I take notes in text files that I have named by topic and all in one big folder. This allows me to search all of the files easily at once and gives me ease of mind that text files will never become obsolete and I should still be able to read them in 30 years. I’ve been doing this for quite sometime and have files going back at least 10 years.
An important step however is that I occasionally copy the entire directory as a backup into a new folder and name it by the date of the backup. I then never alter that archived version. The purpose of this is that I now feel free in my working directory to be liberal with edits and deletes so that I can keep the amount of notes down to a relatively small amount only including important topics at any one time, but have the ability to search through old iterations at the same time.
I never scan notes I take by hand, and only take notes by hand if I’m somewhere that it’s socially unacceptable to have a computer/phone. If I do this I just go through later and type important parts into a text file.
As far as capture goes, I either write a quick sentence or two and email it to myself to later transfer to a text file or I place the note in my phones note feature. Usually once a week or so I go through and clear my inbox and my phones note feature and transfer everything to text files.
I’ve gone through several attempts to build tagging systems but in reality grep (or spotlight search on a mac) are so good at searching text files that it’s never useful and I end up canning the tagging system.
I don’t use evernote, but my notes are very private, I sometimes write in a very journal like fashion, and so I would not let anyone read them.
I take notes in text files that I have named by topic and all in one big folder. This allows me to search all of the files easily at once and gives me ease of mind that text files will never become obsolete and I should still be able to read them in 30 years. I’ve been doing this for quite sometime and have files going back at least 10 years.
An important step however is that I occasionally copy the entire directory as a backup into a new folder and name it by the date of the backup. I then never alter that archived version. The purpose of this is that I now feel free in my working directory to be liberal with edits and deletes so that I can keep the amount of notes down to a relatively small amount only including important topics at any one time, but have the ability to search through old iterations at the same time.
I never scan notes I take by hand, and only take notes by hand if I’m somewhere that it’s socially unacceptable to have a computer/phone. If I do this I just go through later and type important parts into a text file.
As far as capture goes, I either write a quick sentence or two and email it to myself to later transfer to a text file or I place the note in my phones note feature. Usually once a week or so I go through and clear my inbox and my phones note feature and transfer everything to text files.
I’ve gone through several attempts to build tagging systems but in reality grep (or spotlight search on a mac) are so good at searching text files that it’s never useful and I end up canning the tagging system.
I don’t use evernote, but my notes are very private, I sometimes write in a very journal like fashion, and so I would not let anyone read them.