Take Notes to Think Well: Apps you can use

I am still reading Sören Ahrens's How to Take Smart Notes and this topic has been filling my mind these few days. 

I have shared it with my colleagues and friends and some of them are looking forward for me share insights from my study, which I will definitely post a review here soon, when I'm done with the reading, note-taking and thinking.

But one thing that I also find interesting is the many apps and platforms out there for us to use for note taking and journalling. 

And I use quite a few of them. You would think that I should just settle on one but I found that using different note and journal apps for different purposes serves me rather well.

Here are the ones I use and I highly recommend them.

Evernote

I used Notes in my iPhone when I was using my Apple gadgets but when I went full-on Android, Evernote is my choice for all my notes. I store them in separate Notepads for easy reference. I even take photos of my pen-and-paper notes and store them here for easy access. The only problem is since I did not pay for it, I can no longer send notes in via email as much as I like. 

Journey

I use this as a prayer and journaling app. I was using Diaro before but when I travelled to Seoul in December last year, I wanted to use a different app as my travel journal but ended up just sticking to one. Journey and Diaro is somewhat similar but I prefer the feel and user interface of Journey. I write in my personal thoughts and my prayers here. It is also very useful when I need to vent and when I need to sort out my thoughts and emotions. 

Diarium

I started using this a learning journal to note down one thing I learn every day. It started off well but soon I found myself forcing the daily learning points and so I stopped. But I stuck on with the photo calendar. I can view all the days in all the months in thumbnails and it does give me a big picture of how I spent my days. And with just a glance, I can see the significance of every single day. I like the feel that I have spent my days well. Well, some days at least!

Trello

This is what I am excited about now - Trello. It all started when I needed to sign up for an online conference next month that will last for 4 days with a crazy number of podcasts to listen to. I started to Google for smarter ways to take notes which was when I found Trello, which was also when I found Sönke Ahrens's book on How to Take Smart Notes. I have started to practice using the Slip Box in Trello and so far so good. If you want to know how a Slip Box work, wait for my blogpost on it. But in the meantime, do check out Trello. While the other note and journaling apps are straightforward linear ones, Trello is nothing but. You can create boards and lists and cards, and move them all around, which work perfectly well for a Slip Box. And if you check it out online, you will also see people using it for Scrum and sprints. It's quite powerful.

And here I must quote Niklas Luhmann (again), who created the Slip Box: one cannot think without writing. 

So we all do need to write, to take notes, to journal. It's the only way we can think good and think well. 

pearlie

I started a learning journal

I started a learning journal and have been recording what I learnt for the day every day for the past week.

I got this idea when I attended Deloitte's seminar on the latest HR trends. 

Among the things I picked up was that we need at least 100 days of learning in a year to remain relevant. 

With that, I wanted to learn something every day and I thought it'd be a good idea to start a journal to record what I learn on a daily basis. 

I downloaded Diarium, a journaling app and I have been doing it for a week now. Some days were hard whilst other days I have loads to write about. 

Since I kept it a point not to miss even a single day, some days are quite forced, but I would still write something, however irrelevant or trivial that learning item is. 

And it's a good thing because by the end of the day, if I have nothing to write about, I had better go do something useful before the day is out. 

pearlie

Should I stop blogging?

 

I have seriously thought about stopping my blogging several times now. And I thought about doing it over the past few days. 

It's about security issues, about having nothing important to say, about the times when I struggle to find the time and the mood to write. 

But I'm still on it. 

I have stopped blogging in 2009, only doing it sporadically.  It took me 5 years to get back into a daily blogging in 2014. 

The reason I'm still sticking to it is because I know I will never get back to it if I quit. And I still think it is a good thing to blog, albeit about stuff that does not really matter to anyone but me. 

It helps me think, it forces me to reflect my days and I will have a log of what mattered to me everyday over the years. 

But I know I will still think about stopping as I go on. Maybe I should stop thinking so much. But that will even be a tougher thing to do. 

pearlie 

A yearly journal of your life

 

Time really flies and it has been two years since I started using this journaling app call Askt. I blogged about it when I started using it and amazingly, I've kept at answering its daily questions and have completed two years of it. 

Some of the answers to the questions are unsurprisingly exactly the same, for example to the question "Do you like your mirror?", I have answered exactly the same thing in 2015 and 2016: "nope". 

Some entries amuses me though. Like this one: "What do you hate to talk about?" In 2015, I replied "politics" but in 2016 I replied, I hate to talk about "boring stuff. Politics is getting interesting." And I promise I never look before I answer the question for the second time. 

Here's to Askt for the third year round. I wonder how many years will I do this though. 

pearlie

What's in your refrigerator?

 

I have been using the daily journaling app Askt for surprisingly almost two years now. It is an app that ask you a question a day each day of the year. It has been interesting over the past few months when I noted down my answer and then cheeked what I had written last year. Some answers were exactly verbatim while some have changed, for better or worse. 

The one that had changed for the better is the question for today: what's in your refrigerator? 

My last year's answer of "oops...lots of overdue stuff" has been improved to "lots of stuff I use for cooking". 

I am happy I am now a slightly better refrigerator person. 

What's in yours?

pearlie