Freezing your memory: Notes, journals, todo lists in plain text

Being pro-technology and innovation working in the digital world, I often get excited about new tech and quickly find myself installing and testing new apps and software.


The digital space of taking notes and managing a todo list has been exploding with new comers, from the Evernote, to Notion, passing by Google's Keep... I've tried them all.


Distraction.. has a logo


Reflecting on all of this, those tools have their merits, I can't deny the advantages they bring to the table for some users.

However, these apps, as any other digital product, have a mission: harvest engagement, keep you using them, depend on them, never leaving, nor switching to other competitor's app... Which becomes an issue for someone trying to have flexibility, with less distractions. a distraction from doing the actual work you need to be done.

Loaded with multiple features, such as adding images, emojis, links and so on, and now with embedded AI to help you write, note taking has never been so distracting, and sometimes very counter-productive.


So, I'm going back to the basics : Good ol' PLAIN TEXT.
Yep you heard it: I'm moving away from distracting tech, claiming to give us "a second brain"

Why:

  • Moving out of the closed box of vendors controlling my stuff
  • Ease of use, no interfaces, updates, features to deal with
  • No distractions. NONE!
  • Regain focus and concentrate on the important thing: getting the ideas out there.


How:

One tool, no functionalities. Just text.



Just install sublime text, write your notes and save them into .txt or .md extensions, if you need to access them on the go, just save them into an online drive service .

That's it.

Remember, Almost all literary timeless pieces were written, with a pen and a paper.. they didn't have Notion's AI assistant ;)



Always remember : 💋 KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)

See you on the other side. Peace out!

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematical Symbols in LATEX

Image
I have been going through my hard drive and organizing some of the files I have, PDF's, eBooks and articles and I found a very interesting documents about LATEX math symbols. Please deactivate ad-blockers to be able to see the pdf document ! UPDATE : I have published this article a few years and it has attracted the most attention of all my blogposts, so I'd like to thank all of the visitors that shared this post. Please take some time to check out other articles I have shared about Data Science, Machine learning and Big Data: Data Mining basic and advanced concepts - Part 2 : Describing Data Here are some of the most interesting parts of it:
Read More >>

Analyzing Twitter data with R (part 3: Cleaning & organizing the Data)

Image
After we have explained in the previous parts, how to set up the access to Twitter's API and how to import tweets with a simple R command, in this third part we will try to organize and clean the data we have imported in good reusable format. So let's pick up from where we left off , after finishing the authentication process, now we want to import certain tweets. the command  searchTwitter  from the package twitteR will do the job for us.  we need to create a new object that will contain the data we are about to import and give it the result of our  searchTwitter function. In our example, we will be querying Twitter for the tweets containing the hashtag #Tunisia , we will import 1000 English tweets. and we will have a preview of the imported data with the head()  function:
Read More >>

Linkin Park: Analyzing the causes of death of Rock band members

Image
Being a part of the Y generation, I grew up listening to various types and genres of music, from Rap to RnB, to Rock and electronic music. I was personally choked to hear about the death of the lead singer of the Linkin Park band. Their music was and still is popular until today. The news was as choking to me as to anyone else who knew that band. After knowing about the news, I had a discussion about this tragedy , and a question popped up about the fact that rock band members mostly die of suicide or drug over-dose. I wasn't really sure that this information is true, so I really couldn't have a real argument to say that it is maybe (or not ) the most commun reason of death for Rock stars. And since I love playing with data, I decided to fact-check the hypothesis stating that:  "The most commun cause of death among rock band members is suicide" . To start, we have to get  some data! and since there is no available data-set to analyse , I had to be creativ...
Read More >>