Where should I record the day’s minutiae? copingmechanism.com/2020/dail…

@jack I keep thinking about your problem, because I keep thinking about it in my “system”, too! Here’s my question: Where do you put a note when the minutiae and the non-minutiae overlap? Like, you had dinner with friends (minutiae), but the conversation resulted in lots of good notes and suggestions (non-minutiae) that you want to capture, both because they’re interesting and worth checking out, but also because when you look back on them in 5 years, they help you remember how that dinner went by giving you all kinds of good context out of them? I guess part of it is solved by that day’s minutiae entry being right next to the daily notes entry. I don’t know! :)

@twelvety Great quesetion. I've been trying not to overthink it, but failing a little :). My rule of thumb is that if I just want to jot it down as a record, it's minutiae. Otherwise, if I want to "say something," it's in the main Daily Note. I'm not even sure I want to keep the minutiae info in the wiki. There are always some too-private ones that have to go elsewhere, which creates a dilemma. This is still evolving!

@twelvety So I guess for your example I'd put a note about the dinner in the main notes entry, or possibly even in both places. Currently I'm thinking of minutiae as simply things that "don't belong" in the main note for the day. So much for not overthinking it! :)

@jack Looking at it as which items "don't belong" in the main note for the day is probably as close as we can get to The Answer. I think what I'm afraid of by putting it all in Roam is that I'll clutter up the worthwhile notes with minutiae if I don't separate them out. I also started thinking this morning that one other metric that could help me decide if something is a piece of minutiae or a note is whether it's useful if surfaced on its own. The fact that I "ate a handful of almonds" on March 13, 2019 is almost certainly useless by itself in the future, so it's going to be minutiae. But some quote or a link to a promising tool recorded on that day might be worth remembering later. We will see!

@twelvety One thing I've found with Roam is that it's pretty good at filtering out the "noise". I've learned to not link every mention of every topic every time. I try to reserve links for things I'm likely to want surfaced later and leave the rest to "unlinked mentions".

@benedwards Oh yes, Noteplan is so tempting! It's included with my SetApp subscription (although that one hasn't been updated to v3 yet). I like that they focused on notes in the new version (rather than relying so heavily on the calendar integration). I used v2 for a short time as a test and also liked it, but at the time was so deep into Emacs and Org mode that I never seriously considered it. I might need to revisit!

@twelvety @jack I've been following your back and forth on this and have to ask if you've ever tried DayOne? Admittedly it's not much for research but having used it for 7 years now, every day I write in it and it surfaces all of the other entries from this day for the past 7 years, that kind of repeated presentation of historic thread/context has proven invaluable this year as I see how much things have changed but stayed the same. Plus, iOS shortcuts make it very easy to capture minutiae so I can always search and see when, for example, I last put down lawn fertilizer, etc. I enjoy how you guys are digging into the use cases, makes me want to write more iOS shortcuts to make DayOne do things it was never meant to :-)

@sjwillis Yes, I use DayOne, albeit intermittently. You're right, there's something great about getting a notification saying "On this day, 8 years ago"! :). For some reason, though, it's never caught on for me as a way to capture the little things like "Paid such-and-such bill". I can't explain it. These days I use it as a photo journal and plan to print another book from it at the end of the year. Love that feature!

@jack agree, there’s a minutiae continuum and DayOne excels only at one end of that continuum. I try to extend its range for capturing minutiae through shortcuts but even then it’s a bit kludgy. Good luck on your quest! At the end of the day emacs is probably part of the solution :-)