Knowledge Workers Drowning in Notes
Individuals are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information they capture and the difficulty in retrieving it later. Existing tools often focus on organization but fail to address the core problem of quickly capturing and easily finding small, fleeting pieces of information, leading to wasted time and unutilized insights.
SOURCES (60)
“I had a similar feeling the first time I asked Claude to organise 10 year of cancer that was my downloads folder. It's absolutely remarkable that you can take a content dump like this and just have Claude rearrange things into PARA, compared to the…”
It would be great if we could directly create a kanban inside a note or just insert one
“Every file must belong to one and only one folder. A file can have as many tags as you like. You can also use tags in multiple parts of a file--I like to use #edit and #to-do to draw my attention to certain paragraphs that need my attention in the future. I've never really had an issue with notes being "orphaned" when I delete a tag, because my notes usually have more than one tag and I use the Tag Wrangler community plugin when I want to change them. I do have a similar problem th”
“Soo I am that kind of person that always to think something like short story,meaning of something, and stuff like that. But i have a little problem, I want to share my thoughts but I don't know what is the website or apps that use for write down about thoughts. So if you know something website or apps like this can you tell me what is the name of it, thank you for read my post(and I really need the website/apps right now) submitted by /u/Imnotgonnatellmyself [link] [comment”
“I usually do a keyword search. I take notes based on keywords so it’s easier on me later. And yes, I put notes and the transcript on the same page. I have a “meeting minutes” template I modified for videos. I have a spot for the video if I can download it or embed it, a section for notes, a section for my parking lot (where I log new tasks) and one for the transcript. Think of it like a grid Top left is notes, top right is my parking lot Bottom left is the transcript, bottom right is the video I”
“How I use my fault 1. Rename my note 2026MMDD Title Separate everything into only 3 folders. Reference (image, attachment etc), Knowledge (my own note, daily note, note from youtube etc), project/task kanban management (plugin). Provide tagging (1 keypoint you remember about that note) and metadata (date, status etc) You can find youtube How the CEO of Obsidian Takes his Notes. The simple the better but must have structured, tagging and base. Must declutter end of day.”
“I leave fewer and fewer self-written notes every year, and these days they're mostly just key ideas and unique/related thoughts related to the content. It's 2026, and there's too much content to keep up with to be able to review notes as literature after the fact. I leave as much of the raw content as I can, and for video these days that's a transcript. For meeting notes - AI meetings notes. Structure of most of my notes are: - Pre-call (for meetings) - Key notes (written) - Tran”
“Yeah I agree that most "note taking gurus" are overrated. There are no rules, just do whatever works for you. But with that said, you can still learn a lot by listening to how other people think about it. Taking bits and pieces from the ideas that you like and turning it into something of your own. Getting some inspiration doesn't hurt :)”
“Love these suggestions, especially using links instead of tags or folders. I find it really satisfying to skim through a journal entry and link-ify as much possible. People, places, events, concepts, etc. I've been using Obsidian for years now, but for a long time it was basically just as a dedicated text editor. A couple weeks ago, I decided to fully embrace the [[ Links ]] aspect of Obsidian and there's just something about connecting everything together that actually motivates me to j”
“For my daily/raw notes I had to go from Obsidian to OneNote. Not ideal… but it’ll have to do.”
“I don’t think documenting everything is realistic—or even desirable. It can turn the day into one long capture exercise. I’d focus on transitions rather than constant documentation. After a meeting, research session, or important Slack conversation, take 60 seconds to record only: What changed? What did I decide? What remains unresolved? That preserves the useful context without recreating your entire workday. The goal isn’t a complete archive. It’s leaving enough of a trail for your future self”
“I’d start with one question note, not one giant source list. Write the specific question you’re trying to answer, then give each source a job: supports, contradicts, adds context, or raises a new question. If a tab doesn’t serve one of those roles, close it or move it to a separate “maybe later” list. The problem with hundreds of tabs usually isn’t storage. It’s that every source still looks equally important. A question-first note forces the material into an argument instead of letting it remai”
“You need a system like PARA to organize it properly. I personally I’m a fan of ultimate brain by Thomas Frank.”
