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)
“oh man the watch later graveyard is real, i have conference talks from 2019 still sitting there judging me this is the kind of thing that sounds like it would either be a lifesaver or completely miss the nuance of a talk, no in between.…”
“I took most of my notes during undergrad on an ipad so my handwriting is pretty bad. The office I work at uses paper charts and my notes are messy compared to my coworkers. I need to write very quickly and struggle to do so neatly. Any tips? submitted by /u/Ecstatic_Gate_2346 [link] [comments]”
“I use a google sheet to list my major projects and their impact as well as google doc for roadmaps and stakeholder meetings. And then i have a weekly to present these things to manager. Is this an old way of doing it? Is AI used somehow to show our work now? submitted by /u/informatica6 [link] [comments]”
“Hello I understand there are many many notes apps available today. But I'm looking for a true digital cabinet - one where my few 100 notes (so not thousands) can co-exist alongside some audio recordings, lots of PDFs, images and so on. What would be your top 3 recommendations for me to try using? Cloud storage is great for files but I cannot write notes around the file so... Let me add that work will pay for this so the price itself is not so important. Thank you submitted by /u/”
“I have a lot of fencing notes, books, syllabuses (syllabi?) and fencing magazines going back over 30 yeas. That is just the physical stuff I have... I couldn't even begin to guess how much I have on my google drive. Or the incredible resources online i have bookmarked over the years. And I have always wanted a way to make all of that information manageable. Well today I discovered a site called Notion and holy crud it is awesome and I just wanted to let anyone else who is internet dumb know”
“I use tags for my folder structure, I turned off graph view pretty quickly (I kinda went through the plugins turning off things I thought were pointless... For now). However, I've seen writers say they use it to ensure that the worlds they're writing about is connected, they look for certain patterns in the graph view, that there's not too many isolated subjects.”
“The “why I cared” part really resonates. Do you actually write that for most things you save, or only for the genuinely important ones? I'm curious because the capture friction seems like the tradeoff: the more context you add, the easier retrieval becomes later, but the more annoying saving becomes.”
“Thanks. I didn't realize it wasn't an option. I'm not sure I want to add a cognitive step of manual moves... each time I make an upload. Thanks again.”
“Some time ago, I had the epiphany that notes should be stored in a way that makes retrieval easy. So I thought more about what a “retrieval-first schema” of classification would look like. I ended up with something fairly simple, but robust, as follows: A note is classified into one of five types: Reminder, Record, Reference, Project, and Idea. A Reference note is further one of Entity, Concept, or Procedure. That’s it. So classification isn’t based on subject domain (that’s what tags are for).”
“do you ever go back and fill in those empty pages or do they just stay as connection points?”
“Personally in the long run I much prefer Notion as my class knowledge base + notes + lecture transcripts (meeting notes) if you can record lectures. Since so much of classes now are slide decks, articles, excerpts, pdfs on pdf on pdfs, the more you can convert that into markdown the better I’ve found I’m able to parse that content into useful formats. But in a pinch it’s very easy to transfer slides into Notion via an embed or even convert them from a pdf into a page using the pdf import tool .”
“PDF slides can eat space quick, especially if your profs embed a bunch of images or graphs. Drive's 15GB across everything is rough, so I get why you're leaning toward Notion. One thing to keep in mind: Notion file uploads count toward your block storage, not a separate GB cap, but the free plan has an upload limit per file. If your slides are huge, you might hit that wall. Honestly for school, I'd keep the bulky raw files in Drive and use Notion for notes, summaries, and linking to”
“I’d keep it simple 😅 If I have to think too hard about where something belongs, my dashboard is probably already too complicated.”
“Hi I use ppt slides - then I fill them in class. For notes I carry the notes and have them filled in by hand. Over time I have changed some items,updated others, and so the lecture notes are a crossed out mess. some stuff i have looked over a million times and so bored with them. Anyone have a good system of keeping all this in check- with the million cross outs etc. submitted by /u/delphil_1966 [link] [comments]”
“This is actually clever as hell, the sentence-based tracking instead of page numbers is what makes it work. Every ebook reader already has dictionary lookup but for physical books you're just stuck Also I feel personally attacked by the restart loop thing, I got like 3 copies of Dune and never made it past page 80”
“Been thinking about this for a while and wanted to float it before I actually build anything. Basically: a shared vault (or shared space, format TBD) where anyone in this community can dump notes (templates, dashboards, reference lists, workflows, weird little systems you cobbled together at 2am) for other people to poke around in, steal ideas from, and add to. No curation, no gatekeeping, no "is this good enough to post" bar. Just a growing pile of knowledge that gets more useful the”
“No, I haven't. In graph view, you can add a group for specific property and change its color. You can also change the view so it shows only notes with a specific property. That's about all I can think of for the graph view, since I'm not very familiar with it. What I do is I use the Dataview plugin and with it I can do other things such as listing people that appeared the most during certain years etc.”
