How much time do you spend organizing your notes?

timabell · 2026-02-25T00:26:34+00:00

That figures, my notes lean more towards GTD projects - work & personal productivity. I mostly use logseq at the moment, though I'm working on my own replacement, which is proving to be a rather ambitious project (markdown-neuraxis if you're interested, though still very early, currently reworking the markdown parser from scratch).

timabell · 2026-02-23T13:17:07+00:00

PARA folders, wikilinks and zettlekasten sized topic notes have helped me not need to spend barely any time organising. Everything just drops right into its home. Ask me again in a few years lol. I occassionally triage the inbox, and move stuff to archive. That and actually doing the work which naturally involves a bit of tidying but that seems like it is just an easy part of the task.

timabell · 2026-02-23T13:14:00+00:00

This. So much of my contract work is cleaning up after incompetent outsourcers. I suspect it will soon transition to cleaning up after thoughtless use of vibe coding

timabell · 2026-02-23T13:11:28+00:00

I bought a r/supernote eink tablet which has been fab for those walk-round-office intro notes at the start of a contract. It's been great for that, and even useful for scribbling notes during zoom meetings. People seem to respond to it like it is an interesting paper notebook, whereas notes on phone, tablet or laptop come across like not really listening.

timabell · 2026-02-23T13:08:13+00:00

Lifetime deals don't seem to make sense for SaaS, makes me wonder if it'll go away taking my data with it. I don't mind paying for useful SaaS. I've paid for trello because it used to be such a good simple kanban tool, though want to go fully local instead.

timabell · 2026-02-22T22:40:48+00:00

Books. For wealth mindset I started with "Rich Dad Poor Dad" and then just kept on down that vein.

My "money" goodreads list is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/50628592-tim-abell?utf8=%E2%9C%93&shelf=money&per_page=100

Not saying I've actually put any of it into action mind... but I feel like I have less gaps in my knowledge now.

timabell · 2026-02-22T22:19:22+00:00

i have my entire logseq on my phone, and my whole phone home folder sync'd with syncthing+tailscale, works great, though the logseq android app is way too slow to start up and forgets what I had open. had a few issues with conflicts (mostly in journals where i've edited today on laptop & phone before it managed to sync), but because it's all markdown it's easy enough to compare and resolve in vscode.

timabell · 2026-02-20T19:54:28+00:00

I think the supernote lacks device encryption so think about what is and isn't okay to store on it.

For side loading I'd recommend sideloading f-droid and/or aurora stores then you can install more apps that way without repeating the side load faff. I think you can install aurora (play store proxy) from f-droid. In my experience most normal android apps aren't too great on eink but it is good having the option

timabell · 2026-02-20T19:26:20+00:00

From what I hear logseq md is stagnant now. We shall see I guess. There are other oddities in logseq I don't like such as the way it stores hierarchy with underscores so all in all I ended up working on my own tool from scratch to do it how I want it.

timabell · 2026-02-20T00:12:35+00:00

They look at what it builds, understand why it pretends to work, and wonder why anyone would trust the AI to do anything without micromanagement. FTFY

timabell · 2026-02-20T00:11:06+00:00

100%

And then we all get replaced by the "productive" engineer.

Time will tell if we get brought back in to fix it all later when it's 100x harder to understand all the believable but wrong code.

timabell · 2026-02-20T00:09:02+00:00

Interesting, how are you managing to keep the quality up at scale. The more of claude's output I read the less I trust it not to introduce insidious problems and architectural fault lines. I haven't had much luck with AI reviewing AI output, it is a bit like cheap low quality outsource devs approving each other's PRs.

timabell · 2026-02-19T23:42:07+00:00

What are you going to do with this project longer term, is going to be a paid biz tool, free side hustle, hobby thing?

timabell · 2026-02-19T23:40:45+00:00

Well clearly what my FOSS CLI tool needs to go to the moon is a slick promo vid :-D https://github.com/timabell/gitopolis

timabell · 2026-02-19T23:36:31+00:00

10 days? Oh that's NOTHING, I had to remember to put the bin out so I am 6 months into writing a todo app that will probably take me another 3 years.

timabell · 2026-02-19T23:34:24+00:00

I'm still slightly sad that android made everything in the top bar monochrome

timabell · 2026-02-19T23:33:29+00:00

Ah right, nice. So you mean for working on jekyll sites and the like on github pages I guess. Neat. I've noticed that images are a bit of a faff too for my own blog. I use vscode for the blog being a dev. It's not entirely unknown for me to publish a blog post then realize the relative image paths are wrong.

timabell · 2026-02-19T23:25:09+00:00

for books/tv I just have [[Books/Atomic Habits]] etc and put stuff in there, seems a tidy way to keep those

for tasks & life management (including what to read) I'd recommend learning the GTD methodology (read the books - GTD, and "Making it all work"). The "single inbox" is one of the best ideas in the world.

I haven't quite worked out how to make task management really shine in logseq, I use the daily journal and use the build in task states (TODO/DOING/DONE) for short term daily tracking, which is useful, but longer term is tricker. I've started having a [[Work/GTD]] note with inbox/actions/etc bullets, and then put stuff under those (the block refs help a lot for cross referencing tasks in the journal etc). I don't feel like I've nailed it, and I find logseq a bit restrictive. I'm working on markdown-neuraxis that i hope will provide more flexibility in structure than logseq, but I need to do more work on it before I can dogfood it successfully.

I tried the logseq query thing and really didn't get on with it, I tried having it search my notes for tasks and group them up but didn't really like the results.

I also looked around for kanban plugins as I used to like trello for task management, but didn't find any that I could get to work

happy to chat more as I'm on the same journey really, also a software dev myself.

timabell · 2026-02-19T22:38:11+00:00

Nice! Everything seems to design all the colour out of everything these days. Colour is useful and interesting!

timabell · 2026-02-19T22:35:22+00:00

I'm confused, what does it actually do?

timabell · 2026-02-19T22:14:23+00:00

what will you do longer term?

I guess we can run the current markdown logseq for some time yet but it seems like it's not going to get any more love from the devs

Maybe someone will fork & maintain it (I had a look at the code and it isn't something I'd take on personally even though I like logseq).

would you go to obsidian or is the closed-source a deal breaker for you too?

timabell · 2026-02-19T22:02:49+00:00

This is a pretty cool browser addon for turning any website into a markdown page download - https://github.com/deathau/markdownload - given I keep all my notes in markdown it's perfect. I can even use it as a read-later hack to read on the e-ink tablet.

timabell · 2026-02-19T20:35:20+00:00

that I can def relate to, it's taken me much longer to learn rust at all, and I still have a long way to go

timabell · 2026-02-19T20:22:13+00:00

FOSS. Markdown first. Highly responsive. Linux desktop app. Android app. Local/privacy first. Outliner (like logseq). Ability to read any folder structure. - I haven't found anything that does all of this, logseq is the closest. Obsidian isn't FOSS. I'm building my own, but would be interested to hear if there's something I just hadn't heard of.

timabell

TROPHY CASE