📜 README
Record keeping is essential when you’re a “digital professional”, but longevity ended up being more important.
Especially for software engineers, but this applies to most who work with information and problem solve on a day-to-day basis too.
Finding the best methods for recording your solutions or even just keeping track of research can be a whole world a quasi-productivity. You may have come across the endlessly complicated methods known as PKB, Life OS or Second Brain etc.
Although inspiring yourself to optimise and learning to love the process is essential for productivity, it’s more important “to not get lost in the forest looking for wood”.
I personally found a light approach combining the best parts of GTD, brain dumping tasks, and wiki style contextual linking with long term Zettelkasten style IDs works well across the sort of notes I take. It also fast and portable.
But there’s one catch. Recording information in notes is most helpful over the long term, when there’s little or no maintenance needed.
On my quest for longevity, I’ve tried all the most well known systems out there including Notion, Google Keep, Evernote, and Standard Notes - but they all have the same thing in common.
You’re tired to one system, and your data is at the providers’ mercy.
Standard Notes addresses part of the problem of these sorts of service providers, by being focused on privacy through encryption and attempting to aim their business model for longevity. However, it’s still somewhat of a walled garden, and while I used it, the product has some data corrupting bugs and painfully slow development process.
It turned out that you simply cannot beat plain-text, once you get over the sparky features you often don’t need over the long term. Even if it’s just a backup as plain text to ensure your records over the long term.
I ended up leaving Standard Notes to try out markdown plain text files with Vim, Zettlr and Obsidian text editors, and I’ve not turned back in years.
As I was exporting my vast array of notes from Standard Notes, I noticed a crucial part of my workflow was not supported in their text-based export. The metadata such as file modification times.
Not wanting to waste a moment more on closed wall systems, I threw together a quick and dirty script to export Standard Notes format to a plain-text file but with the metadata intact, and the frontmatter file headers complete.
Find the code on my Github, and use it at your own risk! Export Standard Notes to Markdown with Frotmatter
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