Chris on his Chris Notes blog, writing about his Digital Notetaking Stack:

One of the most important parts of my setup is my intake app. I hope you’ve never had to experience this feeling:

Your friend names a cool restaurant or book for you to look up later. You hastily pull up your notes app to write it down. But wait. Where should you make the note? Does restaurant fall under your travel folder? Or your food folder? What should you title it? Do you need to make a new folder? While you’re fiddling with your app your friend has already started talking about that other boba place you should explore. Should that go in a whole other note? Oh god.

I feel like a lot of people give up after going through this a couple times and their notes app just ends up being a hodge-podge of unorganized, random shit that they dread looking back at later.

I’ve been deep into information processing tools the last few weeks. Partly because of work stuff, partly because of the overall activity in the space. Information processing is my catch all for the stack of intaking new things, making use of them/actioning, and then storing and maintaining them. Chris’ above thought on the intake being the most important part resonates with me.

So many of the tools today are just not at all simple. They are complex and overbearing. I’ve gone deep on a lot of the PKM utter-useless-nonsense out there and the offshoot tools created for it. Waste of time. Obsidian feels like that for me as well, but Chris’ use he details in the linked post seems rather sane and logical to me — dare I say, I like it.

But his system also mirrors mine in a lot of ways: paper + efficient digital tools. I’ll write more about my setup in the coming months. But give Chris’ post a read, it’s one of the best how-to/getting started guides I’ve read on this stuff.