My notes taking journey so far. If you are a compulsive notes taker, you might find it useful.

I love taking notes. I have taken 20K in past 14 years.

I used native app when I used to use Nokia E Series phone in 2009-2010.

Catch in ~2011 (used it for 2 years until Apple acquired it in 2013).

In parallel I explored Google Keep but didn't find it very user-friendly.

Further #Evernote which became one of my favourites and I used it extensively and even now I use it. Loved its premium version which enables you to scrap the web content and save it as a note. Tagging feature is great, so is notebooks. Eventually it grows to huge number of notebooks and tags, and it gets hard to manage all the content. But still it's amazing considering you can access notes across multiple devices irrespective of OSs. When you accidentally delete a note, you can easily recover it. You can access note level revisions in premium version.

Apple notes is amazing and is truly a life saver as it's a very light app, supports PDF, text, images and image search. Great for anyone who is in Apple ecosystem. However, when you accidentally make a change in a note and forget about it, there isn't a way to rollback. Search feature is powerful.

I used Day One, which is a beautiful diary/ notes taking app, supports password protection, is available as an App for various OSs.

Joplin is an open source notes taking app, which is extremely powerful and lets you store GBs of notes in it. It can be installed on your machine. 

However none of these actually helps in structuring your thoughts and expand your ideas by interlinking them. I was exploring further about this topic and stumbled about a concept called Zettelkasten method. I further research on it and found numerous videos talking about it in detail.

Folks who uses this method uses Obsidian notes taking app - which lets you interlinking notes with each other, lets you visualize the notes and how the thoughts are interlinked with each other. You will be able to link any of these and go deeper and deeper forming deeper connections in your mind as you will have context at every level. In Q4 2022 I think it is the notes app that I am going to use for years to come coupled with Apple notes for quick bits and Evernote for archiving long form content. 

Notion is a way similar to Obsidian but seemed to be a lot of work and I now have strict preference to have everything on my machine. I guess, with passing days, we are becoming more cyncinal about data security and really I don't want to shell a dime for one more cloud subscription.

WIP