Ask HN: Do you write things down for your future self? If so, how?
10 comments
Two angles to answering your 2nd question:
One, how do you ensure what you write down is useful to your future self?
Two, how do you make sure you find it when and where you need it?
To ensure your future notes are useful to you, read what you have already written weeks or months (or more!) ago. Initially, I found my writing was too sparse. Too much context stayed in my head and my notes were almost useless. I reviewed them just before I completely forgot the context and updated them. The feedback loop of reading my own writing has helped me improve a lot at writing well for future me. I have to write to myself as if I will be an amnesiac in the future.
As for finding my writing when and where I need it, I try to give every file a unique and memorable title so I can refer to it in other notes and writings I access more frequently. For me, this means linking to notes and thoughts in Obsidian and creating aliases. If I know I wrote something down, but think the title is "Note B", but the title is "Note A", when I find Note A, I will add an alias with an additional title or keyword so that in the future, searching for Note B will surface Note A (and Note B, if it exists). Or, I will add a link to Note from the 1 or more of the most topically relevant note.
P.S. This maintenance doesn't take me much time. I only do it if I notice that a note was harder to find than it should have been and it usually only takes a few seconds to make sure it's easier next time.
(I used to use OneNote and Evernote, but bi-directional links with auto-suggest and a file quickswitcher are such gamechangers.
I was there when Obsidian and Roam Research felt like the first two options doing this seriously. The ecosystem has grown up around me and I love it. But you can do this with loads of other tools now.)
My filenames generally follow a "YYYY_MM_DD_HHmm Descriptive Title, perhaps a thesis statement - Source, if applicable" format.
To ensure your future notes are useful to you, read what you have already written weeks or months (or more!) ago. Initially, I found my writing was too sparse. Too much context stayed in my head and my notes were almost useless. I reviewed them just before I completely forgot the context and updated them. The feedback loop of reading my own writing has helped me improve a lot at writing well for future me. I have to write to myself as if I will be an amnesiac in the future.
As for finding my writing when and where I need it, I try to give every file a unique and memorable title so I can refer to it in other notes and writings I access more frequently. For me, this means linking to notes and thoughts in Obsidian and creating aliases. If I know I wrote something down, but think the title is "Note B", but the title is "Note A", when I find Note A, I will add an alias with an additional title or keyword so that in the future, searching for Note B will surface Note A (and Note B, if it exists). Or, I will add a link to Note from the 1 or more of the most topically relevant note.
P.S. This maintenance doesn't take me much time. I only do it if I notice that a note was harder to find than it should have been and it usually only takes a few seconds to make sure it's easier next time.
(I used to use OneNote and Evernote, but bi-directional links with auto-suggest and a file quickswitcher are such gamechangers.
I was there when Obsidian and Roam Research felt like the first two options doing this seriously. The ecosystem has grown up around me and I love it. But you can do this with loads of other tools now.)
My filenames generally follow a "YYYY_MM_DD_HHmm Descriptive Title, perhaps a thesis statement - Source, if applicable" format.
This is a really thoughtful breakdown. Thank you for taking the time to write it up.
The idea of writing for your future self as if they will be an amnesiac fits closely with my experience as well. Ironically, I've found that the more I record, the less I find or can surface later.
What stood out to me is how you treat usefulness as a learned skill rather than something you try to get right up front. It seems like you are only investing more effort when a note actually comes back into play, and the feedback loop of rereading seems to shape how you write over time.
I am curious about a few aspects of how this works for you in practice:
1. How often do you intentionally reread or revisit older notes versus only encountering them when you are searching for something specific?
2. How do you deal with clutter over time? Eventually the note pool becomes large enough that maintenance becomes challenging in my experience.
3. With linking and aliases, do you find that maintenance effort scales reasonably as your notes grow, or does it require more discipline over time?
4. Related to that, do you find linking and aliasing less tedious than the concept of relying on a strong search experience? Most note systems I have used seem to depend heavily on exact string matching or tags, which works up to a point but often feels less supportive to the experience than it could be in my opinion.
The idea of writing for your future self as if they will be an amnesiac fits closely with my experience as well. Ironically, I've found that the more I record, the less I find or can surface later.
What stood out to me is how you treat usefulness as a learned skill rather than something you try to get right up front. It seems like you are only investing more effort when a note actually comes back into play, and the feedback loop of rereading seems to shape how you write over time.
I am curious about a few aspects of how this works for you in practice:
1. How often do you intentionally reread or revisit older notes versus only encountering them when you are searching for something specific?
2. How do you deal with clutter over time? Eventually the note pool becomes large enough that maintenance becomes challenging in my experience.
3. With linking and aliases, do you find that maintenance effort scales reasonably as your notes grow, or does it require more discipline over time?
4. Related to that, do you find linking and aliasing less tedious than the concept of relying on a strong search experience? Most note systems I have used seem to depend heavily on exact string matching or tags, which works up to a point but often feels less supportive to the experience than it could be in my opinion.
A good future-proof titling system is really helpful. Other than that, yes, the structure of everything is pretty organic.
I left out that for almost every note, I try to link to or from another relevant note. If it's not relevant, don't force it. That just adds clutter.
But knowing future me won't remember {$relevant-note} unless I link to it helps me decide whether to link or not. If there's a note that know is obscure, but very important, I will sometimes link to it more than necessary.
1. It depends. I almost never reread for the sake of rereading. But there are notes that I keep coming back to over the past decade because I find the thoughts there worth revisiting or worth further development.
2. Like anything, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. I don't find clutter generally to be a problem. I keep a couple of Junk Drawer or Scratch Pad notes for thoughts that might not deserve a note. If I create too many notes titled "Untitled 1", "Untitled 2", etc, I purge them or give them real titles. But clutter isn't a problem for me.
