Taking Notes 📝

I try not to switch up my tools too many times.

I’ve fallen into that trap of having lists, notes, storage of my thoughts all over the place and then when it comes to writing notes or things I need to do: suddenly I have nowhere to put it.

Well, scratch that – I have a lot of places I can put it, but nowhere that feels trustworthy to be its long-term home if that makes sense?

With that said, I did find a new tool that sort of blew my mind, and since then, I have been trying to adapt my note-taking workflow to it.

My note-taking apps

🗒 LogSeq

LogSeq describes themselves as:

A privacy-first, open-source platform for knowledge management and collaboration.

If you’re familiar with Obsidian, you’ll probably also like LogSeq, which is very similar in terms of features. I tried Obsidian for the first time when I started my new job at Gitpod earlier in the year. I didn’t enjoy the experience as much as I thought I would (surprised that productivity YouTubers didn’t make me productive!)

This thought was interesting because it was a reminder that there are so many tools to help cater to different people. We’re all so diverse; specific tools may not work for all.

Specifically, Obsidian didn’t work for me because I enjoy taking bullet point notes. LogSeq does that out of the box! I know I could have just written bullet points myself, but it’s different when the way the application was designed with folks like me in mind: who liked taking bullet point notes.

Obsidian had used such as writing markdown files, but it didn’t feel as nice as where I usually write my markdown files, which is in the trustworthy Bear app that I’ve used for years.

My use case for LogSeq: daily note taking for work and life. I have a database called “Brain” which is mostly my work brain, and another called “Life” which is my life brain (, e.g. digesting therapy sessions or learnings from a book/podcast)

Another favourite feature is building out this work brain to see all the connections I’m learning. It’s pretty cool.

My first week of using @logseq done – my brain dump is growing 🧠 Prefer this to other note-taking apps, experience is top-notch. 🙌🏼 pic.twitter.com/0RjO1QURPg

— Pauline P. Narvas (@paulienuh) November 15, 2021

My work brain gets the most daily notes because honestly, I learn so much at work, feels like every minute of the day sometimes 😆

Thank you to Matt for sharing LogSeq with me in the first place. 💖 Also, a shoutout to the LogSeq team for merging my PR to improve contributions to their docs using Gitpod. 😄

🗒 Bear

How many times have I talked about Bear on my blog? A quick search would probably tell you that 90% of my blog mentions Bear. 😂 It is that good, though!

As I said above, I’ve been using Bear to write markdown files for years now. Bear fits into my daily workflow as the app I open when writing a blog post, a newsletter for DevX Digest or some dialogue for a podcast or other media projects.

I previously used Bear for everything including my bullet-point note-taking. Still, no matter how much I attempted to organise my notes, it just didn’t work. Now, I exclusively use Bear for writing. That’s it. It was a welcome change because now, I know it’s time to write when I open Bear! My brain is ready to go!

🗒 Apple’s Notes

Unfortunately, LogSeq isn’t very accessible on my phone (and I’ve just got it working well on my iPad, sort of.) I remember seeing some requests in the future for an app, but for now, all the “other” notes that don’t make it in a more meaningful way onto LogSeq lives in Apple Notes.

I moved most of the notes I previously had stored in Bear to Apple Notes. Although that sounds like it’s a dumpster fire, there is a bit of structure! I enjoy using Apple Notes for more personal stuff (, e.g. COVID travel notes) or shared notes with Matt. We all have a copy that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but this switch was very welcome after using Bear primarily (which doesn’t have a share feature).

🗒 Notion

Admittedly, I don’t use Notion as much as in my personal life.

I use it a lot for work, as it’s one of our main daily tools, but although Matt and I have a shared Notion space, I hardly look at it.

Because Notion is so feature-rich, it’s been an excellent way to find links to other things that we occasionally need. It has been helpful when I forget recipes, for example, and refer back to it because 2019 me was looking out for future me.

But in terms of note-taking? Eh, not as much, but still worth a mention.

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Take note: I like taking notes 🤷🏻‍♀️

This post might be too over the top or even complicated for some folks, but having the separation makes my brain VERY happy, and hey – that’s what matters here! 🧠

I’m aware that I didn’t talk about physical notebooks…and that’s because they just don’t work for me. I need to be able to search for things otherwise I’m lost. 🙈

Over to you – tell me about your note-taking workflow! I’m always intrigued to see how people capture everything in this information-heavy age. 👇🏼