How a good notes system is related to creativity? I’ll take a big shortcut here: you are more creative and feel better if your mind is clear from noise. Easy say, well, no so.
I have a mantra, sort of; as I have a poor memory when I need to find something I have done (like um code or something to solve a problem…sounds familiar?) I know I need to keep notes of everything.
Writing is also a dirty process that can create a lot of noise, let say here: garbage ideas; drafts for the most lucky.
I discover experiment after experiment that nothing works first shot. (Sounds familiar too uh?)
1/I tried the man-like kind of note, with header, strict template, indentation etc…
It fails.
It was cool to read but I’m not a machine and while writing ideas don’t go out as the perfect template waits for.
2/I wanted to use an autogenerated header.
It fails too.
Fighting with Vi more than sometimes, still loving it, but nope. Is it a keyboard mapping problem this time,or just me?
And most important: it leaks just too much info such as : author, date, path…
3/Somehow putting the subject of the note into the title.
0-0
It worked for a while.
Until I was tired of greping my own note folder searching for an hypothetic keyword that fit the concept. And there was a limitation: one topic for one note. Even with the same date, if you needed to talk about another topic, you had two file with first date like 12032020-TOPIC1, 12032020-TOPIC2… Informative about your productivity (how many “crazy/meeh/whynot” ideas a day), but a ls sort files by title so… after dozens of notes you can’t read anything but numbers and hazardeous keywords on your terminal.
When I decided that all my notes will be in markdown… with putting .md as extension and still having broken markdown output, because, well you use a vi or a notepad. But markdown was a good move!
And…
4/ “Hey do you know about Joplin?”
me: -_-
2 sec later me: O_o ?
It works!
After all this, I mean, it’s just my experience, but if it can help ^^
We often say that good work is done with good tools, or just if you don’t want to burn your brain while working on a computer, you might try to implement what works for you.
The Graaal here: Joplin