
Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes? - anudeep2011
I read a good amount of articles every day and whenever I find something useful I note them down digitally. Once a week I go over my notes and filter out the ones I want to retain and look back after a while (let&#x27;s call them &#x27;important-notes&#x27;). My &#x27;important-notes&#x27; are filled with &#x27;mistakes-not-to-repeat&#x27;, &#x27;career-advice&#x27;, &#x27;motivational-stuff&#x27;, &#x27;quotes&#x27;, &#x27;things-experience-taught-me&#x27; and so on.<p>When I am starting out on new things (like learning a new framework), or just lacking motivation, or looking to improve productivity I go back to my &#x27;important-notes&#x27; and read them over.<p>This has been super helpful for me. I can give a bunch of reasons as to why it&#x27;s helpful but they all boil down to this: It helps me avoid repeating mistakes, and to avoid stupidity.<p>In theory, it&#x27;s perfect but I do not execute it well. I do not go back to them every week to filter. I do not read the &#x27;important-notes&#x27; often. A lot of times I still make mistakes which I should not because I have clearly written about those in &#x27;important-notes&#x27;.<p>Anyone else in similar situation? Do you take notes that you want to go back and read?
If yes, what&#x27;s your model to deal with this? Any tools that you found helpful?
Any better solution to the whole idea of &#x27;important-notes&#x27; and going back to them?
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zaptheimpaler
This might be off-base, but i think your problem is not about storing
information, more about keeping all that info in your mind so you can apply
it. I tend to have an itch to catalogue and store information, but it quickly
reveals that the constraint is time and what I can keep in my head rather than
the info i have squirreled away somewhere.

The key is to understand that organizing/filtering the relevant info is a
separate task from cataloguing. I spend a little time every week doing that.

Tools -

[https://workflowy.com/](https://workflowy.com/) \- hierarchial lists, very
useful! to keep track of important todos/things to remember in the week.

ultra.work/lights-generator (thats a URL) - to track habits that i want to do
every day.

~~~
anudeep2011
That's right. I do not have problem storing information. I use workflowy
already.

Thanks for sharing lights-generator. Checking it out.

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akulbe
I'd recommend looking into Standard Notes. Cross-platform, and mobile. I
really like it.

[http://standardnotes.org](http://standardnotes.org)

~~~
gt_
Looks great. I wonder how it compares with Evernote. It looks lighter, which
is nice.

~~~
akulbe
It definitely doesn't have all the whistles and bells of Evernote, but maybe
all the OCR and stuff isn't what you're after?

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m2n037
I do almost the same thing with pocket and GitHub. I use Pocket to save
articles. I slack in tagging them but sometimes sit down and tag all the
untagged items at once. About going back, I have recently started taking notes
from them in a Github readme so that I can just go back to the readme and find
the appropriate one to see. I have only recently started doing this as the
number of saved articles have become overwhelming.

It works out well, if not perfect. Usually, articles are not to be re-read
completely, only the important parts or the gist is enough.

[https://github.com/m2n037/learning_notes](https://github.com/m2n037/learning_notes)

Please let me know what are your thoughts regarding this. May be we will both
find a better way to deal with this.

~~~
anudeep2011
This is similar to what I do, save brief notes about important stuff. I hardly
save links. Mostly it's a line or 2 from the link that I save.

~~~
m2n037
You can always put the link along with the lines so that you can still access
it.

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jeffshek
Most articles are saved to pocket. If I really like it, you can "favorite it".
When I'm bored from time to time, I'll scroll through what I've favorited. A
good chunk of the time I'll prune stuff I no longer appreciate.

If there's certain types of learnings that I really appreciate --> I'll add it
to Anki, but just a little snippet of Q/A.

Q - How should you view SSDs when scaling high traffic sites? A - "Think of
SSDs as cheap memory, not expensive disk" \- This was from an article from
High Scalability about Reddit.

~~~
anudeep2011
I have always looked at pocket like 'read it later' (it's previous name as
well). Save -> read -> archive.

However, looks like a lot of people use it like a bookmarking tool.

and thanks for sharing your flow.

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AndrewConn
Filters and labels in Gmail.

Any email I send to myself is automatically marked as read... then based on
what’s in the subject line a label is automatically applied. For example, if I
have an idea for a design I send an email with a subject of “Design - blah
blah” and whatever text in the body. The filter I set up in Gmail looks for
the word “Design” in the subject, marks it as read so I don’t get notified of
a new email, and then applies the Design label. From there, I usually start an
email thread on that subject line as I have more ideas.

~~~
anudeep2011
That's awesome.

But it should soon become overwhelming if you have a lot of content coming in.
If you want to have a glance at all your saved quotes, let's say, you have to
expand into each mail to read them even if they are just 2-3 lines.

I can see how this works nicely for half-baked ideas in mind. You can simple
reply to the thread each time you have more points.

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tzm
I use DevonThink for full text indexing of PDF, web links, docs, RSS feeds,
etc as part of a local knowledge base. Syncs to mobile as well, so I have
access to key info when traveling. I organize content into logical groups for
various projects or research areas.

[http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/devonth...](http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/devonthink-
pro.html)

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dynamic99
Does anybody think it would be a good idea to use AI to automate reminders of
the information when it becomes relevant? How would something like that be
implemented?

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jmduke
Personally, I keep a digital commonplace book —

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book)

In practice, this ends up being a huge markdown file (so I can store readable
code) with entries prefixed by tags to make for easier searching.

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m-s-sripati
I use tagging heavily with any note taking application (like One Note /
evernote). I use voice recorder to record any useful ideas / lessons that my
subconscious brain tells me. I then push it to my note taking application with
appropriate tag and push it to my cloud drive. I review them once in a while.

~~~
anudeep2011
I am assuming you will not review them all but only the important ones. So you
probably have a tag called 'important'?

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Spooky23
Take a spring cleaning day every quarter. Review notes, think, use mind maps
or outlines to distill whatever you are thinking of.

