddly wiki: [http://tiddlywiki.com/](http://tiddlywiki.com/)

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psyc
OneNote for digital, access-from-anywhere text. Thick, cheap drawing notebooks
and pencil for diagrams and design.

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miguelrochefort
My only computer is my Nexus 6P.

I use Keep.

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anotheryou
synced text files

actually: flat file markdown wiki on pc, raw markdown files on my mobile

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pvaldes
org mode

