A quick note about notes
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!
- List with all your notes and notebooks (you can do thematic or project oriented notes)
- two panes: the note editor and the display (markdown nice output, which is quite useful if you type tables)
- keywords options: labels attached to notes, that you can modify etc… and you can search your notes by keywords (cool when you see that you asked the question you are just asking yourself a few weeks ago under the label “poney”).
- it’s opensource etc etc…
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