What's your note-taking process?

General
1

I’m curious about how folks are using SB for note-taking: capturing, organizing, searching, etc.

I’ve been living with plain text files on disk and that isn’t scaling very well :wink: E.g., I can end up with information about a work project in multiple places:

notes/work/some-weekly-meeting/notes.txt
notes/work/other-weekly-meeting/the-project.txt
notes/work/some-project/notes.txt

I also don’t want the cognitive load of having to think about the folder structure. I want to be able to just write and tag and let the tooling take care of the rest.

SB seems to be a good fit for me but as this is my first foray into note-taking / pmks I’d appreciate some pointers from the folks using this tool, rather than asking on Reddit where I’ll get a million different points of view :wink:

I am a software developer by trade, am very comfortable with there being a technical component to the setup/tool/system.

Thanks in advance!

2

After doing a little more research I am thinking Zettelkasten is probably what I want but I’m still hoping to get other perspectives.

3

Not sure if this will help here, but I tend to use a rather flat structure and use tags instead mainly. I basically only have folders for diary, client projects and so called “areas”, as I call them. On such pages are queries, which can then query for certain tags and list pages accordingly.

Most other rather private and daily stuff is on the “root”. Also I came up with a “How to” page, which defines how I wanted to structure all thing and how tags are supposed to be labelled, etc.

3 Likes
4

That’s very helpful, thanks! I want to hear from more people!

1 Like
5

I’m on an extended eval of Silverbullet and really liking it. My previous note-taking box was Tiddlywiki. I really like how, in both, I can mostly just start writing and know that it’ll end up somewhere that I can find it. Silverbullet’s use of Lua is what I’m most excited about. Most other PKMs have some kind of weirdo, custom query language – SB just uses Lua, I love it.

My basic philosophy is: if I care about it, it gets a note. If I want to find it later, I link it to other things. If I think I know what kind of thing it is, I give it a tag. I mostly don’t worry about paths except for special cases, everything else is top-level.

Here’s the structure I’ve settled on so far:

All my custom meta stuff goes under Library/drhayes. Page templates, styles, random space lua or space stylings, etc.

Daily/YYYY-MM-DD for my interstitial journals while doing work things. Each page is tagged dailies and journals. The page is mostly a list of bullets. Every once in a while, during the day, I’ll pop back in there and start a new bullet. I’ll type the /time command then write a sentence or two about what I’m doing. I’ll link to the project I’m working on, the people I’ve talked to, etc. I’m using a shortcut so I can type Ctrl-shift-d to go to my daily page whenever I want from wherever I want. I can post the template, if you want.

I also have Daily/Morning Pages/YYYY-MM-DD for my morning pages. That’s that whole “try to write 500 words first thing in the morning about whatever is on your mind” thing. It’s also been my most consistent journaling practice in my life, I’ve got morning pages going back a few years at this point. I try to answer two questions: how are you feeling? What are you grateful for? Good stuff. Tagged morningpages and journals.

Significant folks in my life get a page with their name tagged person. If they’re a coworker I tag them coworker. If they’re a friend I tag them friend. I’ve got ADHD, so writing helpful facts like “partner’s name” and “kids names” and “what’s going on with them recently” helps me a lot. Yes, it’s a mini-CRM for the people in my life. I’m a robot, beep boop.

I can also link to that person from my daily interstitial journal and quickly answer questions like, “What did Mark tell me last week about that project?”

Meetings are named Meetings/YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM - Whatever Topic. I try to link it up as much as possible: people that are there, projects it touches. I try to write up anything I want to remember from that meeting in there.

Uh… oh no, I’ve written a lot. I’ll stop the novel-writing exercise here. :smile: Let me know if this is the kind of thing you’re looking for!

2 Likes
6

Thanks, that is very helpful!

1 Like
7

I found this format Daily/Wednesday/2025/August/13 very handy myself. And I use data blocks (and also tagged table rows) for some calculations (e.g., debts, payments). As soon as I have good solution, I will share. Otherwise I am still sort of in process of making up how I will re-organize all my notes and everything. :slight_smile:

1 Like
8

Mind showing a couple of examples? I know SB can do a kind of data field like stuff:whatever, but I haven’t found a use yet.