I’m a long-time Notion user: my linkblog is based on it (with new links posted to my site via Micropub), and I use it for everything from tasks to shopping lists. But so far, it hasn’t been quite right for me. It’s slow, and perhaps too structured both in form and editor.

I tried Roam Research, for a while, but the interconnected personal wiki approach isn’t right for me either. It’s not structured enough somehow: getting started has been incredibly hard for me. I don’t fully understand how to get the most out of it, perhaps.

In my fiction writing, I really like Ulysses: an app that provides just enough structure for long projects. I’ve been able to map the story circle into a template there, and it’s been a pretty good framework for building up a plot. I have work to do to improve my writing, but (particularly in comparison to Scrivener, which gets in my way) provides me the kind of light-weight support I’m looking for. Its super-responsive index-cards-and-markdown approach works well with the way I think.

What kind of life-and-work note-taking app will work for me? As part of my ongoing quest, I’m trying out Obsidian. It’s got a beautiful interface and is super-fast in the way that Ulysses is. It’s also unstructured in the way that Roam is, so I’m having the same sorts of difficulties, but I’m finding that if I ignore the mindmap graph view and the “daily notes” feature, I can get somewhere. I also absolutely love that it’s based on local text files, so I get to keep all my data.

Why do I need something like this? I want to keep notes about ideas, people, and companies I encounter. There are so many situations where I find myself thinking, “I wish I could remember that thing that did that thing” - and having an outboard brain where I can not just remember those details but also how I felt about them could be useful. My blog is that in a way, but it’s less an intentional knowledge-base than a record of what I’m thinking about. I’d love to start intentionally building up the former.

I’ve been thinking about it as a private set of notes, but I also wonder if I should be doing this thinking in public. Clearly I can’t keep notes on companies I’ve met privately and publish them to the world, but there’s something to be said for making more general notes and analysis available. One of the benefits of blogging as openly as I do - perhaps the benefit - has been finding similarly-minded people and building community. I’ve often said (because it’s true) that every job opportunity since my very first startup can be directly tracked back to blogging. Would putting a knowledge-base out there help me do that more efficiently? Or would it be counterproductive?

Anyway, I’m experimenting with Obsidian, but maybe I’ll think about doing something more public.

If you use a personal note-taking app - particularly if you make your notes public - what have you found to work for you?