I have seen endless books and blogs and forum posts espousing the use of specific note-taking techniques that are meant to give a leg up to anyone who takes notes as part of their daily life. I am bothered that most of these techniques assume a certain disposition of note-taker – You are either a student taking notes for topics in class that you will later be tested on, or you are a “researcher” of some kind taking notes to help you think through complex topics for deeper meaning.

In the former case, students have a variety of note-taking tools that have lasted for what seems like millennia. Cornell Notes, a system designed in the 1950’s, is a note-taking strategy that allows students to quiz themselves on details they take notes on, which is generally regarded as a good practice for study. Sadly, there are many studies that report the general achievement of Cornell Notes takers isn’t statistically better than other students.

In the latter case, there are proponents of note organization using Zettlekasten and other techniques, where smaller notes are taken and interconnected, rather than having longer notes on topical areas. I’m not sure why, but there seem to be a majority of “researchers” using this technique that are performing bible study, which also flavors a lot of the conversation about purpose and mechanism. Champions of this technique seem to value the interconnectivity of the notes more than the individual notes themselves. I can see the intent, but there’s a problem…

Daily Business Work Need Not Apply

I feel like I am a reasonably typical business note taker. Or at least, there are enough people with note-taking needs like mine, which are different from those note-takers I’ve mentioned above, that my needs merit a different kind of note-taking.

I don’t have a need to take a note every day. Maybe every work day, but more likely, I need to track threads of conversation about topics through different meetings. For example, I have one-on-one meetings with folks throughout the week; It’s probably how I spend most of my work time. I would really like to know, when I am meeting with Bob, what Bob and I discussed last time we met and anything related to things Bob is working on. I want that to come up instantly without having to do a bunch of manual tagging. As you can imagine, this need doesn’t benefit from a “daily note”. Where I might capture the meeting with Bob during a day, the daily note itself doesn’t aid in this specific function.

Moreover, if Bob is working on the TPS project, I’d really like to be able to see recent notes that mention TPS when I go to talk to Bob. I could tag all of these meetings with TPS, I guess. But I’d also need to know that I should cover TPS with Bob, so do I tag Bob’s contact page with “#TPS”? Do I tag every meeting with Bob with “#TPS”? I’m not sure of the best way to get this surfaced when I need to. Again, Daily Notes don’t help with this.

These meetings also tend to be classical 1:1 notes. Like, I want to make sure I’m talking with Bob about his career growth at a regular pace. I want to make sure that any of the seasonal topics (our busy season, the Employee Opinion Survey, quarterly reviews, etc) come up at the proper cadence. It shouldn’t be something I have to correlate in the mornings over coffee before work before I can even consider how I talk to Bob about them. To be clear, the difference here is that I want my notes to tell me that I should talk to Bob about performance evaluations on the right schedule, and not to have to go see what the schedule is and then apply that manually to all of the notes I have that day to ensure that I have that conversation.

And let’s talk about to-dos for just a moment. I have tried all of the to-do apps out there. I really have. They’re all terrible. Why? Because they’re not in my notes where I will see them. It’s as simple and stupid as that. If it’s a separate app, I just won’t. And with all of the added context of my notes, I would have to go back to my notes from the to-do app to see what the to-do is all about anyway. (Nevermind having to figure out how to attach a URL to a to-do item in Todoist or whatever, a complication that seems trivial but is just a pain when I already have that URL in my notes!)

I want a way to review my to-dos in my notes, but there are some downsides to the single notes app for this. Primarily, there’s no obvious and single way to see all of the to-dos but also to group them by topic area. Let’s be real for a moment: There are different kinds of to-dos. There are the ones that must be done at a certain time. There are the ones that have to be done by a certain time. There are the ones that should be done by the next time something happens (which can vary significantly). There are delegable to-dos. There are recurring to-dos. There are to-dos you can only do at certain times, like during the work day. There are to-dos that - unfortunately - you will never do, but just feel good to identify and have written down.

And then there’s the whole philosophy of reviewing your done items. That’d be nice. I mean, it would. Who’s got that time, though?