“I have databases that are dedicated for being a dumpsite of my random stuff. Not everything has to be used regularly. I transfer them to a workspace that I literally named archive to live in until I need to pull it out or just need to see it again”
“I’ve finally decided to commit to Amber Book, but I’m already finding myself getting hung up on how I’m supposed to be studying it rather than just watching the videos. For those of you who passed using Amber Book, what was your strategy? Did you: * Take notes while watching? * Watch everything first and then review? * Pause constantly or just let it play? * Rewrite their flashcards? My biggest struggle is figuring out what’s actually worth writing down. Erik throws out so much information, and”
“I save a lot of Reddit posts, but the current save/bookmark flow breaks down fast once you have more than a few dozen. I can save things, but I can’t really organize them in a way that helps me find them later. Folders, tags, resurfacing old saves, and simple search feel missing. I’m thinking about building a small tool just for this problem—nothing huge, just a better way to organize and revisit saved Reddit posts. Would you actually use something like that, and what would be the one feature th”
“For schedule mgmt, I love Lucen software, formally Office Timeline - a timeline tool that’s a plug in the MS PowerPoint. I pay around $200 a year but it just makes my life so easy. For notes, action items, etc I use MS Loop which integrates beautifully with Teams.”
“Neuroelastic Graph RAG storage after ensuring all are intelligently ingested after OCR and human innthe loop review of uncertain OCR results. Good data in is 100% the key step to any process.”
“Oh no this is entirely personal to me. No one else will be involved in this system or using this tool but me.”
“That's a slick workflow optimization - syncing search to graph view filters in real time cuts down a lot of manual clicking around. Definitely the kind of thing that pays dividends once you get it into your daily note-taking routine.”
“I'll tell you what I did. I have a local llm on my laptop. I exported the whole lot and then let the lol turn it all into markdown files and organize it by work, personal, etc. And then let it run. About an hour later, I had the whole lot done and ready to be plopped into a new vault. I consider this to be using AI properly as its just a tool if you know how to use it.”
“Many people end up suffering from just collecting stuff in their vault that they never use. The way to avoid this is through review and processing. Import your Keep notes, but don't just let them be. Review the, process (tag and link) them, and throw out the things you don't need. Be ruthless. Chances are good that a large percentage of your old notes aren't worth saving, particularly if you haven't looked at them in Keep in a long while.”
“Honestly fewer than people expect. 😊 So I try to organize by purpose, not by project. For instance, I like keeping my tasks separate from meeting notes and separate again from decisions or longer-term thinking. I found that mixing everything together made it much harder to find what I was looking for later. I'm still refining my own system though. How do you organize yours?”
“Today a user was part of a meeting with a large amount of attendees. The meeting was held on zoom outside of our zoom instance. After the meeting all users received a meeting transcript from the AI notetaker agent. Have others run into this before? Not sure how to handle this as it just happened. TIA submitted by /u/milo145 [link] [comments]”
“PKMS app Devonthink; a digital file cabinet to store/organize/access my notes/documents/files integrated with AppleScript for workflow automations I use tags for organization; minimal folders”
“This is 3 years old so don't mind me, sorry - I'm just having the same problem today and commenting for future people like present me. Oh my GOD it works, thank you!! I don't have to manually type out genuinely more than 50 (???) Tags from my other database! Just copied one of the pages to my fresh one and bam - All tag options came with it :)))”
“How do you keep track when you're researching the same topic across multiple sessions and multiple sources? D submitted by /u/Consistent-Hour2061 [link] [comments]”
“You can try the coach and the nuggets on the mobile apps in detail. It's exercises after the concept introduction and then spaced repetition to ensure you remember. We have 1400+ concepts we are building out.”
“For many years now, I have been interested in the PKM topic. I started out by organizing things in simpler ways (back in the days of Evernote), then moved to Obsidian, and finally to Tana (now Tana Outliner), which I have used since the early beta versions. I am an academic working in the humanities, and the supertag model has worked quite well for me over all these years to bring together different types of sources, projects, and resources. However, recently something has changed. As you probab”
“:)) same here. I usually have A LOT of tabs open on my mac too. I like your "I can always open it again" rule. Did you always think that way, or did you eventually realize reopening things is easier than managing them?”
“How laggy it feels compared to the snapines of OneNote. The limited free export options”
“Haha, I feel you on that. It's like a mini heart attack every time I accidentally hit 'Save' too soon. Maybe try breaking the document into smaller sections?”