My biggest clutter problem has been including too many notes titled "{$DATE} - Meeting" or some other short, repetitive title ("Phone call with" or "Conversation with" are similar offenders). But I spend almost no maintenance on my notes unless I either can envision some specific usefulness or feel some specific pain point. And I rarely feel clutter in my thousands of notes.
3. I don't find that burden growing, no. I only alias or link if I see specific usefulness to future me. If I plan to write/think about a topic I might create a $TOPIC_NOTE and then I'll link all my relevant files to it, but again, those are often already linked to each other, so they're not hard to find and the effort remains small.
I don't have to maintain hardly anything. I spend almost zero time maintaining things and still use and can find notes going back to 2016 when I started taking notes in earnest and before I started using Obsidian.
4. I find full text search much more tedious than searching via filenames and links. Full text search is useful and necessary for very specific citations or numbers or names, if I'm not sure what note it is in. But for 95% of my usage, if search functionality disappeared from Obsidian, I would barely notice in my personal notes. I rely on search when I'm wading through other people's writing. I rarely need it for my own.
I left out that for almost every note, I try to link to or from another relevant note. If it's not relevant, don't force it. That just adds clutter.
But knowing future me won't remember {$relevant-note} unless I link to it helps me decide whether to link or not. If there's a note that know is obscure, but very important, I will sometimes link to it more than necessary.
1. It depends. I almost never reread for the sake of rereading. But there are notes that I keep coming back to over the past decade because I find the thoughts there worth revisiting or worth further development.
2. Like anything, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. I don't find clutter generally to be a problem. I keep a couple of Junk Drawer or Scratch Pad notes for thoughts that might not deserve a note. If I create too many notes titled "Untitled 1", "Untitled 2", etc, I purge them or give them real titles. But clutter isn't a problem for me.
My biggest clutter problem has been including too many notes titled "{$DATE} - Meeting" or some other short, repetitive title ("Phone call with" or "Conversation with" are similar offenders). But I spend almost no maintenance on my notes unless I either can envision some specific usefulness or feel some specific pain point. And I rarely feel clutter in my thousands of notes.
3. I don't find that burden growing, no. I only alias or link if I see specific usefulness to future me. If I plan to write/think about a topic I might create a $TOPIC_NOTE and then I'll link all my relevant files to it, but again, those are often already linked to each other, so they're not hard to find and the effort remains small.
I don't have to maintain hardly anything. I spend almost zero time maintaining things and still use and can find notes going back to 2016 when I started taking notes in earnest and before I started using Obsidian.
4. I find full text search much more tedious than searching via filenames and links. Full text search is useful and necessary for very specific citations or numbers or names, if I'm not sure what note it is in. But for 95% of my usage, if search functionality disappeared from Obsidian, I would barely notice in my personal notes. I rely on search when I'm wading through other people's writing. I rarely need it for my own.
That's really insightful. Thanks for sharing!
When I have that need, this is what I do.
I use the info from here as context:
https://github.com/InteractionDesignFoundation/add-event-to-...
I load it via a custom system prompt or skill, then pass my specific need, thought, or anything I want to remember in the future, including events with a certain frequency, as part of the prompt.
From that, I render the URLs needed to create the events directly in my personal calendar via the browser. This part could probably be automated better, but honestly I'm lazy sometimes.
And that's it.
I also try not to overdo it with high-frequency reminders, since that tends to de-incentivize actually using your personal calendar, which kind of defeats the purpose.
On top of that, Telegram 'Saved Messages' with the reminder feature is really useful. The native app makes it very fast to navigate. Obviously not as fast as searching local plain text files, but definitely faster than WhatsApp.
I use the info from here as context:
https://github.com/InteractionDesignFoundation/add-event-to-...
I load it via a custom system prompt or skill, then pass my specific need, thought, or anything I want to remember in the future, including events with a certain frequency, as part of the prompt.
From that, I render the URLs needed to create the events directly in my personal calendar via the browser. This part could probably be automated better, but honestly I'm lazy sometimes.
And that's it.
I also try not to overdo it with high-frequency reminders, since that tends to de-incentivize actually using your personal calendar, which kind of defeats the purpose.
On top of that, Telegram 'Saved Messages' with the reminder feature is really useful. The native app makes it very fast to navigate. Obviously not as fast as searching local plain text files, but definitely faster than WhatsApp.
For my understanding, do you use this exclusively when you know the time you want to be reminded, or do you ever use it to surface information at an arbitrary point in the future?
Paper. Goes in a pile. Pile goes in a scanner. Digital files from scanner get automatically processed into digital files, OCR, indexed, etc.
That makes sense.
I am curious what you are using for indexing and how you typically search through the scanned content. Is it mostly keyword based search, or do you have any way of surfacing things beyond exact matches?
I am curious what you are using for indexing and how you typically search through the scanned content. Is it mostly keyword based search, or do you have any way of surfacing things beyond exact matches?
Digital files go into a Dropbox folder, that folder is exposed for RAG to enable querying with an LLM. I can also get to the raw PDFs through the Dropbox web interface and mobile app.
Interesting - thanks for sharing.
Not just what decision I made, but the reasoning behind it, the assumptions I was operating under, or the message I would have wanted to leave for myself once more time had passed.
I sometimes write notes, but they usually capture facts or outcomes, not my thinking. When I come back later, the context is missing, and it is easy to second guess decisions that actually made sense at the time.
I am curious how others approach this.
Do you write down decisions or reasoning explicitly? Do you leave notes or messages for your future self? Do you ever revisit past thinking intentionally, or do you mostly let it go?
I am exploring a small personal tool focused on recording thinking and returning it later, but I am more interested in how people already handle this today.