“that containment force trick is clever, never seen a graph tool bother with a physical brain shape before”
“Also, as a recovering chronic electronic hoarder (3861 open tabs on PC rn, 2153 on mobile, 10K+ in bookmarks - everything is interesting all the time not my fault), it helps to have some friction in the way we collect (save) things. It acts as a forcing function for filtering what is truly important, just like how having to do a multi-hour task in the last minute concentrates your mind on what actually matters. I feel we often save because we don't want to miss out on stuff, or to be able to”
“You can ask AI to group the texts and create index for your files, or you can do it manually. You can refer to this video for details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=491Q1ZySc1c submitted by /u/Due-Disaster-8698 [link] [comments]”
“I often spend my time designing games in my head, and whenever I have an idea for a new game or story that I can use, I tend to dump as many of the concepts/mechanics/story details etc. into a Google Doc or some other file. I've created quite a few of them, some more fleshed out than others. Most are RPGs or SRPGs based on Fire Emblem, Persona, UT/DR. But recently I've been wondering how I could put those idea into a game design document, or something similar. Perhaps something that I co”
“That’s not the point I was making. I agree it helps eliminate human error. But my point was the blurb about admitting you didn’t review the note yourself. I don’t know how well that would go in court but again I’m not a lawyer.”
“I'm waiting for the OCR feature, it is present in Evernote and for me is very useful. I store a lot of screenshots and photos. So you can search for text inside images. But sadly they ignored this feature.”
“Makes sense to me. I’m pretty proud of how Samurai Scribe evolved into a TEXT FIRST file system. It’s actually the case that the text files in your vault are the SOURCE of truth. If you change a note or transcript on your drive, samurai scribe will eventually load that in, and then re-index everything into invisible database for speed. I used to have it the other way around where text files were simply exported by the database. This is what most transcription apps do and was considerably simpler”
“Heya! People can be rude and unhelpful sometimes. Sorry about that! Anyhow, I don't necessarily have a good example for your applications. BUT. I think it would be super helpful for you do check in on Obsidian features such as tags. Those + graph view would probably be killer in your case. I'm no expert, but feel free to DM and I'll walk you through anything I do know! 😊”
“That's a good idea to append "archived" to the name when the box is checked. Thinking about it I might do something similar but add a symbol to the start of the name too to make it very clear which items are archived if they come up in a drop-down etc.”
“If I need a to remember where something is, I just take a picture of the garden bed with my phone and add text to label each spot. Then make a dedicated folder for those photos.”
“Makes a lot of sense. I think my problem is that I treat every PDF or random file like it needs a permament home, when a lot of it is really just temporary input. I probably need to get better at extracting what I need and letting the rest go lol”
“found one way it happens: When you right click on a page and 'move' it to another location, Notion will DELETE the page and place a reference to the deleted page in the new location. A workaround I found: open the page first and within this page click on the options top right and 'move' it to your desired location. This will effectively move the page without deleting it. Crazy bug, but at least be aware of this.”
“I have things saved on LinkedIn. Videos on YouTube. Posts on X, Instagram and Reddit. Articles. PDFs. Documentation. Sometimes I'll research one topic and save useful things about that same topic across 4 different platforms . And then... that's it. They're “saved.” But what does saved even mean if six months later I don't remember what I saved, where I saved it, or sometimes that I saved it at all? And we don't usually save random things. We save things because something mad”
“I adopted the practice of ensuring that every note in my vault is intentionally added and linked. I often start with an "_inbox" folder to add stuff to review. I periodically "process" that folder and delete anything that's not important. Anything that is, I move it to its final location and add a List Property called "MoC" with the link to its parent note, generally a Map of Contents (MoC) note. Focus on working IN Obsidian, not ON Obsidian.”
“Lol this is my experience. I still try and distill my docs to 2-3 pages regardless (and am a bit more liberal dumping supporting analysis in an appendix), but my general experience is no one reads anything in my org, so I'm not going to kill myself.”
