Note Taking

What are notes?

any written message
could be for reminder, a message to someone else, storing an information, or communicating idea
could be private or public
could be personal or professional, though the lines are blurred often

Though there are many types of notes, these are with respect to building a knowledge.

aka #sprout notes
notes I take in my own words
I might reference source notes; most probably I connect multiple sources to make a point
This is also the way of thinking for me; this is the way I've learned and improved myself
not all draft notes are public; many them are private
you can find most of my draft notes in these pages

aka #shared notes
I polish draft notes and publish them on my blog or LinkedIn or Mastodon or even send via a newsletter.
I don't publish all draft notes
Publishing is not the end of the notes; they might be pruned and updated; That is the beauty of digital gardens

Since these notes are personal and useful, I want these notes to be with me for a long time
I have some notes for the past 10 - 15 years (some of these are private journals; others are evergreen notes - frameworks, personal growth philosophies, and so on)
Open standard formats like text, pdf, jpg are going to around for decades and decades. Whatever the OS, there are going to be programs which will open these.
Choose one of these formats for your notes
My notes are mostly text files, especially markdown format. Markdown gives you enough formatting but reads almost like a text.
When I need images, they are either .jpg or .png
When I handwrite notes with diagrams etc they are stored in pdf

Don't box yourself with someone else's structure
There are many organizing schemes floating around the web; when you follow them, you are not growing your notes; you are borrowing someone's ideas ⇒ you are incurring debt
Start with all notes in a single folder
If you want, you can put same themed notes into a folder

Only organizing method that I'm extremely pedantic about is that they are all in a central location
More than folders, I use hashtags for organizing. OSes and text editors have advance features to list all notes under a particular hashtag.

The question, "how long a note should be" is personal and contextual. It has to be for your way of thinking.
My quick notes are often short - may be less than 200 words
When I write as a way of thinking initially about a topic, I don't bother about number of words
When I have to think deep on a topic or I've present to others, only then I think about length and structure

The oft repeated cliche "change is the constant" is also true for note taking
If you tend to your notes, they will keep growing with you; you'll delete some, edit some, rewrite some. That is ok

Since these are meaningful notes, I want to have access to them for long time. So I have them in my desktop, synced with dropbox, pushed into Gitlab, and published here.
There is no single point of failure since these notes are valuable to me.

Over the years, I have used many different proprietary note taking applications like Evernote, Onenote, Apple Notes, and even Google Docs. I still use Google Docs whenever I need collaboration or feedback.
Most my apps are just text editors - Obsidian, iA Writer, or just Visual Studio Code; sometimes I also edit in Vim.
On mobile, I use Obsidian now since it goes well with the desktop counterpart
I use Drafts for quick notes on mobile since it is extremely fast and doesn't block you with all fancy bells-and-whistles