Note taking

Dec 6, 2020

The other day I saw a talk in an online meetup about taking notes, and although I have written my notes for years on those notebooks from the picture, I've never even thought about compiling it into a better version.

All that knowledge sitting on my drawers without a way to access it, probably a lot of stuff that I don't even remember anymore.

As explained in the talk, the note-taking method classifies notes as:

  • Fleeting notes, which could be explained as very, very short notes just for remembering some nice idea later

  • Literature notes are more than just a few words, but are not yet ready to be kept permanently. You still have to review them and condense them into a better format.

  • Permanent notes, these are compilations of things that you deem worth remembering and that help to map what you learned.

I wonder how this note taking method relates to mind maps.

During the talk some tools were suggested for writing the notes, but for some reason my thought was "I believe I could just write some text files and call it a day, no need for online synchronization"

My plan is to use the tools that I am already familiar with and find a good way to ease the usage, so:

  • nvim for writing the notes
  • Using markdown for some extra elements (images, tables, etc)
  • nvim + fzf for fetching notes and tags

The only thing that concerns me a little is that taking notes directly on the computer might be too noisy and distracting for a meeting (in person or online), so I will probably keep using my notebooks for fast notes and only use the above setup for compiling them down into a knowledge base.