How I keep track of my notes

Published on 2020-11-07

Is it just me or is hackernews full of note-taking apps lately? I thought I could hop on the train and explain how I keep track of my notes. So here it is:

I have a TODO file in my home directory. It is just plain text, mostly markdown-ish lists.
I use a firefox extension for links that I have not gotten around to reading yet. I could keep them in the TODO file, but opted for a bit more convinience here.
Once I dig deeper into a subject I will create a dedicated file in ~/drafts/ for it. I make heavy use of nested markdown lists in these files to iteratively collect and structure ideas.
Finalized articles will end up on this blog.
Code-related projects are published to github.
I do not keep a huge list of bookmarks. Instead, links are included in the relevant articles or README files.

Note that everything starts out in a single messy file and develops into separate articles and software projects from there. That separation means that my system is not particularly good at finding recurring themes. On the other hand, having a singular theory of everything would be just as bad because it would be very hard to incorporate new ideas and perspectives. Still it would be nice to have a better way to keep track of interrelations.