<story><title>Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode</title><url>https://wiki.dendron.so/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>endisneigh</author><text>How are people using tools like this and Roam, Obesdian, etc. etc. etc?&lt;p&gt;Personally I could see the use if you were writing a book or something, but I feel like in practice for normal notes I would just have all of these notes that I&amp;#x27;d never look at again or spend so much time traversing my notes and not getting things done. As someone with distractive tendencies I&amp;#x27;d love to hear the situations where this is useful so I stay on track.&lt;p&gt;I hear the term &amp;quot;second brain&amp;quot; used a lot. The thing is with your brain, you don&amp;#x27;t actively spend time searching and traversing your &amp;quot;notes&amp;quot; consciously. Generally your mind brings things to be recalled just as you need it. Is there something like &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thomascgalvin</author><text>A big part of my note-taking is just to get stuff out of my brain. I might never revisit any of it, and that&amp;#x27;s fine. If I write it down I know I can always go back when I need to, but if I &lt;i&gt;don&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt;, it&amp;#x27;s going to be an annoying distraction in my subconscious.&lt;p&gt;A lot of my note-taking therefore becomes an excuse to successfully ignore the things I know I don&amp;#x27;t need to pay attention to.&lt;p&gt;I do have a bunch of notes that I use for everyday stuff, however. My engineering journal is a hierarchical notebook, allowing me to go back and see all of the contributions I&amp;#x27;ve made to $PROJECT, which is great come review time.&lt;p&gt;I also have a tech notes section for problems that I seem to have to solve over and over again. For example, every time we have a power outage, my Mac Mini gets stuck in a reset password screen, and I need to reset the NVRAM to fix it. I don&amp;#x27;t remember the keycode to do that, so I have a note called &amp;quot;Fix mac mini password reset&amp;quot; that tells me that it&amp;#x27;s `Cmd-option-p-r`.&lt;p&gt;Lastly, anything that might be good in a self-hosted wiki goes in my notebook; basically, my own little set of `README.md`s.</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode</title><url>https://wiki.dendron.so/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>endisneigh</author><text>How are people using tools like this and Roam, Obesdian, etc. etc. etc?&lt;p&gt;Personally I could see the use if you were writing a book or something, but I feel like in practice for normal notes I would just have all of these notes that I&amp;#x27;d never look at again or spend so much time traversing my notes and not getting things done. As someone with distractive tendencies I&amp;#x27;d love to hear the situations where this is useful so I stay on track.&lt;p&gt;I hear the term &amp;quot;second brain&amp;quot; used a lot. The thing is with your brain, you don&amp;#x27;t actively spend time searching and traversing your &amp;quot;notes&amp;quot; consciously. Generally your mind brings things to be recalled just as you need it. Is there something like &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gofreddygo</author><text>I believe this does not work well. At least it did not for me.&lt;p&gt;We routinely conflate todos&amp;#x2F;plans (&amp;#x27;need to do this&amp;#x27;) , observations and patterns (&amp;#x27;this is what i see happening when...&amp;#x27;), events (&amp;#x27;this happened...&amp;#x27;) and learnings (&amp;#x27;this is what i did wrong, right...&amp;#x27;) as &amp;quot;notes&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I started with dropping everything in notational velocity (till it broke on my Mac upgrade) and &amp;#x2F; or &amp;#x27;email thyself&amp;#x27; and like you said, it builds and its there but of little or no use. Unless its in my brain, I can&amp;#x27;t make connections. Without connections I cannot recall when I need it. It really does not help. Its actually net negative with the effort that goes into putting it in there.&lt;p&gt;I now use Google docs. One doc for each topic I am currently working on (e.g interview preparation, home purchase research, kubernetes, etc..)  This builds topic wise documents which are exponentially faster to navigate&amp;#x2F;guess without needing text search or any filing system. I can skim through 1-2 documents and it provides context, history, insights, quotes in 1 place that I try and read more often which tends to stick in my head. Also given that I am more a visual learner, the place where something particular was on a document also brings in what was written next to it simply because I&amp;#x27;ve seen it so often.</text></comment>