I also use a single text file. I have developed my own notation to give it some structure [1]. I have a parser for the notation that creates tree of the document. Then I write various programs that walk the tree and do cool things. I have been happy(didn't feel like I needed anything else) with my system for some years now.
Checkout the video: https://youtu.be/CpcsOiETgxA
[1] https://github.com/PratikDeoghare/brashtag
Apologies for low quality of video and code. :)
-----------
Example file:
```
[x*x for x in range(10)]
```
#out{}
```
[x*x for x in range(10)]
```
#out{
````````````````````````````````````````````
[0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81]
````````````````````````````````````````````}Same, except I append to the bottom of an Apple note.
(I append, the author's really prepending. Anyway...)
When the note gets too long, I cut and paste it to what I call the big note: a 127000-line, 4.9 MB text file I've been maintaining for 14 years.
Trivially searchable, can get context from neighboring notes (What else was happening around this time?), and easily parsable when necessary.
[Reviews current note...] Oh, I do both! - Prepend todos to the top, append notes at the bottom.
Why does the perfect note-taking system seem to be such blogging catnip? And the post always basically says "here's my system", never "here's why taking notes is valuable" or "here's something objectively valuable that was enabled by my note-taking system".
By the way, here's my note-taking system: https://renormalize.substack.com/p/my-markdown-project-manag...
All joking aside, append-and-review does seem like a nice pattern for maintaining attention on a big heap of odds and ends, which is probably useful for a researcher like Andrej Karpathy.
I find it pretty mysterious, and am starting to think it's distributed bike-shedding. I'd wager most notes, if they are ever taken, are write-only. Seems like a distraction to me.
I have been a huge note-taker for many years, but it's mostly about tracking projects and tasks at work and home that I need to be accountable for. Whereas a lot of the recent trendiness around note-taking seems to be more like, looking for a system that is going to capture every insight you have or interesting tidbit of information you encounter, and this is going to reveal things to you.
But what people seem to find is, if a system requires a lot of work and doesn't show any benefits, they give it up pretty fast. Which is why a super simple system like TFA's is probably the only sustainable thing if you just want to remember "stuff" you hope will be useful later.
A funny thing happens where, if I don’t write something down, I’m more likely to forget it than if I do. So I write things down!
If I happen to indeed forget, I’m one grep away from finding what I wrote about the topic based on some vague keyword.
I used to like Reflect Notes which had an "infinite " scrolling daily note. Are there any other similar apps to that? it's kind of nice to have everything laid out on one screen but i need a little more structure than Karpathy's single note which feels more brittle somehow
I use RememberTheMilk for this work - especially the notes feature for appending thoughts. Giving items a due date ensures I need to review things.
This seems almost uselessly simple to me. The “cognitive overhead” of a list of notes feels trivial considering this is a person who managed to put their words online.
The issue isn’t cognitive overhead, it’s not having rituals to review and refine your thoughts. Everyone has to jot down ideas from time to time, but if you never take time to stop, review, and organize your thoughts then sure it’ll feel like a lot of cognitive overhead.
> person who managed to put their words online
He also managed to do quite a lot of other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrej_Karpathy
The person is also quite good at specifically putting their words online in a way that others can benefit from them. (Enough so that it’s a bit of a running joke[1] when he quits his job and has time to write some more words.) That skill is generally difficult to transmit, so if they’re saying something in that direction it could be worth listening.
> The issue isn’t cognitive overhead, it’s not having rituals to review and refine your thoughts.
It is called the append and review note, so I think the blog author engages with your point and agrees with it?
Most of my attempts at note taking usually end up devolving to this. Not to say it’s a bad thing, I think it’s effective enough.
I may keep separate append-and-review topics per major area (work, personal, cooking) but that’s about it.
Usually in form of an outline / list, append in the front, and with deeply nested sub-points, as I “discuss with myself in writing”.
I didn't have a name for it, but I evolved to this same exact system myself. I use HeyNote [0] for mine.
This system seems quite similar to sending messages to oneself on Signal/Telegram/whatever. What I like about using messenger apps is that every note gets a timestamp and that messenger apps are, in my experience, more polished than note-taking apps.
Then you’re at the mercy of a third party service for access to your notes.
That depends on the messenger app. Telegram, for instance, supports backing up messages as HTML and/or JSON.
Ok but todos have a time cost. It takes time to watch a YouTube video or read a book or make a slide deck. Todos often have deadlines as well. You can't capture all of this in an unstructured text file unless you create your own grammar (like what Andrej showed). Even after that, you need to visualize what's in progress and what's blocked because of some other todo, and before you know it, you have reinvented a shittier version of Linear.
This feels similar to a GitHub issue.
1. Editable description 2. Comments
Next up: everybody claims this the best way to do note taking. Single note on Apple notes is now all the rage and single-noting startups crop up in droves. Give this man a breather honestly.