Daniel Voicu

Which is the best note taking app?

I feel that I’ve been running after the perfect note taking tool and I see a lot of them popping up recently. A lot of them are promising features that will help you be more productive, get your ideas out there or whatever you want to do; or in the case of some apps, that you won’t need anything else, bundling calendars, office suits, note taking apps etc into one large tool.

This is what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. Trying note taking apps, hoping that the next one will be THE ONE. I used Obsidian for a while - an amazing app, by the way - , I tried Roam, even simpler apps. I was looking especially into apps that would help me take notes about the things I am reading or just journal some random thoughts that I have.

I think I stopped using Obsidian when it became an all in one solution for publishing content online, creating a ‘second brain’ and a PKM app.

I’ve tried apps like Notion and Craft, but I feel that they have too many features and that I would spend too much time tinkering with them instead of actually writing. I’ve been using Agenda, but more for personal project notes and a place to gather info about very specific topics that can be useful in my work. In the meantime, I also found out about Capacities – Your second brain and Tana. All these tools are amazing for teams, so I probably won’t be able to use them at their full potential.

Second brains and external memory

A thing that’s probably common sense, but it took me some time to realise is that everyone has a method to take notes, you just need to find your own. I looked over the recommended apps for building a second brain, all of them seem to be recommending things that work for the author.

It’s good to look at how others organise their work/research/notes etc, but in the end you have to do it in your own way. If it works for you, that’s enough. You want to create some sort of an external memory for you, not for someone else.

Initially I was making a confusion between the note taking app and the concept of “second brain”, which is actually an ecosystem of apps. But still, the most important tool in this ecosystem is the note taking app, which should be the place where you store and distill the information you’re gathering.

My ideal note taking app

If I would try to describe my ideal note taking app, it should be:

• easy to access from any device and sync notes. I tend to jot down ideas on my phone and get back to them on my laptop.
• its files should be an open format that can be used on different platforms and with different apps - ideally markdown
• it should allow me to make connections between my notes fast
• a small amount of features - text, links, images, video embeds and site embeds
• offer a preview mode in case it uses markdown
• allow you to search through your notes without you having to remember the exact taxonomy / tagging system
• I want my editor to let me focus on what I want to do - without any distracting notifications or features
• have a way to export notes. It would be great if it could export a note and all the notes that it links to, generating a single pdf/html file. Ideally batch export.

At this point I’m writing this in Bear, but I’ve also been using Ulysses. I feel that Ulysses is much better for writing long-format articles, novels or research papers, which is also its stated goal.

I like apps that don’t have flashy features: they get discovered by the user naturally, at the right time. If you have some features that are useful to the user, make them as unnoticeable as possible.

I think in May or June I found out about a great podcast called To the Best of Our Knowledge. I've been listening to it since then, and I remember that the first episode that I listened to is called "Solace of Nature". In that episode they talked about the way nature influences our life, how it can offer us contemplative experiences.

I continued with another episode called "The Weird, Wild World of Mushrooms". In this episode one of the guests was Paul Stamets, a mycologist on whom a character from "Star Trek: Discovery" was based on. The character even shares his name and has a similar job, but with a twist: he's an astromycologist. This episode was also a good starting point for me to check out a documentary on Curiosity Stream called "The Kingdom: How Fungi Made Our World". You should check it out if you would like to know more about the importance of fungi and their relationship with the environment, trees, plants and even humans.

Today I found out from [IDEO's blog](https://www.ideo.com/blog/ideos-new-podcast-asks-food-world-visionaries-about-the-future-they-want-to-see) about their podcast where they discuss the topic of food and how the future looks like for it. Just the fact that it comes from IDEO makes me want to see what it's all about. It has 8 episodes so far, around 25 minutes each. The podcast can be found here: https://ideo.com/food, with transcripts for each episode.

I have listened to the first episode, and I am adding a few ideas here.

The main question of the podcast is "How might we design better food systems?" Another question that it discusses is "how does climate change affect the way we produce and consume food"?

I will add a few updates and probably turn them into separate notes as I listen to the rest of the podcast

First episode

How do we connect with food - main three ways: shop, cook and eat. We don't think about the systems behind getting the food on our plate.

13 mil children in the US go hungry every year, although almost 40% of the food produced goes to waste.

When restaurants, school cafeterias and coffee shops closed - or reduced their activity - due to the covid-19 pandemic, farmers were also hard hit. A lot of their products remained unused and they had to dispose of them when their biggest clients no longer needed these products.

Our current food system has lead to the loss of biodiversity, rise in factory farms, chemicals in soil, and release of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

The current food system is responsible for 25% of the annual greenhouse gas emissions.

Dr Ricardo Salvador, director of the food and environment programme at the union of concerned scientists, who was a guest on the show said:

"The food system isn't broken. It is working exactly as it's intended to work. And exactly as it was designed."