My notes are a horrible mess.

[aimeeandbeatles]

My notes (this means not articles) about a certain subject are scattered in hundreds of text files (with unhelpful names) in a folder on my hard drive. Although a few of them date back to 2007 (these are ones that survived my computer crash of 2008) lot of them were made shortly after I had my concussion -- that period is vague for me but I guess I couldn't remember things from one day to the next. As well, a lot of them suffer from poor spelling and grammar.

Whats your favorite system for note-taking on the computer? I have access to Microsoft OneNote via some college thing but I dont know if its any good. Other than that, anything free and compatible with Vista is good. (Also Id like it if I wasnt locked in and could export it later without copy/paste.)

Or ... should I keep my plain text files, perhaps with more descriptive filenames?

What would you do?

Also, this could be a general discussion about notetaking, organization, etc etc.

 

[Lillefix]

My notes consist of openoffice documents and txt documents spread all over my computer. If anyone has better solutions I would appreciate it.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Yeah, I use Tolon NoteKeeper for certain things but I found it doesnt exactly work for notes the way Id like.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Spend an hour creating a proper tree structure and file naming regime.
Like any good programmer that has to deal with hundreds of objects which have to be tracked perfectly.

Dont worry my non geek friends were like this. They had to use "FIND/SHERLOCK" when ever they need to find a file. And if they forgot the name that file and work were vapourware lost to the mysterious Gods of the machine.

 

[Arakhor]

I have multiple folders in my My Documents folder: AD&D, Birthright, GURPS, Lone Wolf, Mount & Blade, Star Wars, Thief etc, then I keep all files relating to those topics in their individual directories.

 

[Lillefix]

I have multiple folders in my My Documents folder: AD&D, Birthright, GURPS, Lone Wolf, Mount & Blade, Star Wars, Thief etc, then I keep all files relating to those topics in their individual directories.

It's my dream, that one day I will be able to do that. I have the folders, I just haven't learned to put things in them.

 

[de Maistre]

I use one big .txt file; at least it's all in one place.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

The problem in my case is that a lot of them dont exactly go into predefined categories. So a label/tag system something like Gmail might work better for my needs... or a way to put it into multiple categories without endless copying and pasting.

 

[Arakhor]

It's my dream, that one day I will be able to do that. I have the folders, I just haven't learned to put things in them.

Well, keep working on it and you may get around to a half-decent filing system by 2020.

 

[cardgame]

I just use one .txt file for any notes I need to take.

I separate topics with large lines of ____________ or ----- or ///// or ||||||||||| or a combination of these.

Then I title it if necessary and just ramble about whatever I need to.

 

[Lillefix]

I've actually gone to the lengths to learn php and mysql to sort out this problem, but I have to rebuild the entire thing if I'm going to use it again(went away with my harddisk 3-4 years ago). You know, perhaps it's worth it.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Well those are well past what my brain can handle -- lol. I can tinker around with php a little but Im terrible with programming stuff.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Spend an hour creating a proper tree structure and file naming regime.

This!!!

I grew up with a computer geek brother who early on taught me the value of a tree-structure-file-system and I just took at as something ordinary. Which resulted in me gazing in disbelief how uncoordinated other people save their stuff. Nowadays I am used to it and just like to laugh at those people when complaining that they have trouble keeping track of stuff.

 

[warpus]

I have given up attempting to organize my computer in any complex sort of way and rely on the following system for notekeeping:

1. If something is important or urgent enough, write it down on a piece of paper. Keep this piece of paper on your desk at all times. Do not use more than 1 piece of paper.
2. If something is important but not important enough to fit on the piece of paper, email the information to yourself with useful keywords in the subject.
3. Ignore everything else as "not important enough to keep track of".

 

[Integral]

I rarely take notes on a computer.

For the few courses in which I did take notes on a computer, I used a plain txt file for each lecture, named 20110214_Quine.txt or something similar: the date and a one to two word description of what was discussed.





But I do love talking about internal folder organization (neeerrrd!).

Everything goes into one of two folders: c:\integral or c:\media. c:\integral is for documents, c:\media houses music, save game files, &c.

The c:\integral folder has nine top-level folders (school, teaching, research, projects, articles, and a few others). 'Articles' is a collection of loose papers that I intend to read someday, organized by JEL class (for economics articles) and broad field for everything else. School has subfolders for summer work, high school, and college; each individual course gets its own folder.

Teaching is split across course and time: if I taught Statistics in fall 08 and spring 09, I'd have a 2008.03_stats and 2009.01_stats folder. Separate folders for each year because I keep student projects and the like (when computer-submitted) on hand.

Projects and research projects are split by, er, project. One folder each.

