I received an email inquiring about my note-taking system, so I'll copy-paste my response here:
Nothing revolutionary about my system. The short answer is that I use Notion, because it checks a lot of boxes right out of the gate: it's cross-platform, easily searchable, shareable, and strikes that perfect balance between unstructured and structured data.
The longer answer is: I have top-level documents for each facet of my life, and each of those documents is organized with a particular structure to optimize for a particular use case. Much of it ends up as some combination of nested documents, databases, and kanban-style boards. The databases and kanban boards make use of templates to normalize data whenever possible.
For example, I have a top-level "Automotive" document. Within that document are sub-documents for each of my vehicles. Each vehicle document primarily serves as a quick reference with vehicle metadata like VIN number, license plate number, etc, and maybe some general notes. The vehicle document contains a "Maintenance Log", which is a kanban board to track upcoming maintenance, completed maintenance, repairs, and everything in between. The maintenance items are templatized to streamline entry and reduce cognitive overhead.
I've found that the combination of templatized kanban boards and free form documents can be applied to basically anything, from programming projects, to house renovations, managing job interviews, cooking / menu planning, etc, with slight variations to adapt to a given use case.
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I'm really pleased with how well this system has worked for me, and have considered writing about it in more detail. How meta. Perhaps I should blog about it :)
