Wed Oct 14 05:05:20 PM EDT 2026
To understand my notes let’s ask why my notes are why the are. It occurred to me that my notes are a manifestation of all the bitter times I haven’t been able to remember things and have been punished for it in some way. I’ve been chided many times my entire life “I’ve told you multiple times”, “You should already know this”, and so on. Or a favorite “I just told you this!”. At one point it was a contributing factor in losing a job. Or two. It’s miserable. I know there’s no helping it.
I realize the point of my endless pile of notes is to capture all these things people tell me casually and somehow expect me to remember forever and to recall instantly. Well “instant” isn’t achievable but what is acheivable is being able to find information. If i can get time to myself i can use vim and grep and find the needle in the haystack even if it takes a few conversation beats longer than “instant”. In this way I can solve 95% of problems without asking for help a second time, solving the core of the problem. It’s been a real game changer.
The way this works is mainly through two irreplaceable mechanisms.
The first is the naming scheme where tags are a hierarchy in the
filename. You can control + f or ls *tag*subtag* or more
recently, vim fuzzy autocomplete on a tag as you’re typing the link, and
find note files dedicated to a given topic or area pretty quickly. This
works exceedingly well in 90% of cases.
The second way is the practice of dedicating files to specific things. Ideally if I’ve ever compiled vim, i’ll have a note on compiling vim and I can use it directly. These are findable via the filename tag hierarchy. Then there are notes dedicated to the act of doing something, task notes, and the log notes which are meta task notes.
For the task notes, I do all my work of the task note for a specific task. Just about every command I run and every decision I make, every code or script snippet and often times even complaints appear in the order they happen. This is extremely useful for being interrupted - I can go back to where i was instantly, context and headspace and everything is preserved as it is and as it happens. When I do something a second or fifth time i can skim the previous times and get all the highlights and lessons learned, all the links and everything i ever found helpful. After a few times i like to compile all the helpful info into their own dedicated notes so i can build the perfect reference note so i dont have to skim all of the previous notes. When i have to google something or learn something new I like to make dedicated note files for them as well. For example this is where the recent vim notes came from.
For the log notes, at work I have a weekly note, as I attempted to describe in the previous blog post on this topic. At home I have no weekly review process so I’ve started an infinite log. In either case the logs contain headings that link to dedicated note files for specific tasks and a small summary of what i did and why. This doesnt seem to be totally necessary if youre not doing a review process but i’m finding more and more the infinite log file is the place to enter my notes now. If i start each task there i can go back exactly where I was the last time, or even other times before. It grants a concrete reference point. Dedicated note files are created as needed, often during a task, and can be searched for and randomly accessed, but tasks are specific to times and contexts and benefit from such a reference point as found in the log file structure.
This is the central skeleton of my approach to taking notes. Hopefully it’ll help you make more sense of the giant braindump that was the previous blog on this where I attempted to touch on everything. As I said in the beginning there, this has grown to be something that can’t be quickly and casually described.