The value I've found in note taking over the last 18 months

I don’t recall what triggered it, but in December of 2024, I began to try to keep notes. I had always taken notes during work meetings or for something I’d need to remember in the short term, but I never formalized them.

I settled on Obsidian as my note app of choice, not for its plugin ecosystem or graphs or anything, but because it keeps everything as files on disk and is cross platform. It’s a bare minimum for most of the software I choose to use, and Obsidian has been a wonderful choice.

“Note taking” is almost a dirty term online. I even get a bit skeptical when reading the term, because it often implies writing down information that can just be searched for immediately. If the information I’m writing into a note can be re-found easily with the internet, then it’s not worth keeping.

I also don’t keep notes as a way of learning. I mean, sometimes I will, but I never refer back to them. Note taking is not something I do regularly as a way of structured learning. I don’t have much structured learning these days. It’s more ad hoc and practice based learning for me.

Examples of notes

I keep notes on information that can’t be easily found again. That means I’m usually taking notes on personal information. This includes a variety of types of data.

Event planning

This includes metadata to calendar events like seeing a show with a friend, or events I’m planning.

My calendar is my source of truth for time, but the notes (when appropriate) serve as a place to store additional information, like PDFs of the tickets, when I purchased said tickets, receipt information about any purchase associated, or who is also attending.

For planning, I’ve found there’s nothing more valuable than writing it down. If it’s written down, I’m not going to forget anything that went into the planning.

Receipts

By “receipts”, I don’t necessarily mean a literal paper receipt, but anything that I may need to prevent myself from getting screwed over. I like to have record of any important purchases or appointments written down.

One time I had a debt collector say I hadn’t paid a medical bill. I didn’t take notes at the time, but I was able to find the receipt in my email with confirmation codes and credit card records and was able to get that cleared up.

Planning

To me, planning is the way to allocate effort and time to deal with something from the time of an event to an earlier date. I really like having all my decisions made head of time so I can more effectively do what is needed at a given time with as little on my plate as possible.

I had a deer collision on the highway at one point while I was 400 miles from home. My car ended up at a shop in Upstate New York far from anyone I knew. I was able to plan and coordinate every facet of the repair, insurance, and transport back to me with relative ease. Working with insurance and auto body shops is a game of making sure no one tries to screw you, because it feels like everyone wants to if they can. The auto shop handling my repair has multiple mishaps between them and insurance that I was able to resolve with receipts because I was ready to go and had the next steps for transporting my vehicle back to my home planned well before I needed to.

Workouts

I used to track my strength training in a small notebook I kept on my bench. This was totally fine and got the job done. The issues I’d run into revolved around travel and quickly accessing this data at a later time.

Now I track each workout as their own note with some metadata in the frontmatter. I love that I can quickly reference last week’s lift and my notes about how it felt or what I’d like to try next time.

See this previous post for more details on how I track my workouts.

Note taking doesn’t replace other information management

If you spend time on any personal knowledge management spaces (which I don’t recommend because it’s almost all fluff and a waste of time), you’ll see it’s quite common for an individual to try to turn their notes into the single source of truth for all information.

I don’t think that’s worth the time. Other systems that store knowledge are better at what they do and provide most of the capabilities you’ll need (organization and search, mainly) out of the box.

I’m not going to save my emails separately when I can just archive and search for them later.

I’m also not going to try to shoehorn my notes to serve as my calendar, when my calendar already works perfectly with every other piece of software I use.

Online discourse is awful around note taking

If you engage in any online discourse with note taking, you’ll quickly get hit with acronyms and rules around ideas for complex structure.

It’s almost never useful. Notes are personal and probably shouldn’t have a lot of thought put into their structure. If that works for you, that’s great! That said, I’ve seen so much discourse about rules for notes that often end in a comment section patting themselves on the back for their “beautiful” notes. More power to them, but it’s often not valuable for most people.

Side note: There’s no point in reading most online discourse. This is mostly a me problem for having waste time reading and actively being annoyed by repeated low value posts on Reddit.

The other side of things is the opposite: people arguing that there’s no point in note taking. I think this is because the “note taking” they see is this formalized, structured, learning focused model that’s infinitely popular on personal knowledge management forums. Can’t blame them there.

Everyone should “take notes”, because it’s just writing down some information you’d like to be able to recall later. It doesn’t have to be formal, or structured, or anything requiring more effort than opening your device’s default notes app or text editor.

I’m still trying to become more consistent and thoughtful with my writing. I’ve got a lot of learning to do as a writer, so please bear with me.