Reflection: one note per id? - no chance!

10-19 Concepts 14 Build your system
1

As I get back into organising my stuff (I have been out of things for a little while) I’ve been tying myself up in knots over the nature of an id.

The ‘bookcase - shelf - box - manilla envelope’ analogy suddenly fell into place in my mind (I’m mostly digital, so I don’t have those things to start from) and I set about recreating that in Bear with tags - including a tag for the id. And for a while I felt comfortable with that - irritatingly long, and I’d much rather only two levels…

Ooooh look, that’s the idea (I know, I know, gimme a break already)

So now it looks like two levels of tags (AC) with the id represented by a note - Peachy. But…

I don’t have that many files - some, yes, (actually loads of old ones, not so many new ones). The folder structure has a folder for an id with files inside that. Neat.

Mostly I have notes.

Atomic (permanent) notes and reference (literature) notes are in a Zettelkasten structure within Bear, but I have a lot of other notes that don’t belong there (they are not ideas/concepts) - P and R notes in PARA terms, as well as lists of things and other stuff that I need to keep organised and retrieve. I’m coming from networked tools, and find that these kinds of notes have not fitted well - so I am integrating them with the JDEX - So now there are multiple notes per id.

Some of these I’ve resolved by merging a bunch of them into one note - an obvious example would be lists rather than many list items with a note for each item. Other forms of note have been more challenging to work out how best to organise them within a single note to avoid that note becoming overloaded and unwieldily -client notes can be re-jigged into this format using date headings with the most recent on the top, with older ones folded, for instance. Thinking things through as been surprisingly interesting and beneficial.

Other notes, well I just need to put a load of notes into the manilla envelope - there are a number of topics on this forum already on this - I’m adopting the + (or extra dot) extension approach and adapting the convention in different id’s to ensure a useful sort order

I find that I welcome the extra thought I need to put into deciding on both the location and form of the note - it often means bringing a note into an inbox, and then working on it before filing it away properly - I think it might transform the filing system from being a file store (aka oubliette) into something much more dynamic and memorable.

Has anyone else found particularly satisfying ways of working with notes within the JDEX?

Or thoughts on slow productivity, perhaps?

2

Hi,

I recently started migrating my JDEX away from a single file into multiple notes. But I use vimwiki and its functionality so I have a “full wiki toolset” for keeping and managing it. So far this has been quite good. And one side effect of it is that I keep more notes directly at IDs. So I would say that a supportive technology helps a lot here (be it Bear or vimwiki or orgmode or whatever).

However most of my notetaking is done on paper. :wink:
I’m one of these people always carrying around a small notebook and something to write.

3

Can you say more about “keeping notes directly at ids”? single notes per id, or multiple notes?

What difficulties does the ‘full wiki toolset’ help to mitigate in either case?

4

And welcome fellow paper notebook addict!

1 Like
5

Most of the time I have a single note although some of them can be quite large and grow overtime.
In other cases when I think it is better to split things up then I usually only have a list of the notes directly at the ID and each entry directly links to the note.

In the former case I tend to have something like:

---
title: XX.YY Tips for FreeBSD
description: A collection of tips and tricks for the FreeBSD operating system.
location: Wiki
relates-to:
keywords: FreeBSD
lang: en
...

## Audio problems with Firefox
...

## Update UEFI Bootloader
...

## File systems
...
### fstab

...

### ZFS

...

For the latter case it is more like this:

---
title: XX.YY Games
description: Notes, hints, cheats and walkthroughs for computer games.
location: Filesystem, Wiki
relates-to:
keywords: Games, Walkthrough, Cheats
lang: de
...

- [Blackwell Legacy](blackwell-legacy.md)
- [Fallout](fallout.md)
- [Kathy Rain](kathy-rain.md)
- [Loom](loom.md)
- [Thimbleweed Park](thimbleweed-park.md)
- [WarCraft II](warcraft-2.md)

also the note is likey to be “its own folder” i.e. stored in “xx.yy games/index.md” instead of “xx.yy games.md”

What I like about the wiki toolset is that it is quite easy to create a new note (or split a bigger one up) which is automatically linked to from the parent page, auto generating table of contents or simply link lists, rendering the whole stuff into an html file (that I can open in the browsers) or helper functions for moving stuff around without breaking existing links. Also my templates are helpful to have the html output providing proper headers and table of contents for each page (and id).

Hope I could help.

6

FWIW this is what most of my notes look like. With the caveat that I tend to keep short notes that are usually bullet points vs. longer prose.

7

My short ones also vary. Most common is the the link list to more detailed notes but I also have simple bullet lists or even todo lists that can be checked.

As mentioned most of my notes happen on paper but I [at least try to] go over them in short cycles and refine the ones worth keeping and they end up either in one of my bigger notebooks (which may be destilled into books) or in the Wiki/Notes/JDex.

A good example are “books to read” or “movies to watch” which I used to distill elsewhere digitally but now they live beneath “11.83 My Library” which is cool. :slight_smile:

8

I initially was very attracted to the idea of using the index note for the ID as the container for all notes about that ID but my practice has changed over time due to:

  1. Generally increasing the scope of the ID level of organisation and wanting to avoid overly long and complex single note files
  2. Wanting to use Drafts for my index app to allow some automation but also wanting to use Apple Notes for features like note sharing and multimedia storage

So now I have one note per ID in my index in Drafts, the note will hold information about the ID (clarification of scope, location etc). Then I use Apple Notes for my day-to-day organisation, with multiple notes per ID if necessary (it usually isn’t).

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