A quick thread on how I take notes:

In middle school I took a class about organization - while all my friends acted up, I learned a skill I used through high school: Cornell Notes

Subjects go on the left and notes go on the right - you can even fold the two sections for a study guide! https://i.imgur.com/ZIv8gFY.png

bringing mini apps to 1B users @base              dylansteck.com

I felt it was important to stay organized and also liked that this method could be used as a study guide, instead of making flash cards. 

I'd go on to take notes everywhere I was -- in club meetings, 1:1's with teachers, class, and while doing homework. I would(and still do) over write, making sure I held nothing back

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I'd also just read a book called Essentialism by GregMcKeown, and so the methods like Zettlekasten and GTD that users of Roam frequented fit right in

I moved my whole life over to Roam and I was loving it. I built a Chrome extension to sync your notes with your browsing history and was big in the #roamcult on Twitter

Until one day I hit an inflection point: this well-crafted system of tags, pages, and attributes was way too complicated to maintain.

There was so much friction in this process, and it took so much work to get a reward out of the system that I ultimately gave up on the structure I had.

I kept using Roam for a good while and kept using two features I was using before:
- Daily journal: using my daily page to journal what I did in the day. Not only was it helpful to have notes in one place, I ended up really needing daily notes to understand what I was doing.

- Block refs: Since I used a daily journal, I had a pretty detailed log of everything I was doing. So if I wanted to reference something very specific in my notes, like a point someone made in a meeting or a decision I made during a work session, I could do so and alias the reference - v. helpful for writing good notes

Up until this summer, I had been using Roam, with the exception of the occasional Apple Note(usually not as important and just a throw away note). And idk if it was the speed or the price or what, but one day I felt like it was time to use something else.

sidenote: I still have notes there I need to do smth with lol

I've probably used every notes taking tool that exists(within reason, but I mean I've gone preeetty deep down the rabbit hole) and spoken with tons of PKM teams, but I started playing around with a few that really caught my eye for different reasons:

Tana

Before Tana's release, the most hype I'd seen around a PKM was Roam, and I didn't think another tool could garner similar hype(Mem.ai was up there too, but I never became a big fan of it)

Tana is very well designed and has many Notion-like features that Roam lacks out of the box.

The thing I liked the most about Tana was how granularly you could control options on block or tags -- each one can support a wide range of key-values that could be queried from anywhere in the system.

However I kept falling in the same traps I did using Roam, and I wasn't getting anything out of those features.

Obsidian

Beautifully designed, local-first(MD files), has a great mobile app, and they keep shipping great features(like canvas).

It was also nice to break away from the bullet structure. I was so used to it in Roam because each bullet wasn't just a note but a value in a key-value pair -- and a decision hierarchy.

But I could just use bullet notes in particular instances and not revolve around them as much as I was before hand -- took a little to get over this.

LogSeq

LogSeq is the app I've been using most recently for my daily notes, while I still use Obsidian to write articles and thoughts for my dylansteck.com - which I then pull from GH as a headless CMS.

It's similar to Roam and works with local files, but felt I wasn't getting anything extra out of it.

On top of that, I realized it was time for me to have an organization system that better tracked my projects & progress on them -- I wanted to do this in a more visual and non-bullet based interface, and one that was easier to set up than a whole system of tags and queries(that still wouldn't look great).

I had been thinking for a while - can I just do what I want to do in Notion?

The reasons I was thinking about Notion are: you can publicly share links, you can visually edit content in different data types that look nice(their galleries are really well designed for example), web embeds, and mobile capture/app

And on top of this, I miss having one place to store all of my stuff. For some reason Notion just feels like a good place for this right now, even though it's not local first and might not have as great support for certain note-taking features.

Here's how I have it set up right now -- it's super simple. 

I have a gallery of daily notes, where I log what I did for my own notes. Then below I have a tasks board, where each task has a status and an assigned project(I included personal as a project too).  https://i.imgur.com/yCNpeET.png

I also have a page of lists I want to create -- so that I can create collections(like a moodboard for a project or topic) and also keep a bucket of links to review(so they're not lost in Pocket or elsewhere). But I haven't set these up yet, I've just been focused on my daily notes and tasks so I can get things done

Other than things being scattered across apps or not as organized as they can be, the main reason I wanted to re-organize my work was because I felt I didn't have a direction when I sat down at the computer -- I was just hopping from thing to thing.

Me using Notion is also a reset to make sure I stick to one system.

And that brings us to the end of the thread! 

Is the workflow perfect? No. 
Am I already thinking about add-ons and plugins? Yes.

But at the end of the day, you need to figure out habits that work well for you and stick to them - the differences in these apps aren't crazy and making a complex routine gets in your way

During my junior year of high school, I stumbled on a tool that changed how I think about notes -- Roam Research. 

As I'd just started research for @cortex, two thoughts came across my mind:
- this note taking style will change how I get things done in my life
- imagine these backlinks and extensions but for the web