Published Aug 22, 2024
On Note-Taking Systems
Every productivity system eventually becomes about the gap between capturing information and actually using it. Here's what I've learned about building notes that work.
I’ve tried most of the popular note-taking systems. Zettelkasten, PARA, Evergreen Notes, Johnny Decimal, the Getting Things Done inbox-everything approach. Each one taught me something useful. None of them stuck exactly as prescribed.
What I’ve landed on is simpler, and it starts with a question most systems don’t ask: what do you actually want your notes to do for you?
The Problem with Capture-First Systems
Most productivity advice starts with capture. Get everything out of your head and into a trusted system. Inbox zero. The idea is that once your thoughts are recorded, you’ll be free to process them.
The trap is that capture is easy and processing is hard. I can take notes for months without them doing anything. A note that is never read is just anxiety with a filing system.
The real question isn’t how do I capture more — it’s how do I make what I’ve captured useful.
What Notes Are Actually For
Before picking a tool, I find it helps to separate what notes are for into three honest categories:
- Reference — things you’ll look up later, not read start-to-finish
- Thinking — working through a problem in writing, often disposable
- Creating — material that feeds future writing, talks, or decisions
Most note-taking apps treat all three the same way. They shouldn’t. Reference notes want a search index and stable structure. Thinking notes want low friction and permission to be messy. Creating notes want connection to other ideas.
A System That Matches Use
What works for me:
- Daily notes as a scratchpad for thinking and capturing. Low friction, no filing, just dated entries. If something matters, I pull it out later.
- A small reference folder for things I look up repeatedly: command-line snippets, config templates, decisions made on recurring problems.
- Topic notes that accumulate over time — not Zettelkasten atomic notes, but lightweight pages where related ideas cluster. If I find myself writing about the same topic twice, I consolidate.
The folders are flat. Search is faster than hierarchy, and hierarchy ages poorly.
On Tools
The tool matters less than you think, as long as it meets two criteria:
- It’s fast enough that reaching for it has zero friction
- It stores text you can export
I’ve used Obsidian, Notion, Bear, Apple Notes, and plain text files in a git repo. They all work. The difference is in how they age — Notion pages drift into complexity, Obsidian vaults accumulate plugins that break on upgrades. Plain text ages best because it has nothing to break.
The best note-taking system is the one you’ll actually open when you have a thought worth keeping.
The Most Important Habit
Write a short review at the end of each week. Not a full audit — five minutes, looking back at what you captured. What’s worth keeping? What can be deleted? What do you want to do something with?
The gap between writing a note and doing something with it is where most systems fail. A brief weekly review is the bridge.
This habit, more than any tool or folder structure, is what makes the difference between notes that accumulate and notes that compound.