I think it's important to acknowledge everyone's mind works differently, and something different works for everyone.
For me, I've found once I start trying to follow a system, like PARA or zettelkästen or whatever else, it just becomes tedious and time consuming and I feel like a slave to the system.
After going through 3-4 cycles of this, I came to feel like the main point of these systems is to sell books to people like me, who's brain craves structure yet struggles to create it :).
I also came to realize most of my notes are write once, read never.
I now just make quick and dirty notes and throw them in an "archive" folder once they are not active (one "inbox" folder for active ones), and rely on search.
No system, no curation.
Same strategy for email.
I do find the notes useful to keep; e.x. "when was the last time I got bloodwork done at the doctor" or "what command did I run to get the debugger to hit the right symbol server for that old old project", but I spend basically 0 thought cycles on them now.
I also find plaintext or markdown to be the ideal format for these notes.
There's a whole other category of notes, where you want to share information with others or teach. This is documentation. It is best suited to a wiki format with rich text.
I think a lot of people end up making wiki-style notes, but really they are never going to look at them again or share them and they could have just hacked up a quick text file and then archived it, instead of making something pretty no one will ever care about afterwords (including themselves). It's really hard to admit this though.
I have one note per topic. I write down in summary when I'm activity studying something. Most of it i end up remembering but its nice knowing where to look when i forget. (Especially a link to what i used to study it last time). Some of them could probably be printed as a compendium at this point.
I have one note per project, running as a log of quick paste dump or thoughts when i leave for the day. Usually never revisited.
I have some journal notes. But they're rare and only written for larger events (trips, holidays).
I was all-in on backlings and atomic notes for a while, but it ended up being unsearhable. The current method could survive without backlings at all.
For me, I've found once I start trying to follow a system, like PARA or zettelkästen or whatever else, it just becomes tedious and time consuming and I feel like a slave to the system.
After going through 3-4 cycles of this, I came to feel like the main point of these systems is to sell books to people like me, who's brain craves structure yet struggles to create it :).
I also came to realize most of my notes are write once, read never.
I now just make quick and dirty notes and throw them in an "archive" folder once they are not active (one "inbox" folder for active ones), and rely on search.
No system, no curation.
Same strategy for email.
I do find the notes useful to keep; e.x. "when was the last time I got bloodwork done at the doctor" or "what command did I run to get the debugger to hit the right symbol server for that old old project", but I spend basically 0 thought cycles on them now.
I also find plaintext or markdown to be the ideal format for these notes.
There's a whole other category of notes, where you want to share information with others or teach. This is documentation. It is best suited to a wiki format with rich text.
I think a lot of people end up making wiki-style notes, but really they are never going to look at them again or share them and they could have just hacked up a quick text file and then archived it, instead of making something pretty no one will ever care about afterwords (including themselves). It's really hard to admit this though.