Vimwiki & syncthing

Lightweight, libre, synchs on all my devices. Links between notes. All I need.

Obsidian vault in my cloud storage. Does everything I need with no bells and whistles.

I use a 20+ year old PDA for notes and other general productivity/organization needs. Distraction free, keeps me off my phone, and a fun conversation piece. Handy for staying on top of my ADHD.

Am I weird for just using a pen and paper? I recently upgraded my setup by buying a binder and ~1000 pages so I won’t have to burn through notebooks or money.

One thing that I know for sure is weird is that I use a fountain pen for it all…

Zim just works.

Notesnook at the moment. Excited that they’re started supporting self-hosting. It seems immature but working well for people. I’ll get round to hosting my own sync server when I have the time and maybe once self-hosting is more mature.

Nextcloud notes finally got good enough to replace google keep a while ago.

Been happily using that since.

Notesnook FOSS and free tier is sufficient for me. I’ll subscribe if I can’t find a donate option.

Moved away from Joplin because it wasn’t a good fit for me. The Notesnook devs seem to fit my communication style better and the Notesnook app is beautiful and the fancy features don’t get in the way too much for me. Exports also make sense.

Previously used OINotepad.

Now using neutriNote for quick note taking.

The good old notepad. One-time notes go in my pocket, anything even short-term get put in the bullet journal.

Complex stuff (talks, projects, brainstorming, etc): The notes get taken on paper. Some things stay there, because the act of writing them down is enough. Some things then move to my “second brain;” for personal stuff, that’s currently on Notion (I’m contemplating migrating it to Obsidian or something similar). For work stuff, that’s a Slack thread, or (if it’s really important) Confluence.

Todos go into Google Tasks. I used to use Todoist, but I got frustrated by how inflexible the notification system was.

Shopping lists (and a few other similar lists that need to be shared) go into Google Keep.

I used to keep a text file in each project, with todo items at the top and a ‘done’ section at the bottom. File gets too big, start a new file.

Now I use a note taking program that stores markdown notes with links in between them. Kind of the same idea, mostly, some notes are to-do items and others are lists. I have about 10000 notes in there.

email and notepadd++ are the most common but sometimes a calendar.

On my tablet I use xournal++, and on my computer I use vim.

For digital notes I’m a big fan of plaintext in the basic notes app. Anything more and I get distracted trying to beautify it and my actual notes suffer for it :(