Ask HN: How often do your review notes?

9 points by nullptr_deref 2 years ago | 9 comments

I see a lot of people writing about note-taking and all the software around it. But how often do you review it?

I am curious because do you have a dedicated hour in your work schedule that you allocate for cleaning up notes? Otherwise, it feels quite counter intuitive to take those fleeting notes.

Given how swiftly the field changes, the notes also change in same rate. So wouldn’t it be better to just internalize the concept and create a db of the resource that was used to internalize concepts?

VoodooJuJu 2 years ago |

My notes review involves me reading through an entire notebook after filling its pages and then writing a traditional index of important keywords on the last few pages.

These are the benefits:

1. The act of reading-through and indexing serves as a good and deep review session in itself. Forces you to think about what's important.

2. The long interval from inception to review helps me discover and filter out what's truly important and worthy of review, and also relieves me of the pressure of feeling like I need to constantly review and play with and occupy myself with my notes.

3. The index itself continues to serve as a useful lookup tool whenever I need to find something.

---

As these are physical notebooks with hundreds of pages, my review sessions are few and far between, but rigorous. It may take 1-3 months to fill a notebook and then a few hours to read through and index it.

As I'm doing my read-through, I often encounter things that I either can't remember or deem unimportant. These things don't get indexed. Only the important bits. What constitutes important is whatever I feel like at the time. If it piqued my interest enough to write it down two months ago and also piques it now, then it's worthy to be indexed.

Truly important and interesting things don't ever vacate your mind. They'll likely return to you almost naturally over the course of days, weeks, months, years after you've encountered them, even without deliberate review.

So even if I've forgotten many details of something I've notated, I can recall bits of it here and there, and if I want to read the details, that's where the index comes in: I just look up in the index of my notebooks the keywords I can recall, then I can easily find the full relevant sections on the appropriate pages.

Beware - all the notes & note-taking apps and methodologies and crap are largely just a waste of time. They become anti-productive "tool games" [1], born out of procrastination [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33135227

drakonka 2 years ago |

Pretty much never, but that's okay. Writing the note itself seems beneficial. I figure if I forget about a note it wasn't that important in the first place. And if I ever remember it, I'll have it to go back to. If it turns out to be something time-sensitive I should've revisited, it should've been a calendar entry with an alert or something instead.

fullstick 2 years ago |

I look at yesterday's notes once per day. Sometimes I'll look for a specific note if I think it has important details that I have forgotten.

I have a to-do list in the MacOS notes app. When I'm working on a list item I might write down what I did. The next day, I copy all of the remaining to-do items and repeat.

billybuckwheat 2 years ago |

I keep this process as simple as possible -- taking about 10 or 15 minutes at the end of the week to quickly scan my notes. My focus is mainly on anything that's 6 weeks old (or older). If I haven't touched it in that time, or I don't recall why I took the note, then it goes.

kesavvaranasi 2 years ago |

I find the act of writing down a note to be more useful than the note itself. It helps me commit something to memory. I use mini yellow legal pads for jotting down interesting ideas I come across. Maybe once a month I'll pick up a pad that I've filled with notes and skim through.

gergo_b 2 years ago |

I don't have a good system put in place yet. I tend to write& rewrite interesting things I find and I keep them in separate notes in the hope that one day I'll re-use them somewhere. But it's a mess.

koconder 2 years ago |

Second brain, I have processes to trigger and re-surface notes. Raw notes i "recycle" on a regular basis into my second brain. Anki is great for things i need to constantly remember like key facts.

hiAndrewQuinn 2 years ago |

Every day, but that's why I use Anki and spaced repetition instead of pen and paper notes.

subtra3t 2 years ago | |

I'm not saying Anki flashcards don't count as notes, but I think OP was referring to the kind of notes that would typically be created by software like Obsidian, OneNote, etc.