Personally I’ve abandoned all of my complex attempts at productivity and knowledge systems and have recently moved to the ever reliable txt file. You can format it however you want, use fun ascii art, or just plain paragraphs.
I’ve got a daily.txt where I prepend a new days section every day and put in whatever I want over the course of the day. I also create other files for courses I’m going through or projects as needed. The nice thing is using my editor I can make a file reference and hit gf and it’ll go right to a referenced file. But this “system” will keep on working regardless of what tools or system I happen to be using.
I use Apple Notes and don’t bother to organize anything unless it’s a whole bunch of related material that I’m going to use together—notes for an rpg session, say. All the rest, I just make sure that I give it a title that I’ll recognize when I see it, and include words that I’ll likely use if I go looking for it with search.
Been doing this for years, haven’t lost anything yet. It works so well that time organizing it would have been wasted.
Over the years I realized that the best tool for that is the one that’s easy to do it both on my phone and computer. That’s why I’ve stuck with Apple Notes for more temporary stuff or unorganized stuff and Notion for more structured concepts.
Idk how long these tools will exist but at least Notion allows exporting to markdown or PDF.
Having trouble with Apple notes syncing too slowly. Wife can update the shopping list but I won’t see it for 24+ hours. Unfortunately my life runs on it. Problem may be that my Notes file has become a 15G monstrosity?
“Reminders” is better for things like shared shopping lists (not to say Notes shouldn’t be working better for you for this use case, but Reminders is another option that’s specifically for that kind of use case)
[edit] in the latest version it’ll even organize your grocery lists by category, for easier shopping.
There exist programs to export them to markdown or what have you. Dunno how well they handle embedded media. I do a lot of copy-pasting screenshots or embedding PDF pages… or entire pdfs.
[edit] “why screenshots?”
1) To record gui workflows, walkthrough-style.
2) to record whole screens of values from guis while preserving formatting perfectly (think: cloud dashboard vital stats screens for various resources)
3) to record short message exchanges from ephemeral messaging with all the formatting intact with zero extra effort. (Think: feature discussion in a periodically-cleaned chat channel; I can always turn it into text later if I need to, recording with screenshot is fast)
4) plus now that it’s almost as easy and reliable to copy-paste from images as from regular text, on macOS and iOS, why not?
Read data? lol it is usually just a write only system (aside reviewing the current info from the week).
But since it is all in one place I just do search queries using my editor to find what I need. I don’t use tags, but it would be very simple to just append some #tags in my content and search for those.
Although I extensively use org mode, I didn't follow the GP's approach precisely because of this searchability problem. These days, however, vector DBs and doing RAG is getting close to changing my mind. I want to do less and less organizing, and more dumping, and use vector search capabilities to find what I need.
Personally I’ve abandoned all of my complex attempts at productivity and knowledge systems and have recently moved to the ever reliable txt file. You can format it however you want, use fun ascii art, or just plain paragraphs.
I’ve got a daily.txt where I prepend a new days section every day and put in whatever I want over the course of the day. I also create other files for courses I’m going through or projects as needed. The nice thing is using my editor I can make a file reference and hit gf and it’ll go right to a referenced file. But this “system” will keep on working regardless of what tools or system I happen to be using.