Ideaflow

Seeding my Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ blog with more random posts, e.g. here's something I had on backlog for a while: # The append-and-review note An approach to note taking that I stumbled on and has worked for me quite well for many years. I find that it strikes a good balance of being super simple and easy to use but it also captures the majority of day-to-day note taking use cases. Data structure. I maintain one single text note in the Apple Notes app just called "notes". Maintaining more than one note and managing and sorting them into folders and recursive substructures costs way too much cognitive bloat. A single note means CTRL+F is simple and trivial. Apple does a good job of optional offline editing, syncing between devices, and backup. Append. Any time any idea or any todo or anything else comes to mind, I append it to the note on top, simply as text. Either when I'm on my computer when working, or my iPhone when on the go. I don't find that tagging these notes with any other structured metadata (dates, links, concepts, tags) is that useful and I don't do it by default. The only exception is that I use tags like "watch:", "listen:", or "read:", so they are easy to CTRL+F for when I'm looking for something to watch late at night, listen to during a run/walk, or read during a flight, etc. Review. As things get added to the top, everything else starts to sink towards the bottom, almost as if under gravity. Every now and then, I fish through the notes by scrolling downwards and skimming. If I find anything that deserves to not leave my attention, I rescue it towards the top by simply copy pasting. Sometimes I merge, process, group or modify notes when they seem related. I delete a note only rarely. Notes that repeatedly don't deserve attention will naturally continue to sink. They are never lost, they just don't deserve the top of mind. Example usage: - Totally random idea springs to mind but I'm on the go and can't think about it, so I add it to the note, to get back around to later. - Someone at a party mentions a movie I should watch. - I see a glowing review of a book while doom scrolling through X. - I sit down in the morning and write a small TODO list for what I'd like to achieve that day. - I just need some writing surface for something I'm thinking about. - I was going to post a tweet but I think it needs a bit more thought. Copy paste into notes to think through a bit more later. - I find an interesting quote and I want to be reminded of it now and then. - My future self should really think about this thing more. - I'm reading a paper and I want to note some interesting numbers down. - I'm working on something random and I just need a temporary surface to CTRL+C and CTRL+V a few things around. - I keep forgetting that shell command that lists all Python files recursively so now I keep it in the note. - I'm running a hyperparameter sweep of my neural network and I record the commands I ran and the eventual outcome of the experiment. - I feel stressed that there are too many things on my mind and I worry that I'll lose them, so I just sit down and quickly dump them into a bullet point list. - I realize while I'm re-ordering some of my notes that I've actually thought about the same thing a lot but from different perspectives. I process it a bit more, merge some of the notes into one. I feel additional insight. When I note something down, I feel that I can immediately move on, wipe my working memory, and focus fully on something else at that time. I have confidence that I'll be able to revisit that idea later during review and process it when I have more time. My note has grown quite giant over the last few years. It feels nice to scroll through some of the old things/thoughts that occupied me a long time ago. Sometimes ideas don't stand the repeated scrutiny of a review and they just sink deeper down. Sometimes I'm surprised that I've thought about something for so long. And sometimes an idea from a while ago is suddenly relevant in a new light. One text note ftw.