Greg Morris

Design Your Engine First

Following on from a great post by Jeff Perry about the unimportant things we worry abut when choosing a note taking app. I wanted to expand on this slightly. The way you take notes and the access you have to them afterwards is infinitely more important than the app you use to collect them.

You can have the best, most expensive note taking app in the world, but if you don’t have a system for collecting your thoughts and being able to refer to them easily then it doesn’t make a bid bit of difference. Time and the again I fall for a new app that is going to improve my ability to do X better — and that is emails apps, note apps, task managers — when in reality all I need to do is keep doing the thing.

On the flip-side of this, I have been using Roam Research for quite a while now, and it allows me to dump ridiculous amount of information with almost zero separation and leave it to form its relationships. This can be done in other services, including a recent update to Notion, but the system I have works tremendously well for me.

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