Most people don’t take any notes, let alone detailed notes. The minority who take notes don’t take them in an organized way that they can be easily found years later. You can become one of the top ten percent by setting up a well-thought-out system and then building a habit of taking notes every day of your life.
The requirements of a good permanotes systems are straightforward:
- Will your notes system work 20, 30, and 40 years from today. Longevity of the technology is crucially important.
- Are your notes easily exportable? That way, if your choice of technology gets deprecated and discontinued, you can still import your history into the next new thing, the next best bet tech.
- Can you search every word within your notes, not just the subjects or the tags?
- Can your notes store non-text media — for example pictures, audio files, and video files?
- Will your notes system scale to large sizes and remain performant and effective?
- Can you backup your notes system on a regular basis to multiple cloud storage areas?
- Is your note system secure enough?
The simplest (free) solution is email boxes on BOTH Gmail and Outlook. Why not:
- Set up an email box on gmail with an address like yourname.notes@gmail.com. It is a good bet that Google will be around doing email 40 years from now.
- Setup a second email box with an address like yourname.notes@outlook.com. It is a good bet that Microsoft will be around doing email 40 years from now.
- Forward all mail from the gmail address to your outlook address. Now, anything that you send to the first will automatically be backed up on the second one.
- Optional — you can use any email client to pull email down to your local machine for a third backup.
- Optional — you can set up a third email account and forward everything that Outlook receives to the third system. A good candidate is ProtonMail for the extra security it offers.
- Start emailing yourself all your notes. If you take notes on paper, take a picture of your written notes, put a couple of words on it for future search indexing and email those in too.
There are many apps, from Google Keep to Evernote to Microsoft OneNote to Day One that all take nice notes, but each has different aspects including some plus and minuses. I have used Keep and Day One a lot, but hindsight is 20/20. If I was starting over today, I would simply use the email system above for its obvious ubiquity and ease of use. I believe gmail has a better chance of outliving Keep and Alphabet has famously killed off programs in the past. But with Gmail as the most popular email system in the world, it seems to have staying power that is essential for this use.