I had an ‘aha!’ moment about taking notes

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending and speaking at Cincy Deliver, a conference run by my friend Phil Japikse. It’s a great event, and I not only had a great session myself, I sat through some other sessions and learned a few things.

In fact, I’ve been thinking about one of them since, and I think I’ve had one of those ‘aha!’ moments where my thinking on a topic was just clarified.

Beyond Tech

The session I delivered is titled ‘Beyond Tech: Skills for Success’. In it, I talk about several things we can all do to stand out both in our careers and life in general.

One of the topics I discuss is writing. I cover it from several different angles including day-to-day work notes to help keep you on track and give you reminders of things you’ve done as well as writing things down to help your team. I also talked about onboarding documents, developer journals, and personal journals.

As I’ve mentioned several times on this blog, I have a strong preference for hand writing things on pen and paper (or my iPad with a Pencil). In fact, just a couple days ago, I wrote this:

Taking notes is always hard because for as much as I love writing with pen and paper, there are times when taking notes electronically makes more sense; I can pull them up from anywhere, I can search them, and I can easily share them.

I also mentioned the concept of spaced repetition and using tools like Anki for reviewing notes:

There are some great apps for creating flashcards like Anki which has versions for the web, Mac/iPhone, Windows, and Android. Anki specifically uses something called spaced repetition to help learn.

During my ‘Beyond Tech’ session I tell people that I don’t care where they take their notes as long as they’re taking them. I tell the audience of my preference for pen and paper, but in the end it doesn’t matter.

My friend Eric Potter listened to what I had to say, and while were talking after my session, he told me that his session following lunch would touch on some of the same things I mentioned, but that he had strong opinions about tools. Awesome. I was really interested to hear what he had to say!

Capture, connect, and create ideas: A Programmer’s introduction to knowledge management.

Eric’s session was really good, and while I didn’t take any notes, I’m going to sum up what he talked about:

The notes we take all have connections, and unless we can see those connections, our notes lose a lot of value.

Those aren’t his words, just my interpretation of what I heard.

He uses an open source application called Logseq. There are client apps for all major OSes, and there are also mobile versions, BUT there are drawbacks to not having a dedicated device. Notes can be written in markdown, and creating links between notes is extremely easy.

He showed us how he has things set up, and the graph that’s created to show the connections between the notes. That was a powerful feature, and the one that made me realize that I don’t manage knowledge, I take notes. Eric manages knowledge.

Someone in the audience said it’s similar to Obsidian, BUT the winning features that are drawing me to following Eric’s lead with Logseq is the graph, AND the ease of creating flashcards that the app uses for spaced repetition review!

At dinner the night before, he even mentioned to me that he found some notes he took during a talk I gave back in 2014!! He ended up showing them during his demo, and I was blown away.

I’m not doing Eric’s talk justice in this little blurb, so if you get a chance to see it, it’s worth the time!

Clarifying my thoughts

I think I’ve been looking at things all wrong. I’ve been focused on taking notes, and the convenience of how I take notes, but that’s it. In several posts, I have written about the problems I have with notes, mainly that they are either physical and hard to deal with, or that they are digital and disconnected from my written notes.

My notes are not connected. At all. They are grouped, whether in a OneNote notebook, a cluster of index cards labeled a certain way, or maybe in a particular notebook, but that’s it. Searching is next to impossible.

Final Thoughts

I’m going to give Logseq a shot starting this weekend. It will be my dedicated knowledge management solution. I will continue to take notes by hand as needed, and any handwritten notes I take during meetings will get transcribed as quickly as possible after I take them (I’m thinking of notes during meetings where typing them directly would be too much of a distraction.)

I plan to go back through my developer notebook and transcribe as much of it as I can. I may even go through some of my writing and personal journals and do the same. It might also be cool to import posts from here as well, just so I can build the connections.

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