> The value of a note is directly proportional to the number of times it is visited.
That’s an easy thing to measure, but that doesn’t make it a good measure.
A note is valuable when it aids your thinking, problem solving, recall, etc. How many times you visit it is irrelevant. Some of my most valuable notes were ones I visited once or twice. Some were valuable because I just wrote it down; that was enough to aid my memory or thinking.
Proxy metrics are more harmful than the worst data-hoarding habits. See: JIRA
I am never sure which notes I am going to reference again. Most of my daily notes go unread forever. But occasionally, that seemingly trivial thing that I jotted down in a meeting turns out to be _very_ important. I have AI assistants that take notes for me too, but somehow I can’t stop taking notes in meetings - and occasionally this has saved me (note taker bugged out).
Daily notes are also where I do a lot of scratch pad thinking, and occasionally those come in handy as well.
I agree here. When I take notes more formally in a structured way, I often feel like there isn't a good place to store something. Or I think something is so scrappy that it doesn't "deserve" to be a note in a carefully curated store, so I don't write it down.
When taking daily notes... I can just literally fire anything into the note and forget about it.
If it's something I'm actively working on, it'll be in a note from a couple of days back.
If it's something more historic, it can sit gathering dust and I never need to worry about it and maybe if I need something I can just search over the notes files.
“That value is exponentiated each time a note is shared.”
I disagree, I write notes for my eyes only. They would be less useful, not more, if I shared them: I world have to make sure others understand it, and would need to censor it to avoid offense.
A note that will be shared is called email, or a social media post, not a note. A note is for personal use. This notion of a note being more valuable if shared is baffling to me.
This is quite a personal thing... I'm terrible at note taking and I've tried a few methods. I find organising this kind of "data" very difficult and I also find habit forming around note taking very difficult also. Finally, I always hated the idea of daily notes/journaling, so I resisted it for the longest time.
But when I finally started making a journal it was a lifeline. It works so well for me. I stop worrying about what I'm writing, how well I'm writing it, how I'm structuring it, where I'm storing it... and I just write it.
If it's something pertinent to what I"m working on, then it'll be a note from the last few days. Old notes, I just don't worry about.
I do have a page for "todo" type thing and I'm still working on that and I also write "proper" documentation separately. But daily notes are a huge win for me.
I have a single system that I use for both digital and paper notes. Start writing, put new stuff at the end. Date every entry. Use topic headings that stand out clearly from the text. When it gets too full, slap a date on the file / notebook and open a new one.
Mostly this is not for returning to, but for thinking things through, although the paper system is also good for to do lists.
Nice. I followed this process of appending the date instead of new notes (or pages) because the paper is too costly. I fell in love with the Midori MD Notebook. I do not want to waste space on the paper, and hence keep appending new notes.
Btw, try out those translucent sticky notes for the highlights.
That is a great notebook; I agree that it’s too fine to leave pages unwritten. The only time I do that is when I change jobs. I’ll have to search up those sticky notes; I didn’t know they existed!
Well I have been doing daily notes for probably 10 or 15 years, and love it. The clean slate every day is a godsend, and it's really not that hard to 'cat <some range>' or even cat * | vim - if you want a full note.
I guess all I can do is average out TFA since we precisely disagree.
I disagree with the author, but I also get the impression that their view of notes is fundamentally different than mine so there's that.
I like the way LogSeq implemented daily notes, UX wise. It's an infinite scrolling page where you can add and edit dailies, so I end up "doomscrolling" my daily notes and re-reading them a lot more often than in other apps.
> Instead you should focus on creating notes that you are likely to revisit or likely to share.
One interesting thing I have discovered: the interface matters just as much as the content.
The faster you can recall notes, the more useful you find them, which makes it more likely you will write more notes.
I also put answers in the titles of my notes which allows me to scan a list of previously solved issues. The combination of a vague yyyy-mm-dd.md title and just a file system UI makes recall harder.
I have a fuzzy search app for Apple Notes that has been working well for me:
It's difficult for me to read past the sentiment of the author's language, which is unfortunate, because there are interesting ideas here.
At any rate, my takeaway isn't anything to do with whatever the author considers a "daily" note or not, but about how the way we structure and synthesize our thoughts, alters the things we make.
For example, if in the creative process, I create an audience for myself (i.e. by thinking of sharing my notes), that may or may not introduce productive constraints to my process. On one hand, it could force me to better articulate my thoughts. On the other, my inner critic could preclude important insights.
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That’s an easy thing to measure, but that doesn’t make it a good measure.
A note is valuable when it aids your thinking, problem solving, recall, etc. How many times you visit it is irrelevant. Some of my most valuable notes were ones I visited once or twice. Some were valuable because I just wrote it down; that was enough to aid my memory or thinking.
Proxy metrics are more harmful than the worst data-hoarding habits. See: JIRA
Daily notes are also where I do a lot of scratch pad thinking, and occasionally those come in handy as well.
When taking daily notes... I can just literally fire anything into the note and forget about it.
If it's something I'm actively working on, it'll be in a note from a couple of days back.
If it's something more historic, it can sit gathering dust and I never need to worry about it and maybe if I need something I can just search over the notes files.
I disagree, I write notes for my eyes only. They would be less useful, not more, if I shared them: I world have to make sure others understand it, and would need to censor it to avoid offense.
A note that will be shared is called email, or a social media post, not a note. A note is for personal use. This notion of a note being more valuable if shared is baffling to me.
But when I finally started making a journal it was a lifeline. It works so well for me. I stop worrying about what I'm writing, how well I'm writing it, how I'm structuring it, where I'm storing it... and I just write it.
If it's something pertinent to what I"m working on, then it'll be a note from the last few days. Old notes, I just don't worry about.
I do have a page for "todo" type thing and I'm still working on that and I also write "proper" documentation separately. But daily notes are a huge win for me.
Mostly this is not for returning to, but for thinking things through, although the paper system is also good for to do lists.
Btw, try out those translucent sticky notes for the highlights.
I guess all I can do is average out TFA since we precisely disagree.
https://jodavaho.io/tags/bash.html
I like the way LogSeq implemented daily notes, UX wise. It's an infinite scrolling page where you can add and edit dailies, so I end up "doomscrolling" my daily notes and re-reading them a lot more often than in other apps.
One interesting thing I have discovered: the interface matters just as much as the content.
The faster you can recall notes, the more useful you find them, which makes it more likely you will write more notes.
I also put answers in the titles of my notes which allows me to scan a list of previously solved issues. The combination of a vague yyyy-mm-dd.md title and just a file system UI makes recall harder.
I have a fuzzy search app for Apple Notes that has been working well for me:
https://github.com/emadda/hot-notes
At any rate, my takeaway isn't anything to do with whatever the author considers a "daily" note or not, but about how the way we structure and synthesize our thoughts, alters the things we make.
For example, if in the creative process, I create an audience for myself (i.e. by thinking of sharing my notes), that may or may not introduce productive constraints to my process. On one hand, it could force me to better articulate my thoughts. On the other, my inner critic could preclude important insights.