The key here is that if you’re looking at the above and thinking “wow, that’s not Cornell Notes,” yeah, that was my conclusion, too. Also, it’s not Zettlekasten, so please, please you devotees of little virtual note cards, leave me alone with your “you’re doing it wrong”. I’m not. Our lives are different. I am not a researcher. The connection from Bob to his kid that does sculpture to Michelangelo to various baroque painters to baroque music to the contemporary use of the fiddle… That kind of connection between notes is not useful to me. And the metadata to source that ability is more effort than my day can suffer in note-taking.

What I’m Doing Now

Let me declare that I am a devout Obsidian user. Everything is markdown and it’s all in one vault. I put my work stuff in there. I put my personal stuff in there. Everything goes in Obsidian. I can no longer stand the lack of portability of WYSIWYG editors. As a former Bear user, when they switched to the WYSIWYG editing with version 2.0, I was out. Markdown or nothing.

But when you start with all of your notes in a directory structure, formatted in markdown, you start to ask questions about how you should organize things. For the longest time, when I was using Bear, I just used the tag system it implemented to organizally organize my notes.

These days, in Obsidian, tags aren’t very useful. I more organize my notes into folders. There aren’t a lot of cross-themed notes in my vault (which is the primary thing that will send Zettlekasten warriors into a tizzy), so there isn’t a lot of reason to tag everything. When things are tagged, it’s often intentionally for this purpose or for the purpose of moving a file to its right location – I use a plugin that moves files to specific folders based on some criteria, one of them being certain tags. Using this plugin, I can create a new file anywhere (a kind of flaw with Obsidian, IMO) and have it move where it belongs quickly. Another example of this is using this same plugin to move files that have a title like “24w39” into my “Work Weeklies” folder, where this title would be for 2024 and the 39th week of the year.

This brings me to another point: Daily notes are the worst.

This flies in the face of Obsidian convention, I know. But there’s something distasteful about having a note file for every single day, even if there’s nothing to note there. I really don’t want to use my markdown files as a weird frontmatter-driven database. In fact, the dataview plugin only exists in my inventory to show lists of subordinate pages in a directory or other simple listing tasks. I never use it to search for metadata – it’s way overkill and over-engineered.

A conceit: I use PARA. It’s a mutated form of PARA. PARA is an acronym for Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives. This helps me decide where I decide to file my notes. I also have a Meta category that goes in front of all of this so that I can use the GTD method of using an Inbox to store new files and classify them later. Meta fills up a lot, and I don’t often go back to reclassify, but I do occasionally perform a sweep and that works well for me.

In my Resources folder I have an important Contacts folder where I keep a file for each person I know. The file has their vitals and a dataview list that shows files linked to their name. All of the contacts start with an @ and I use a plugin that autolinks things that start with @ to their contact file. This is actually proving remarkably handy, but I am still having issues with linking from people to their recent 1:1s, since…

I tend to record all of my notes for a work week into a single file. The headings link to the contact of the person I’m meeting with, or are for each meeting that I have. I’ll keep my notes there for each 1:1 or meeting. I used to break these out into individual meeting file notes using a plugin that splits a note by heading. I found that this just creates a ton of files that I never use. I realize that this could be helpful solving my problem of learning what my last meeting with a person was about. But I feel like there should be a way to glean that from the headings of prior weekly notes rather than creating a whole bunch of tiny notes. Maybe this is crazy.

Why do I use weekly note files? It’s useful to keep a list of to-dos at the top of the weekly note for completion that week. Like I said earlier, reviewing my to-dos neatly is a pain. If I capture the to-dos I need to accomplish for each week, they’re all nicely contained in one place. I also have a section at the top for “Success this week looks like” and usually list a couple of items there, like “Get through to Friday without murdering my co-workers”. You know.

Before I start thining through how I might solve this note-taking problem in a way that is habit-forming and sustainable, I have one other major topic to review in regard to how I use my notes on the personal side. It’s probably worth its own post…