“We've given loop a try. It works well for most things. Also Copilot can use it as a resource when asking internal questions”
“This started as notes for my own interview prep. I kept losing the same explanations in bookmarks and half-remembered blog posts, so I started writing them down properly. It got out of hand. It's now 573 topics across 8 sections — the browser, JavaScript, React, Next.js, backend, data, system design, AI/LLM engineering, practices and behavioural. One rule decided what got in: a topic earns a page if it can plausibly come up in a real interview round, or if you need it to answer something tha”
“It reminds the concept of atom, molecule and alloy that Wanderloots explains in his video by tagging each note. 'Atom' for someone else words. 'Molecule' when you combine and rephrase in your own words. Another way around may be to use collapsible callouts. Look in the online doc for syntax and use”
“I've been hosting a Dokuwiki instance for almost 20 years now, for all of my notes. Haven't had an issue with it. Why reinvent the wheel?”
“(preface: I did hesitate between a meme tag for this) I'm 80% through the dissertation writing (computational materials science). I've managed to have 5 different versions of alpha in my equations in my ~130 pages. My advisor is a stickler for "new variable, new nomenclature." So even across chapters, "alpha" is "alpha." Mostly philosophical humor, some advice, how do you deal with this? I'm learning towards "descriptive" subscripts with a hand”
“I posted an early version here a while back, but it was a wall of text with no demo so here's a proper look. I do project work daily and I have used Excel, Notion and Obsidian for following up my work. Notion needed constant setup just to see my open tasks across pages and Obsidian got there with plugins but started to feel heavy. I wanted to include my tasks in my whatever notes in several pages and be able track those tasks easily. So in KontrolRoom, any checkbox in a note can carry a sche”
My work requires me to read lots of academic papers ( I am in the semiconductor material RnD space). But I don't like uploading papers to chat bot to get the summaries…
“Neither, mostly. My folders are just containers for things that behave the same way (References, Journal, Attachments, Templates) and they carry no meaning at all. The actual classification lives in a categories property: every note links to one or more category pages like Books, People, Projects, Writing, Travels, and each of those pages is basically an empty note with a Base embedded in it that lists everything pointing at it. About 1,200 notes in my vault are filed this way. The reason I pref”
“Really curious what your approach to organizing is. Have been considering doing the same but worried about text based notes getting out of hand. Thought of linking documents rather than using note "cards".”
“Google Sheets Google Sheets Well, if I knew that I wouldn't be able to tell you would I? Wouldn't know, don't use that shit Write Notes -> Write Outline -> Write Script People constantly trying to sell me half baked SaaS solutions No. No.”
“hey guys, back in uni i remember taking biochem notes on a surface pro 4. drawing structures and typing labels on the same OneNote page felt like literal magic back then. i still remember how good it felt, how proud i was showing my notes to friends and professors. ten years later, now for work, i'm still using OneNote and i consider it a prison. Handwriting is OneNote's last bastion. not to wax poetic but i am pretty excited to break out this plugin is my attempt to solve the handwritin”
“This is when you gotta ask yourself if the things you’re trying to track are actually important enough to track. And if you do wanna track it, what is that data going to provide for you?? I used to track every time I did one of my hobbies and then realized it was a waste of time”
“I am a folder user that is trying to use tags but the issue with categorizing anything remains. How much time do you want to spend describing something that can be searched already? Are titles not tags in a way? The beauty of obsidian is all text within is searchable. I could spend more time coming up with tags that I think fit those multiple subject notes then I can just throwing it in a main subject folder. I use folders everywhere else so it's definitely a struggle. Still learning the pro”
“It made me realize I have done far too many #clippings and they way attachments are handled turns into insanity. When I tried to start using tags it turned into a huge mess and became unusable aside from finding notes I probably would have never looked at again.”
“To my mind, unread stuff has nothing to do in a Zettelkasten. And actually, for my own very narrow reading of the concept, writing by somebody other than me also has no place there. If you want to develop it into a tool to have a conversation with -- in the intellectual sense, not in the “I run an GenAI agent over it” sense -- then it needs to be your own writing. Otherwise it won't work.”
“Agreed, filing, linking and writing why were parts of the classic zettelkasten method.”
“Yours is the workflow where read later genuinely works, and I think it's because of two filters most people skip. You skim first, so every save has already passed an engagement test, and every save is tied to a project, so "later" has an actual date attached. That's tips 1 and 2 running in the background without needing to call them rules. Papers are also a special case in a good way. A results table isn't something you read once and absorb, it's reference material you”
“At my last job, my boss ands I had differing views on retention. My view was “storage is always cheaper than recreating something you deleted because it reached an artificial expiry date”. He was more focused on what he saw as useful either now or in the short term. We were both wrong at times, but often the cost of me being wrong was less than him being wrong. I use obsidian as a hoard of articles and emails that I found useful or interesting. The whole second brain thing I found a mix of confu”