Making quick notes

I have a leaky memory. If I don’t write something down, I forget it, such as when:

• A friend tells me about an interesting book or a movie
• I’m deep down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and find a cool website
• I remember something in the midst of house cleaning
• I’ve just made an appointment with someone
• I’ve had an epiphany
• My wife tells me (thrice!) that I need to get the wheat milled
• I receive an email that needs me to act
• and so on.

It’s not only about forgetting. Writing things down acts as a filter to the ocean of information that laps against the shores of my mind every waking moment.

In the old days, I used note books or sheets of paper folded over to fit my pocket and over the years I’ve come up with ways to make notes in different situations.

Paper Journal and a fountain pen

I love my Midori-knockoff which my wife filled with un-ruled sheets that fold out. This is my favourite writing instrument because I can also doodle and mind-map. I like using my medium-nib Lamy Safari which makes strong, juicy lines. I bought some sepia ink and mixed it with a little black ink and so I now have a nice stock of burnt-umber-coloured fountain pen ink to write and draw with.

On the Smart Phone

I use an Android phone and a tablet, and Markor makes note-taking razor fast. I have a shortcut to a file called mobilecapture.org which I can dump tasks and notes in. A text expansion program adds an org heading with a TODO status, tags and an active timestamp that guarantees that I will see the task on my org-agenda the moment my phone syncs with my computers.

This setup is handy for quick note taking. For more relaxed writing on my phone or tablet, I use Logseq, which saves notes as .org files, which are also synced to my computers.

Anywhere on my computer

I own a desktop and a laptop and both run Linux Mint. I use a launcher called Kupfer that pops up over any application I’m using, lets me add a line or two to any .org file connected to org-agenda and goes away. It’s quick. Perfect for one liners. I use it for writing down stray ideas, names of people, reminders or what have you and then getting right back to what I was doing.

Using Emacs and Org mode

Recently, I have discovered¹ that I can run Emacs in server mode, which means that I can pop up an Emacs buffer in a second, and launch an org-capture pop-up configured to capture a variety of information. I schedule events, create tasks, make notes, log progress information, add a financial transaction, capture an idea for a blog post, conduct weekly reviews, log a potential lead into my sales pipeline…

I’ve got about three dozen captures, which is overkill, and I only use a fraction of them often enough to justify them, but it’s all there if I need it, so I let them be.

On the Browser

I use Wallabag to capture articles I want to read later on my Lenovo tablet. I highlight and make annotations when I am reading, and can retrieve these later if I need it, using Wallabag’s web application. I also use Wombag, which is a Wallabag client in Emacs, making it super convenient to select text from saved articles and send them to my notes, with a date stamp and a link back to the source.

Sometimes, I come across interesting websites or web pages that are not articles. I’ve set up org-protocol and a javascript bookmarklet that captures the link, date and selected text of any website I am on to a file called web_captures.org with a single click. This is my most recent capture method, and I’m thrilled I got it working.

Email

Email is among the things I dislike. I no longer receive as much email as I used to, but the system I built back when I used to still works perfectly.

I use mu4e on Emacs because it is so minimal and psychologically it keeps my email-PTSD at bay because it makes my email interface look like any other plain text buffer.

I can very quickly scan my email, and if I need to follow-up or act on an email, I can run my org-capture email template, which creates a task with a link back to the email, and also captures the person’s name, email id, and subject line. The capture is automatically filed into the right task list.

When I’m in Thunderbird, I use an extension called Thunderlink which copies a link to the email to clipboard. I can open the email if I want to later using this useful snippet of code.

If I’m in the browser with Gmail open there, I can always use the org-protocol system to send the link right where I need it.

Instant Messengers

On my phone I can already copy a Whatsapp message and paste it into Markor quickly. However, this does not capture metadata such as the sender’s name, or time stamp. The same limitation exists when I use org-protocol with Whatsapp’s web version. BTW, I just learned about Whatsapp.el and I intend to try it out sometime.

RSS Feeds

On my phone or tablet, I use the open-source Feeder, which has the standard ‘share to’ feature, which is meh. I can either share selected text or the URL, and for some reason, not both. On my desktop however, I have the excellent Elfeed running in Emacs. I have a set up that lets me shoot selected text and the URL straight into my notes, or saved into Wombag, or into a task…

Annotations

This isn’t strictly in the same category as everything else I’ve described so far. All that other stuff is a way of sieving relevant information from the daily noise that comes my way. Annotations on the other hand are a considered and mindful way to make notes when I’m reading.

On paper, I prefer those new-age gel based highlighters which I think hurt the paper less. Highlighting on paper is generally reserved for text-books and manuals that I print out.

On my phone and tablet, Wallabag has annotation capability. On Emacs, I use org-remark, which I can use to annotate almost any text document including articles I’m reading in Elfeed or Wombag, markdown documents.

Less frequently, I use org-noter to annotate PDF files within Emacs. On my phone I import PDF files into Logseq which saves the annotations as org-mode headers, which is nice.

The side effect of all all that capturing is that a fair bit of information dumped into my system every day. Some of it goes into my projects and tasks list, some go into my working notes and everything else goes into long term reference.