There is no right or wrong way to take notes but I always enjoyed reading it when people shared the details of how they take notes and how it fits into their daily lives (as long as they're not trying to sell you a course or template that is).

Some background, I work as a Software Engineer focused on infrastructure. Part of that job is to wear many hats, one day I am trying to improve performance of SQL queries on Trino and the next day I am deploying new services to Kubernetes.

The core of my workflow is a daily note with 3 sections

  • tasks

  • scratchpad

  • review

On the day I wrote this post you are reading right now it looked like this:

Tasks is kinda self explanatory, I suppose, you write down what you want to do that day and add more tasks as they come up during the day. It's usually the first thing I do when I start the (working) day, to write down the main things I want to accomplish that day. I also look back at the previous day and move any unfinished tasks over if they are still relevant or delete them if not.

Scratchpad is by far the most simple and valuable thing for me. It's really just an empty section where I jot down things throughout the day such as thoughts, ideas, notes on what I did, what I need to follow up on. Anything can go in there. This daily note is really essential to how I stay on top of things, especially on days where many people might ask for your help on a wide range of topics. I usually put a line --- whenever I switch to a different topic.

Working as a Software Engineer in most places involves a daily standup where you give a brief report of the things you did yesterday and discuss any blockers. The scratchpad of the previous day thus automatically serves as my notes for the standup of the next day.

The review section is also what you would expect, it's for thinking over what happened that day and what new things I may have learned and what could be improved. Now to be fair, I don't do this everyday but whenever I do it feels useful. I keep the section in to remind myself to do it more often.

That's all I have for today, I might do a few more follow ups on "How I use Obsidian" in the next couple of weeks as it's genuinely one of my most beloved pieces of software to use

Closing

I split my writing across two leaflet publications

You can find also find me on the web at mariuskimmina.com as well as across the atmosphere on BlueSky & Tangled