[ChatGPT] ★★★ 3/5 (v1.2026.188) — Enjoy finding errors! Been using the app for a few days and I have to say it is extremely helpful in a lot of ways, when it…
“Plenty of good decision-log advice here already, so I'll add the part that made ours actually work: retrieval. Decisions don't get re-litigated because the log is missing — they get re-litigated because the new person never had a reason to open the log, so we started pasting the decision ID directly into the artifacts people actually touch (backlog item, design doc header, SOW clause). The second fix was writing each entry with a 'what would reopen this' line — new joiners are fr”
“Hello and good morning! So, I'm leaving evernote behind, I did a LOT of searching all over the internet, and ended up settling on Joplin to try out. Right now I'm looking for anything that's better than Joplin (for my use case) that I haven't already considered. According to my evernote stats, I have: Notes 2,509 used Notebooks 111 used Devices 8 used Attachments 4,925 used Storage (MB) 9,036 used Tags 21 used My use case: I keep my personal digital library here, notebooks of thi”
“I have realized that a large part of my personal knowledge system is currently trapped inside Instagram and TikTok. I save content related to fashion, hairstyles, design, restaurants, travel, products, tutorials, creative ideas, and professional references. The saving process is fast, but retrieving anything later is extremely difficult. I have created many collections, but finding the correct one every time requires manually scrolling through a long list. Because of this friction, I usually put”
“Markdown may reduce integration overhead, but I’d test the actual research loop before migrating: retrieval quality, repeated context sent, correction work from stale notes, and cost per completed literature task. I maintain Tura and wrote this analysis on why tool-level token savings need a complete-task denominator: https://turaai.net/blog#token-saving-plugins-are-mostly-stupid-idea”
“For many years now, I have been interested in the PKM topic. I started out by organizing things in simpler ways (back in the days of Evernote), then moved to Obsidian, and finally to Tana (now Tana Outliner), which I have used since the early beta versions. I am an academic working in the humanities, and the supertag model has worked quite well for me over all these years to bring together different types of sources, projects, and resources. However, recently something has changed. As you probab”
“This is quite an old post but I thought I’d shoot my shot. I feel the same as you wrote here. What are you using?”
“7 months later, here's what I do: Daily notes database with recurring template Siri shortcut to open the latest daily note in lock screen Turn more complex blocks into 'notes' i.e. pages with canonical area page mentions inside It's not ideal as mentions <> relations, but it does the job for light notes”
“decision records are helpful but keeping them concise & easily findable is just as important..”
“I want to track daily habits. Ideally, I'd like to wite down activities I did for the day, add markdown do it & it will be highlighted a certain color (red or green). Then every week I'd like to see a mixed color bargraph of daily values. For example: Monday: [G] got up at 6 [R] ate fast food Tuesday [G] got up at 6 [G] read for 1 hour So the bargarph for Momday is 50% red, 50 green... Tuesday 100% green. On paper, I'd normally just highlight these words w a green or red marker.”
“Hey folks, hope you're all doing well. Over the last few years, I’ve pretty much transitioned entirely to ebooks. It’s convenient, for sure, but recently I noticed this weird, slightly sad feeling: once I finish a digital book, it just kind of... disappears into the ether of whatever app I was using. I realized I really missed having a physical bookshelf to look at. Something that acts as a visual reminder of the journeys I've taken and the things I've learned. Since I couldn't f”
“That’s a clever workflow. How fast is it in practice from having a thought to getting it saved in Notion, and do you use it consistently on mobile? I’m trying to understand whether a dedicated capture app is meaningfully faster than opening a favorited Claude chat.”
“Hi everyone ! I’ve been traveling for a year and just got home now, I spent the afternoon trying to find a good app to make my travel book but can’t find anything that works for what I want. I want it to not crop the pictures, be able to easily move the pictures and the texts and also freely do the layouts. I’ve tried all the classics like Saal Digital, CEWE, Canva Pro, FreePrints, Pixum… but it’s so frustrating every time because they will either force you to have a shit layout, or force you to”
“I don't trust the privilege or confidentiality with any note taker or digital recorder like ZoomAI/Firefly etc. I still take pen and paper notes the old fashioned way and probably will forever.”
“I love this problem and think it's super important. I've similarly noticed myself using a whiteboard to think critically for a while and then take a picture of the whiteboard as proof of deep thought, even if the next step is AI supplemented (a doc, a video, etc).I've also started noticing people annotating a whole doc "written by humans" to try to convey effort and care. That's fine for some things but do that too often and a reader will be left with two thoughts:1. Did they actually write this”
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