Habit: note taking while working on a task

One habit I’ve worked into is keeping notes when working on any sizable task. Some aspects of this:

  • note down anything I think of while working that may need done in the future (ensures things don’t get forgotten)
  • keep list ordered in priority (I always know what needs done next)
  • move things to done when completed (feels good)
  • when I stop working, make sure I have first in the list what I’ll be doing when I resume work (fast to get started again)
  • write down questions, problems, various alternatives (writing makes for better thinking)

Here is a demo:

thanks for sharing these tips. Really handy

I like your todo/done and the nesting, that’s super handy!

I personally use zim (https://zim-wiki.org/) to keep my notes and the files sync between my various machines using syncthing. Zim is not fancy but it has worked well for me.

I create one zim page per topic and then normally I’ll write a header for each day I’m working on that thing and then write my notes for that day. Things I need to do still are bolded, then when completed I strike-through them. If I need to find something, I use grep to look through all the zim files (they’re just text files) to find things, especially helpful as sometimes I note hardware issues across multiple topics but they’re on the same hardware type, so grepping for serial numbers or specific phrases works well enough to locate such commonalities.

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Sounds like a good process – simple and sustainable long term. @bminer mentioned he also uses syncthing – really need to get that going here.

A good notes system seems common in effective people. Some people call it a second brain.

Almost all of my notes are now Markdown documents.

I use:

  • Typora on Linux
  • Markor on Android
  • Syncthing for synchronizing files

To save a bit of battery on my phone, I have Syncthing set to only sync over Wi-Fi.

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I came across this native tool, seems cool

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A lot of nice ideas in that application!

I watched this video about note taking and how it can aid in remembering things that you read, I found it pretty useful

syncthing does not have an iOS app thats sort of bummer for me.

True. Quite a bummer for the iOS users out there…

Although there is a thing called Mobius:

ah thats cool. I can give it a shot.

I also thought it was a bummer, but when I had an Android phone and ran syncthing on it I had a bunch of issues around storing the synced directories on the SD card and around battery consumption. The way that dropbox for phones works where it’s basically just a window into the files stored elsewhere seems like the least bad mobile way to get at shared file storage, although with syncthing actually doing this would be quite difficult to implement.

I still use dropbox to sync my encrypted password database between computers and phones – works really well and too lazy to figure out something else.

Long term, I’m thinking I would like to transfer more critical files to Git (Logseq got me thinking down this road). For human generated files (not media), I would like to get everything in Git, and then have a different solution for media.

Need to try Git on phone … GitHub - maks/MGit: A Git client for Android.