It depends on the book, and subject matter. I might turn notes on The DevOps Handbook into more of a technical format but a book like The Lean Startup might have just Chapter titles with bullet points. I don’t think I’d use it to review books though.

So your notes on books for example, are they more like a collection of highlights, or like an essay summarizing or reviewing it?

Lately, I&#x27;ve been using GitHub Wiki pages to keep notes on random topics I find interesting. Books I read, articles that I want to refer back to, a weird mathematical equation that helped me solve a problem, etc...

Interesting post. As I said, I see the use case if you have a blog. Your case for &quot;Capturing information from audio sources&quot; makes a lot of sense too, something that I hadn&#x27;t thought about.

I feel like this depends a lot on yor tasks and use cases.For example, if you have a blog, or if your professional role includes a lot of writing, you can benefit a lot from notes. Usually, when I start a blog post, I go through my notes on the topic and when I am done with that, my post is halfway finished.I have a post about knowledge management that has a section specifically about when to take notes:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tkainrad.dev&#x2F;posts&#x2F;managing-my-personal-knowledge-base&#x2F;#when-to-take-notes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tkainrad.dev&#x2F;posts&#x2F;managing-my-personal-knowledge-ba...</a>

I write daily, through a Markdown file for each day. The sections include:- Dreams: recording dreams to enhance lucid dreaming- Notes: daily notes about what I&#x27;m thinking- Plan: nested todo list of what I need to do today- Next: what I need to do tomorrow or later. This is copied into the next day&#x27;s Plan section, so tasks roll over if not done- Research: things I want to research. I write them down here so I don&#x27;t waste time if I think of something interesting and want to follow up later.

There has been a recent spike in HN discussions on the best tool for taking notes, as well as different note-taking methodologies. And I agree that there are good reasons to do so if you are preparing for an exam or writing a book on civil war (or a blog post comparing two JS frameworks). But for the rest of you, what notes do you keep?I mean if I&#x27;m learning something new, let&#x27;s say type embedding in Go, and I need to refer to it later, 1 - in most cases accessing it via a Google search is much faster than referring to my notes, 2- in 6 months, probably someone has written a better explanation for it, which probably will rank higher in Google results, and 3- in 5 years, it probably is obsolete anyway.More fundamental types of knowledge are not going to expire, but the first two reasons are still there.I see the need for a more temporary note-taking, say what actions the team is going to take after this meeting, but I think that is not what most people on HN mean when they talk about keeping notes.So my question is: what are the topics for your notes, especially in the context of retaining knowledge for the long term?Much appreciated!

Ask HN: What notes do you keep if not a student or a writer?