These are not mutually exclusive. And the fact that they are not mutually exclusive is, in my opinion, one of the major obstacles in being able to develop a really good process for taking notes and then operating on those notes. I frankly don’t care much for any note software out there because the note taking part is generally easy so I just default to Apple notes for jotting down “external brain hard drive” stuff.
I’m actually working on a solution that integrates the notes and the tasks. See, I’m in meetings all the time so I write things like:
1. Client’s main priority is look and feel of website. (This is just a note)
2. Client needs to be done with project Dec 1 (also just a note)
*3. Ryan (me) to set up meeting with Joe and Jane. (This a note but I have to do something here and track it)
I can’t stand taking notes and separately having a todo list. They need to be integrated. You need to be able to take notes and quickly see all the todos that came out of it. You also need to be able to prioritize those todos and filter them as part of your day and executing on those todos. This is what I’m working on and I think it is the silver bullet for me.
If anyone wants to come along my journey or wants to see the prototype, email me (ryeguy_24 at yahoo).
I'd also want to integrate notes & TODO - but also time-tracking, i.e. the ability to "click" on any note/TODO and log time against it. Perhaps a TODO can be a note with a tag like "#todo"/"#todo-important"/etc, and time-logs can be child notes..
You can do this with Org-mode in emacs! It will look something like this:
* project
** DONE investigation
...
** TODO implementation [2/3]
DEADLINE: <2021-06-21 Mon>
:LOGBOOK:
CLOCK: [2021-06-17 Thu 13:30]--[2021-06-17 Thu 16:03] => 2:33
CLOCK: [2021-06-17 Thu 10:30]--[2021-06-17 Thu 13:04] => 2:34
:END:
do X and Y, be careful about Z
- [X] part 1
- [X] part 2
- [ ] part 3
And you can quickly show the time spent on each entry:
1. Notes
2. Tasks
These are not mutually exclusive. And the fact that they are not mutually exclusive is, in my opinion, one of the major obstacles in being able to develop a really good process for taking notes and then operating on those notes. I frankly don’t care much for any note software out there because the note taking part is generally easy so I just default to Apple notes for jotting down “external brain hard drive” stuff.
I’m actually working on a solution that integrates the notes and the tasks. See, I’m in meetings all the time so I write things like:
1. Client’s main priority is look and feel of website. (This is just a note)
2. Client needs to be done with project Dec 1 (also just a note)
*3. Ryan (me) to set up meeting with Joe and Jane. (This a note but I have to do something here and track it)
I can’t stand taking notes and separately having a todo list. They need to be integrated. You need to be able to take notes and quickly see all the todos that came out of it. You also need to be able to prioritize those todos and filter them as part of your day and executing on those todos. This is what I’m working on and I think it is the silver bullet for me.
If anyone wants to come along my journey or wants to see the prototype, email me (ryeguy_24 at yahoo).