• In short: Most of the time you spend on your notes should be on reading and writing. Ideally, no time should be spent on maintenance because you don’t have to.
  • The simple and timeless workflow:
    • Give a note a title with rememberable keywords in it.
    • When you want to know something, 99% of the time, you will remember whether you have written it. If you believe so, search in your notebook before going to a browser.
  • Folders or tags ❌. Flat note repository and search for notes ✅.
    • Folders and tags make you categorizing, which keeps:
      • reminding you of notes that you don’t need at the moment;
      • interrupting your mind from your current important works;
      • wasting your precious time categorizing them;
        • This will also keep your notes difficult to scale infinitely.
    • In short, if you are looking for something, it should appear in front of you. Otherwise, it shouldn’t, or it will distract you and waste your precious time from building or learning something new.
      • If you keep organizing and reviewing your notes (instead of reading new books or information), your notes are essentially a bottleneck for your growth. In fact, by doing so, you are serving the note app, instead of the opposite. With them, the more notes you have, the more time you need to spend on organizing and maintaining.
    • When it comes to things you wrote by yourself, folders and tags bring more harm than benefit. They only provide psychological reassurance, because 99% of the time you will remember whether you have written something and therefore will type to search for it. Folders and tags are good for categorizing external resources like downloaded documents or books, but they will hinder your growth when used for notes. Their harm won’t manifest obviously until you have more than 50 notes, but you can benefit now by using the search-oriented approach even when you only have 3 notes, because you can just write, leave it, and focus on building or learning something new.
    • How about notes with hierarchical relationships?
      • Use links and the list items to express the relationships.
      • Even in this case, a flat note repository is still better than folders or tags, because it’s more inconvenient to operate with the latter.
    • In most apps, you can’t write something about the tag. If you can, it’s better to just make it a note and create links to it from anywhere in any note.
  • Flat note format ❌. Outliner ✅.
    • For readers (others or your future self):
      • An outliner makes the logical relationship between concepts much clearer.
    • For writers:
      • An outliner encourages you to think about the relationship between concepts. As a result, while you are writing, you reason and come up with new ideas, thus gaining systematic and creative thought.
  • Pure Markdown ❌. Tree-based data model ✅.
    • Note: You can still export your notes to Markdown, so no worry about vendor lock-in.
    • How about pasting Markdown contents like AI answers or multi-line text?
      • No worry. The quote block is designed to render Markdown content as a single list item.
    • You can’t put blocks or any multi-line text as a list item in an ordinary Markdown app reliably.
      • As a result, if the text is long, its relationship with surrounding text (e.g., your own comment on it) is less clear without using a list.
      • Examples:
        • AI answers, pasted as either plain text or a quote block.
        • Code blocks.
  • Pure block (pure outliner) ❌. Flat note repository + blocks ✅.
    • A pure outliner costs your precious time to categorize and maintain blocks you don’t need anymore.
    • Most blocks should remain un-searchable in a daily search. Only those to which you gave titles should be searchable, which are called “notes” in this note-taking design.
  • Block-level linking ❌. Note-level linking only ✅.
    • This encourages refactoring, thus keeping notes readable.
    • The name, semantics, and position of a block can change, making links to it quickly become meaningless.
      • When a block or blocks should appear at two places, instead of using block-level linking, which makes future changes to them prone to loss, the best practice is to use the one-click refactoring command to refactor them out.
  • A bookmark/link/highlight collector ❌. A notebook for saving links or pasting external text ✅.
    • Not everything said by an authority is true, let alone the non-authority. Sometimes they are true, but not in your situation.
      • By commenting a book in the book itself instead of in your notebook, you are believing everything it said is true, and you are learning from it, instead of critically thinking about it. What if two books or sources have contradictory opinions?
    • External ideas should be integrated in your notebook, and you form your thought from there by reasoning, reflection, and the review of various sources. Your thought will start to form when you have the option to comment external text and place them wherever you want in your notebook.
    • In short, your text should be centered on your own thought, the single source of truth, not others’. Separating your ideas and others makes this impossible.