I started keeping comprehensive digital notes in late 2020.

Previously, I had kept limited digital notes because of concerns over work confidentiality: I was almost exclusively using a corporate-issued laptop, attended in-person meetings for the majority of most days, and taking all of my notes with pen and paper in spiral bound notebooks.

I took seriously the dictum to not use any 3rd party syncing software, though I never handed over the notebooks. Looking back over the notes now yields very little actual information, instead mostly half checked todo lists, phrases from meetings, and little geometric drawings. At that job I used Google Docs heavily, and what wasn’t in there was in documentation repos. I kept personal notes on my phone in iA Writer going back to 2016.

In the early 2010s I cycled through many different tools: Wunderlist, Evernote, paper notebooks, email, and project management software like Sprintly and Pivotal tracker.

Strategies

I am not a zettlekasten zealot, but I do have a “system.”

• Make a digital note for every day.
  • Move day notes into Year / Month folder every week or so.
  • Don’t be shy about going back to update and edit notes.
• Use lists for everything.
  • Blocks of text are daunting, even if they’re well written.
  • Lists, on the other hand, decompose ideas for you with their structure.
  • They can’t do everything, but they’re good enough for plotting most thoughts.
• Work notes should always be linked under a common topic.
  • This delineates work from not-work. I use the same notebook for both work and personal notes, so nesting everything under a work tag makes it easy for me to divert to non-work as needed, as well as keeping a definite record of my day-to-day work activities.
• Tag topics and long running projects.
  • Move sections of day notes into topic pages with bi-directional linking.

Tools

I’ve been using Obsidian since 2021 and it’s been exactly what I had been looking for in a note taking app. Namely:

• Apps for Mac, iOS, and Windows
• Wiki-style linking
• Automatic day notes

Before that I used Roam Research. I give credit to Roam for introducing me to the concept of a daily note.