Organising my notes
Note: This seems to have gotten a bit too tech centric again…
So it comes to a point in everyone’s life where they found about a thing called a second brain either from YouTube or word of mouth. It involves getting a notes app, preferably Obsidian or Logseq, and try to create notes the Zettelkasten way (or something similar) which creates a very fancy graph that some people share on social media [1].
Now it’s not like I don’t understand the appeal of it. Like most people who have been exposed to this, I tried dabling in Obsidian and Logseq to make a second brain that works for me. I tried using it on an off, but it never really clicked each time. Not saying that it doesn’t work for everyone, it’s just that I specifically cannot work with that mental model. It took me quite a few years to find a note taking method that works for me, which involves Emacs with Org mode.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Emacs is a text editor, kinda like notepad, but is extensible by programming in a language called elisp. Org mode on the other hand is a type of markdown language, like markdown with ways to style and format the contents inside of it. Although org-mode has a unique syntax, it is arguably more featureful than markdown in a lot of ways. There are a few applications that support Org mode, but a lot of Org mode functionality can only be accessed by using emacs.
For context here, I use emacs as my go to editor when I want to do programming or just edit a text file. I’ve been using it for a year or so, so I’ve been quite comfortable in using it (though I only learned the basics for navigation and saving files). I know text editors aren’t something that people look out in a note taking app/workflow, but for me it’s something personal. Something about my identity. This is probably why there are a lot of
What I would do is that whenever I am doing something that I know I want to reference later and it’s hard for me to find the information in the first place (for me it was on how to flash a USB drive) and write down just the answer or a simplified flow to do it. Most of it is tech related stuff. How to configure Linux, Firefox, tar. How to diagnose Windows installations. Not everyday things I have to do, but it would take me longer than I would like to admit to search and find the answer for, considering the landscape of search engines in the past few years.
If the file becomes too big (too much scrolling for example, I’m okay with a bit), then I would split it up and put it all in a folder by theme. This hasn’t happened yet as I don’t take that much notes now, although I already made folder in advance because it’s notes from a specific website.
As you might have guessed, this is pretty simple compared to how other people would describe their note taking process elsewhere. Instead of Org mode and emacs using markdown and notepad might be more effective for some. I don’t know everyone needs to find their own note taking method that works for them. There is always something simpler, notably paper and pen, but I have a problem of misplacing the paper each time, so yeah.
Originally I wanted to put a list of files and folders I have using the tree command down here. Unfortunately when I previewed the posts it shows that my setup doesn’t support codeblocks. Then again, I guess putting up my file list does constitute as showing off.
Reply to me via e-mail
[1]: Here I wanted to highlight how influencers and YouTubers always show those very complex graphs, though I suppose it came out as a bit negative here. Appologies for that.
tags: blog, lifestyle, note-taking