Note-taking
It's the same old story: your current note-taking app is just not cutting it. You've tried all the popular ones, but they all seem to fall short in some way. Apple Notes, Bear, Notion, Craft, Obsidian, Capacities... you name it. After spiraling for a while, I finally realized that none of these apps actually solve the core problem of note-taking. The issue isn't taking the notes themselves. That part is easy. The real issue is everything that comes after. The real issue is, simply, time.
These apps offer great tooling for writing, formatting, organizing and sharing notes, sure, but without the time to actually format and organize every note, they become disconnected and difficult to find. This defeats the purpose of taking notes in the first place. You end up with a dump of disparate, useless notes that you can't find when you need them.
I think I've finally found a note-taking app that addresses this head-on: Mem. With Mem, I can scratch down my notes as always without worrying about organization, tagging, categorizing, anything. That's it. Then, when I need to find something later, I can just ask for it.
Some cool examples:
- I have a note about my cars, and I'm able to ask Mem to pull up my license plate number. Little pieces of information like this that don't come up that often can be hard to find in a sea of notes, but Mem displays them immediately.
- I have a number of notes that follow a similar template, but I'd never written down the template itself. I was able to ask Mem to generate the template for me, and it did, no problem.
- I can even ask Mem to summarize my notes from the past week, and it will do that too. Great for preparing for one-on-ones at work or just keeping track of what I've been up to.
If I need a piece of information, I just ask for it. The LLM does a better job than a simple string search because it's able to connect the dots between notes even when they don't necessarily use the same keywords.
Maybe even more exciting to me is how it's allowed me to loosen up with my note-taking. I can just write down whatever I want, and Mem will have that information for me later. I used to be strict about including a title for every note, but now I don't feel the need to do that every time. I've even started to dictate notes for the first time.
What I'm saying is, Mem lets my notes be notes and not an aspirational wiki. I'm tired of that, and while I previously saw it as a personal failing, now I say: embrace it and use a tool that does that work for you.
Mem finally lets note-taking be just that. Note-taking.
Note: This is my opinion. I hold that LLMs are much more interesting for human-to-computer interaction than for human-to-human interaction (Microsoft Is Using GPT-4 Wrong), as is the case here. If you have thoughts or concerns, that's fine - feel free to message me.