I’ve been taking a lot of notes for ~16 years. When you write too many, they become write-only. It’s too difficult to sift through them to find nuggets you can synthesize into something else. I’ve tried structuring my notes after writing them, but this becomes remarkably time consuming and difficult to do unless you are extremely diligent about how frequently you do it.

You’ve got to structure your notes as you write them, and LogSeq makes this easy.

I still take a lot of notes via “Note to self” in a messaging app; I don’t use the LogSeq mobile app because of some opinions I have around syncing (if you pay, you can sync, but I want full ownership of my notes and to trust that they are private). However it’s just a copy-and-paste for me, because I’ve got my hashtag structure figured out mostly.

I have a few tips for new users:

Use hashtags - but not indiscriminately.

It might take you some time to find the “themes” of your notes, before you’ve really wrapped your head around it you might just pepper hashtags everywhere. Eventually it becomes pretty clear. Use them diligently and later when you get fancy with search and queries you’ll be glad you did.

Don’t write massive blocks.

Separate larger thoughts in the outliner - sub-thoughts, parallel thoughts. Make child blocks. Remember that child blocks inherent the tags of their parent blocks, so don’t repeat tags in child blocks or the search results will get messy. When you come to a conclusion, hide your evidence and reasoning under your conclusion for future reference.

Finally,

Journal!

I am very glad I’ve been journalling for so long. I wish I had done it more. Every now and then I go back to old journal entries and revisit the me of the past, and the problems I had. I can reflect on them, add amendments, and essentially have a conversation with myself through time. It is remarkably valuable.

My opinion on obsidian

I’ve used obsidian a bit. It is much more polished and so are the plugins. However, the long-form structure it promotes loses out on the second piece of advice I wrote above: don’t write massive blocks. In my opinion, it is much easier to synthesize something later with your notes when you have structured them in an outlier format that is backed by a true graph structure with searchable parent/child relationships. It’s more like how your brain works, and if you’re using this as a second brain that’s important.

I’ve been looking into Logseq and Joplin over the last week or so, trying to figure out how I want to migrate away from Evernote since they are massively increasing their prices.

What I like about Logseq and Joplin both is that at their core it’s just Markdown files and you can sync them around in a number of different ways however you feel like, including self-hosting, various cloud providers, or locally and securely via syncthing (which is what I chose). With syncthing the content of the notes is never exposed during transit and it’s never stored anywhere I don’t control.

At the moment I’ve moved almost entirely over to Joplin since it’s pretty close to Evernote, but I do plan on trying to use Logseq and see how I like its journaling/block tagging type approach.

I use Logseq as well, and I love it. Something about journaling bullet points fits me so well and feels natural. But, templating system is a bit clunky, the app is rather unstable (do enable git tracking or you might lose your notes), themes/plugins quickly get out of sync and to fully power-use it you need to know Clojure programming lanugage (I don’t and I’m missing out powerful filters).

But, all data is in simple markdown files, so we are not locked in.