(2021-06-18) Dorneanu Note-Taking In 2021

Victor Dorneanu: Note-taking in 2021. Almost 6 years ago I was blogging about organizing and visualizing knowledge. At that time I was just playing around with Tiddlywiki and using it to collect notes during my CCNA course

Yes, I still blog but I also have a digital garden available at http://brainfck.org. For me blogging and maintaining a public source of inspirations and ideas is not the same. A blog post should be readable and contain full sentences (essay). A collection of ideas/thoughts can be just some bullet points with some random links (for me they’re not random, since I actively set those links in order to inter-connect notes). The idea is that I use my PKMS to lookup things and generate new content (like this post).

In my job as a Security Engineer I need to keep up with new technologies and arising attack vectors.

Making future-proof notes (a terminology used in a Zettelkasten system) is essential for me also because I use that content to generate new one. (idea generation)

Not only in a professional context, but also for private purposes it does make sense to actively read your books/articles. (active reading)

I’ve spent the last years, trying to find not only the perfect note taking system but also the most proficient note storage system. I don’t want to dissapoint you, but there is no perfect solution. You just need one system that fulfills your needs, is easy to use and will most probably still work in a couple of years

Note taking

In this step taking temporary notes as described by Söhnke Ahrens in his book “How to take smart notes”

will give you a good starting point for storing them in a permanent manner

Pen and paper

This is still my favourite way of writing things down and collecting so called temporary notes

Smartphone

I do use my smartphone to take notes, especially when I don’t have a “piece of paper” with me

orgzly

once I’ve came back to Tiddlywiki I’ve somehow abandoned orgzly in flavour of miMind

miMind pro

This little (mobile) application has great usability and it does help you to quickly add new notes, structured as a mind map. You can then easily export your map as XML

Desktop

GTD suggests to always capture what has our attention

I also tend to capture my thoughts where it feels most comfortable. If I’m doing some work at my laptop and suddenly some idea comes to my mind, then I’ll capture it on my laptop

During the last months 2 input capture systems established and have become part of my note capture routine:

ORG Capture Intergrated within Emacs and ORG mode... I use it mainly for events, appointments or TODOs

Tiddlywiki

Whenever I think something should be added to an existing note, I open that tab, search for that specific tiddler (a page/note in the Tiddlywiki ecosystem) and make the changes I also used for storing notes to podcasts, articles I listen/read to/about during the day

Note storage

as with the Unix philosophy everything is a file I like to cluster notes (on the same topic) in one single file. This solution is completely software agnostic and files can be modified accordingly to be imported into different note-taking systems

Other digital solutions

Final thoughts

I really recommend taking this whole topic more seriously since it will pay off on many layers.