Every Note-Taking Method I Have Tried
I have been taking notes for as long as I can remember, and I have never been fully satisfied with any system I've used. This is, I think, a common affliction among people who work with information for a living. The search for the perfect note-taking method is a kind of low-grade obsession that never quite resolves, because every method involves trade-offs, and the trade-offs only become apparent after you've committed enough material to the system that switching away feels costly.
What follows is a roughly chronological account of the methods I've tried, what I liked about each, and why I eventually moved on. I'm writing this partly for my own reference — I've been thinking about making yet another change — and partly because someone at a community workshop I helped out at recently asked me how I keep track of things, and I realized the answer was too long for a conversation.
I started, like most people, with notebooks. Lined composition books at first, then later those black hardcover notebooks that seem to be everywhere now. The appeal of a paper notebook is its simplicity and immediacy. You open it, you write. There's no login screen, no sync delay, no decision about which app to use. The physical act of writing by hand has a quality of attention to it that typing doesn't quite replicate. I still believe that writing something by hand helps me think more carefully about what I'm putting down.
The problems with notebooks are well-known. They're sequential, which means your notes on a topic end up scattered across multiple pages separated by notes on unrelated topics. They're not searchable, except by flipping through pages. They're fragile — I've lost notebooks to water damage, to leaving them on buses, to simply misplacing them in moves. And they're finite. When a notebook is full, you start a new one, and now your notes are split across two physical objects. Over time, the collection of full notebooks becomes its own organizational problem.
I tried to address some of these issues with index cards. The idea came from reading about the Zettelkasten method, though my implementation was much simpler than the system described in the literature. I used standard three-by-five index cards, one idea per card, with a simple numbering scheme and a few keyword tags written in the top corner. I kept them in a small box on my desk, organized roughly by subject with tabbed dividers.
Index cards solved the sequentiality problem beautifully. Because each card is an independent unit, you can rearrange them freely. You can pull out all the cards related to a topic and lay them out on a table. You can insert new cards between existing ones without disrupting anything. The constraint of the small card forces you to be concise, which is a discipline I find valuable.
But index cards have their own drawbacks. The physical box gets heavy and hard to carry. The numbering scheme requires maintenance — you have to remember what numbers you've used and what comes next. And the keyword system, while helpful, is no substitute for full-text search. If I wrote something on a card six months ago and I can't remember the exact keywords I used, finding that card is a matter of flipping through the whole collection. I used index cards actively for maybe two years before the friction became too much.
My first serious move to digital note-taking involved one of the popular commercial apps — I won't name it because I'm not interested in promoting or criticizing any specific product. It was a cloud-synced notebook app with tagging, full-text search, and web clipping. For a while, it felt like the answer to everything. I could take notes on any device, search through all of them instantly, attach files and images, organize with tags and notebooks. The experience of typing a few words into a search bar and having the relevant note appear immediately was genuinely transformative after years of flipping through paper.
The problems crept in slowly. The app became bloated over time, adding features I didn't want and changing its interface in ways that slowed me down. The subscription pricing kept increasing. And I grew uncomfortable with the idea that all my notes lived on someone else's servers in a proprietary format. If the company shut down or suffered a data breach, my entire note-taking history was at risk. I've watched several note-taking services shut down over the years, leaving users scrambling to export.
I tried two other digital apps after that, both marketed as more privacy-focused alternatives. One had a linking system that let you connect notes in a web-like structure. The other was aggressively minimalist, stripped down to just text and tags. I remember debating the merits of linked notes versus flat files on the old Zettelkasten forums as "plaintext_kv" before that community migrated somewhere else. I used each app for several months before running into variations of the same issues: dependence on a specific application, uncertainty about long-term data portability, and the feeling that I was spending more time configuring my system than actually taking notes.
Which brings me to plain text files. I've been using plain text — specifically, a folder of text files on my computer, edited in whatever text editor is handy — for a while now, and it's the closest I've come to a method I'm genuinely content with. The advantages are almost embarrassingly simple. Text files are readable by any program on any operating system. They'll be readable in twenty years. They take up almost no storage space. They can be searched with basic command-line tools. They can be backed up by copying a folder. There's no subscription, no account, no sync service, no proprietary format.
My system is not sophisticated. I have a folder called "notes." Inside it, each file is named with a short description of its contents: "project-solar-panel-quotes.txt," "recipe-bean-soup.txt," "reading-notes-information-theory.txt." I don't use subfolders. I don't use tags. If I need to find something, I search the folder. If I need to create a connection between two notes, I just mention the other file's name in the text. It's manual and low-tech and it works.
The drawbacks are real. Plain text doesn't handle images or embedded files. Formatting is limited to what you can do with line breaks and indentation. There's no built-in syncing across devices — I have to manage that myself, which I do with a simple script that copies the folder to a USB drive. And the flat folder structure means the directory listing gets long. I have several hundred files in there now, and scanning through them visually is no longer practical. I rely entirely on search.
I don't think there's a perfect note-taking method. Every system optimizes for some qualities at the expense of others. Paper is immediate and tactile but not searchable or durable. Index cards are modular but heavy and finite. Digital apps are powerful but fragile and dependent. Plain text is robust and portable but plain. The best method, I suspect, is the one you actually use consistently, which means the one whose trade-offs you can live with.
For now, plain text files are that method for me. I reserve the right to change my mind, probably sooner than I'd like to admit.
— Kevin V.