There's also a dedicated folder for joint projects outside of the regular school stuff. CFC has a subfolder there, wherein I keep all of the scripts that make all of the graphs I've posted. I can reproduce virtually anything I've posted here. It also holds some notes that I've written for PMs and such. I like to keep that kind of thing around.

Et cetera.

The whole complex takes up about 2.5GB and is sync'd to two flash drives for backup purposes.

I decided on this structure in 2007 when my hard drive failed and I had to restore everything from spotty backups. The hardest thing was to figure out to do with all the truly random bits and pieces; I ended up throwing them in their own top-level folder.



The c:\media folder has one subfolder each for pictures, save files and music. Music is organized by artist\[year] album. Nice and clean. Save files are organized by game, of course. Pictures are a complete organizational nightmare.

The c:\media\ folder is synced to an external HDD.

 

[Takhisis]

I have multiple folders in my My Documents folder: AD&D, Birthright, GURPS, Lone Wolf, Mount & Blade, Star Wars, Thief etc, then I keep all files relating to those topics in their individual directories.

Same here. Music files go to the Music folder, civ3 goes to civ3, etc. etc.

 

[bombshoo]

The notes I take in class are always pieces of crap. Full of doodles in the margins and completely disorganized. Nonetheless, I get by. I usually draw up much better study guides for myself before any tests using the notes from class. This works out since most tests usually only end up covering a portion of the material and by the time of the exam, you can usually tell what will be left out. Redoing everything neatly before the tests helps not only because I end up with a concise and easy to read manual on what to study, but the recopying of everything ingrains it further into my brain.

 

[Mathilda]

Moderator Action: Closed. I'll sort through this when I get a chance.


Moderator Action: Edit: reopened after deleting spam. Worst offenders were infractioned.
If you are going to post in this thread, keep it on topic.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

But I do love talking about internal folder organization (neeerrrd!).

For my folder structure I actually use a data partition. I found it makes backup easier and I like the idea of keeping data seperate from system and application files. Im hoping that when I get money I can buy a secondary 1 TB hard drive and use the original 500 GB for system -- Im running low on space these days.

Believe it or not, one of the most organized folder structures in my system is a certain subfolder in my music folders. It looks sort of like this:

Spoiler :

1977-04-23 -- Sausalito Record Plant
1977-06-16 -- Cologne, Germany (Rockpalast)
1977-11-29 -- Roslyn, NY (My Father's Place)
1978-07-16 -- Boston, MA (Breakdown!)
1978-08-03 -- New Orleans, LA (The Warehouse)
1978-12-30 -- Winterland
1979-07-23 -- Salinas, CA
1979-07-25 -- Sacramento, CA
1979-12-06 -- Houston Music Hall
1980-03-07 -- Hammersmith-Odeon
1980-03-24 -- Oxford, England (Rock Goes To College)
1980-04-17 -- Nagoya, Japan
1982-06-06 -- Peace Sunday
1982-12-04 -- Utrecht, Holland
1982-12-04 -- Utrecht, Holland (Louie Louie)*
1982-12-12 -- Wembley Arena
1983-03-17 -- Indianapolis, IN
1983-04-13 -- Cow Palace
1983-04-14 -- Kabuki Theater
1985-06-16 -- Saratoga, NY (SPAC)
1985-08-xx -- Wiltern Theatre (Live In L.A)
1986-07-06 -- Washington, DC (w. Bob Dylan)
1986-07-14 -- Buffalo, NY (Rich for Poor)
1987-06-18 -- Clarkston, MI
1987-07-24 -- Jacksonville, FL (Anyway You Want It!)
1987-09-29 -- Stuttgart (w. Roger McGuinn)
1989-08-07 -- Clarkston, MI
1989-09-13 -- Chapel Hill, NC (Free Fallin')
1990-01-29 -- Charlotte, NC
1990-02-11 -- Auburn Hills, MI
1990-02-20 -- Bloomington, MN
1990-05-18 -- Wilmington, NC (Southern Choice)
1991-09-18 -- Syracuse, NY (War Memorial)
1991-11-24 -- Oakland, CA (Psychotic Reaction)
1993-11-03 -- Gaineville, FL (Homecoming)
1994-10-02 -- Mountain View, CA (Bridge School Benefit)
1997-02-07 -- Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA
1999-04-11 -- New York, NY (Irving Plaza)
1999-04-23 -- Hamburg, Germany (Echo in the Dark)
1999-08-03 -- Minneapolis, MN
2003-04-19 -- Chicago Vic Theatre
2003-07-03 -- Soundstage
2010-07-18 -- Maryland Heights, MO

*before you ask, this is two different versions of the same show

certain folders I need to rename a little better though... I do it this way because it goes chronologically this way.

 

[Harvin87]

Do it with style... get a Moleskine.