I was hit on the head a lot as a child. My memory isn't great, so I take a LOT of notes. Those notes and the writing/searching tools to use them are very literally a memory prosthetic.
Zettelkasten is a methodology of organizing a LOT of notes.
I index by topic, date and people involved. I can look up a friend and re-read every shared IM, email, and event I logged almost instantly. Faster than any website can. It's my own personal pile of papers future historians will be excited to find because they can actually read it.
One of my biggest frustrations is that most of my note-taking tools are not permitted in my workplace for security reasons. I have to keep all my notes on their infrastructure. I'm going to loose a chunk of my brain when I change jobs someday.
That reminds me (heh) of a bit from one of my favorite book-series, involving someone recovering from a kind of brain injury.
> “It’s been so long since I had to [use a holo-map], it didn’t even occur to me. It’s like an eidetic chip you can hold in your hand. It even remembers things you never knew before. Wonderful!” He unfastened his jacket, and pulled a second device from an inner pocket, a perfectly ordinary, though obviously best-quality, business audionote filer. “She gave me this, too. It cross-references everything automatically by key word. Crude, but perfectly adequate for ordinary use. It’s nearly a prosthetic memory, Miles.”
> The man hadn’t had to even think about taking notes for the past thirty-five years, after all. What was he going to discover next, fire? Writing? Agriculture? “All you have to remember is where you put it down.”
> “I’m thinking of chaining it to my belt. Or possibly around my neck.”
-- Memory (1996) by Lois McMaster Bujold
That last "audionote filer" is looking increasingly practical in real-life, cross-referencing and all.
Its in the backlog of notes labeled "blog post ideas" :'(
I think more general tooling to "convert your assorted takeouts into a local database" is higher on my todo list. I have a bunch of python scripts I cobbled together to convert things. If we can get it all into an easy to use database, everybody could do their own things with them more easily.
There is a ton of content about Obsidian! Also it's a fairly intuitive interface. I'd just download it and start messing around, then check out the community plugins. If you really want to dig into notes systems, then you can Google PARA or Zettelkasten, but to me, that quickly begins to devolve into homework and needless learning curves. Just bolt on what you need it for. It's very full featured and if you feel like you're missing something, just search for a plugin.
> I'm going to loose a chunk of my brain when I change jobs someday.
Ah, that is quite sad. Do you write general impressions of the work day, at least, when you get home? I guess none of us remember all of the details of our workdays anyway.
I don't understand if you are self-syncing how would you lose your notes when switching jobs? Just exclude relevant work directories with sensitive info compress the vault and ship it to a cloud provider.
You're really going to drop these three words without any context?