How Do You Take Notes (or Markdown and Bullet Journals)

Here’s a post I wrote for Hack Library School discussing Markdown and the Bullet Journal system for note-taking. Markdown is a simplified way of writing html, and happens to also be what I use when writing this site through Jekyll and GitHub Pages. Bullet Journals are a system not for classroom or lecture note-taking, but rather for everyday notes about actions, ideas, or projects.

An aside on Markdown not in that Hack Library School article: Sometime I plan to write a few posts on this blog about how I made this site with Jekyll and GitHub Pages, both of which use Markdown. I actually write all the notes that I type in Markdown format (or a variant) because I prefer plain text files and being able to output from there to all sorts of different presentation formats like .docx, .pdf, or .rtf. Oddly enough, I starting using it because earlier versions of iOS didn’t have a way of writing notes that allowed for formatted text, so Markdown started taking off among people who had iPhones but wanted to write links (or italics for academic citations). I’m glad I started using Markdown, even if I do so because of technical limitations, because I think it’s a highly useful way not just for writing for the web but also for taking notes and writing in the most lightweight, future-proof format possible.