> I'm a prodigious note-taker with pen and paper, and have made peace with the idea that I’ll never reference 99% of the notes I write.
I abandoned pen-and-paper in favour of text files and maintaining a dir tree structure because just grepping through your notes is all it takes to get a hold of even the most obscure notes you've taken.
This system works very well for me. One time I had a team member reaching out to me because I was the last one touching a module years ago and there was a critical issue involving that module that needed fixing. It took a single grep run to pinpoint the engineering log entry I added for that day, and from thereon I could reference a couple of notes where I added the necessary and sufficient context regarding how and why something was done. This turned a multi-day spike into a couple of hours of tests. Running grep once was enough to save the day.
I'm sure graphs and colors and markup languages and pictures work well for some, but the hard part of taking notes is querying them, particularly in the medium to long term. If you start with a strategy to easily query data, you already solved the hard part of taking notes.
I abandoned pen-and-paper in favour of text files and maintaining a dir tree structure because just grepping through your notes is all it takes to get a hold of even the most obscure notes you've taken.
This system works very well for me. One time I had a team member reaching out to me because I was the last one touching a module years ago and there was a critical issue involving that module that needed fixing. It took a single grep run to pinpoint the engineering log entry I added for that day, and from thereon I could reference a couple of notes where I added the necessary and sufficient context regarding how and why something was done. This turned a multi-day spike into a couple of hours of tests. Running grep once was enough to save the day.
I'm sure graphs and colors and markup languages and pictures work well for some, but the hard part of taking notes is querying them, particularly in the medium to long term. If you start with a strategy to easily query data, you already solved the hard part of taking notes.