He has a point about digital hoarding. But that isn't the whole story about taking notes. Not everybody takes notes because of some twisted quirk rooted in evolutionary behaviour, really. Some of us take notes because... we need to remember things, a lot of things.
The acid test for note taking is: do you get back to your notes, process, organize, sieve, tidy and reformat them regularly?
So have a free insight if you're writing a note taking app: make it useful for serious note takers.
I feel like note-taking is improving my personal life since I decided to embrace it.
I’ve always had the bad habit of “Sure I’ll do that for you!”, then meaning to remember and forgetting about it. I was that person that you couldn’t rely on to follow through with stuff.
I over-estimated my own memory in the moment and yet at the same time I was too afraid to really embrace note-taking because I was worried that if I started relying on notes, would that make my brain weaker?
I decided to try and dive in, after all I owe it to the people I know to be better at this.
It’s actually had the opposite effect on my memory - I find the action of taking the note makes the memory more solid and frees space up in my head to get back to other things.
For me, being able to use scribble on my Apple Watch is what made it feasible. I have a notepad on my wrist and can discreetly write notes whenever I need to.
From there, they go to Drafts as my inbox. At night I can glance over them; some will stay there as to-do items, some will be sent to Obsidian for longer-term storage and others might be deleted or end up as reminders, etc.
It’s great. It bridges that gap between my working memory and long-term storage really well.
The acid test for note taking is: do you get back to your notes, process, organize, sieve, tidy and reformat them regularly?
So have a free insight if you're writing a note taking app: make it useful for serious note takers.