Technology

It and I might just be at odds about some fundamental aspects of note taking. One of the major problems I have is shared with Protonmail: Folders as a second class feature.

I may be old and tired, but structure is information. Folders are a premium feature, which on its face is laughable - I'm not opposed to paying for software, I pay for the note taking software I use now, but c'mon. For me tags are not a suitable substitution, they are good metadata for sure; particularly for searching but it's a very flat organization system. It could be so much richer.

Missing free-form note metadata. We've got created date and modified date which is good, and an archived flag which is OK. An example I have from my notes is: I take notes during a meeting, sometimes on paper when I'm not in a situation where I have a computer in front of me. When I digitize these notes I assign an attribute to them that is the date the meeting took place, since digitization may not happen until the next day or longer depending on how long it sits on my desk.

Missing templates. I have spent some time putting together rough outline structures for different kinds of notes; release notes, change logs, general meetings, and daily task notes.

Missing note links. I am a big fan of not repeating information in a bunch of places. Doubly so in notes. My first impressions of a thing may be wrong, incomplete, missing context.. and if I can create a note about a thing, and then link back to the thing when I refer to it in other notes it adds a great deal of context and allows for extremely simple revisions.

None of this stuff is mandatory for note taking for sure, but so much value can be derived not just from the content of your notes but the metadata surrounding your notes. When you open the door to this, and you add something like "smart lists" which are more or less just saved search critera.. it helps.