My note taking system

After a decade of futzing around with second brains and note taking systems for forever, I’ve settled on a dumb setup and haven’t touched it in three years.

I use Obsidian which saves as local markdown. I keep two categories of notes:

• People notes, which have a filename matching the person’s name. Everyone I work with gets one of these. Each time I talk to them one on one, I put the notes there.
• Daily notes, which get autogenerated in a folder called “Daily” with a filename matching the date. Almost everything that doesn’t go in a people note goes here, such as non-1-1 meeting notes.

I almost never look at a daily note again after that day is over. But I look at people notes all the time to brush up on what we talked about last time, or to remember their cat’s name, or to nudge myself to check in their goals, or whatever else.