whatbrentsay

Recently several friends have voiced some amount of displeasure with their current note taking solution. They all use Notion, but I'm not here to tear it down. Notion is damn good software and while I have moved away from it, it's the first recommendation I would make to anyone who wants to digitally organize their life.

Offering a compelling and robust note taking app is tough. You have to have a fast and intuitive method for note entry, a well designed interface optimized for locating and reading content, a powerful note editor that offers some level of formatting, and reliable file sync across apps on different platforms that also must be designed, built, shipped, and maintained (because notes are useless if they're not where you are). That's several products in one. Notion does almost all of these things at a level I would call Very Good. It's no surprise its so celebrated and the company is worth a lot already.

Considering the difficulty of doing all the above, I'm not surprised that folks are feeling some amount of friction. For me, my biggest complaint was how slow the mobile app experience became. It was tolerable, but also just enough to get my eyes to wander. It wasn't until I migrated out of Notion that I realized my true, much larger problem with it and note taking apps like it.

When you export your notes out of software like Notion or Evernote you are usually left with a much less useful version of those notes. Two potential futures lie ahead of you: one in which you spend hours turning the output into something useful again or another in which you throw your hands up and start over. Neither is ideal and one is more devastating than the other.

The suggestion I offer is simple in principle: don't allow anyone else to dictate how and where you take your notes. If you take notes like I do, these are ideas for projects, offloaded knowledge, recipes, references for things that are easily forgotten, in-progress writing, meaningful quotes, collected inspiration, to-do lists, and more. The thought of that information, built up over many years, becoming useless in some way makes me uncomfortable.

What does owning your notes mean in practice? Well, that's where I struggle with an easy recommendation. I've fallen in love with plain text note taking in my post-Notion life. More specifically, I take notes in Markdown format and interact with them on desktop using an app called Obsidian. I keep my notes in iCloud so they're synced across all the devices I regularly use. On my phone or tablet, I have a range of apps I can use to read or create notes depending on the situation. For example, I often use Taio when I'm creating notes, especially for my to-do list, and iA Writer when I'm hunkering down for some long form writing. I won't pretend this system is for most people because it really isn't.

Instead, I want you to consider what happens when you take full ownership of your notes. First, you gain agency. There are a lot of text editing apps out there and when your notes are easily readable, like plain text files are, you can open them just about anywhere. Apps become an interface for your notes, rather than the only place you can interact with them. Don't like the one you're using anymore? No problem, find something else. Plain text notes are incredibly portable. If you're on a new machine, or otherwise away from the devices you normally use, you can access your notes as long as they're synced online somewhere. You may have to use something like macOS's TextEdit or Windows' Notepad (or flex your vim-/emacs-fu) but something is always better than nothing.

There are drawbacks, though. The most obvious adjustment is the luxury you'll give up. You won't have spiffy tables to lay your notes out with, or dynamic and synced data you can embed within them. You won't have as many options when embedding multimedia. There are only so many advanced features that can be propped up on top of Markdown. That took some getting used to for me. Now, I revel in the simplicity; similar to life, it was another reminder that you can often get by, and even thrive, with much less.

The hardest part is the best and worst quality. You have full control over how your notes are organized. Without an app to prescribe hierarchy and automatically attach metadata to everything you do, how do you substitute for them? Do you number your notes? Do you timestamp them? Do you split them across different folders? All of this is up to you. It's an overwhelming—if not paralyzing—amount of choice. In the spirit of plain text note taking, my recommendation is simple: do some light reading about Personal Knowledge Management systems, pick one, and modify it as your needs evolve. The power of this level of control is that eventually you will mold it into a system that works for you one hundred percent of the time. You just have to start. That's always the challenge, innit?

Not that what works for me will work for you, but I'll volunteer my system as an example. Each note I create starts has a timestamp in its title and is atomic in nature. The one I drafted this post in starts with 202103241947. That's something I lifted from the Zettelkasten style of note taking. I often add a title after the timestamp so my future self has an idea of what's inside. I also keep a daily note; today's was 202103240000. It contains two sections—a to do list, which I copy, paste, and triage from the previous daily note and a section called "Log." I add anything worthwhile I come across—articles, videos, web sites, etc.—to the Log along with some light commentary. It can be just a sentence; the key is to provide context for later on. The daily note is something I borrowed from the Roam app; I fell in love with the concept after trying it out.

The real stars of the show are #tags and [[wiki links]]. Tags help me find related content more quickly and don't require much explanation. Wiki links allow me to make connections between notes. Any plain text app worth using will help you auto-complete both. Tags are good but wiki-style links are non-negotiable; connecting notes is where the magic is. Hyperlinks were good enough to build the modern internet on top of. I promise they are good enough to build your knowledge base on.

That's a lot to chew on so I'll wrap it up there. Whatever your solution for taking notes is, if it works for you, you should keep doing it. If you don't do it at all, I highly suggest it; our brains aren't designed to perfectly retain everything we want and need to. Notes may just be words you return to—or not!—but they can provide you with great and unexpected value. If you find that value is high enough, consider the downsides of not owning that environment. Making an informed choice is what's important. Whichever way you go after that is right for you.