How I take notes in 2026
Plain text, dated files, and a single weekly review. The tools matter less than I thought.
I have tried every note-taking tool. Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Bear, plain text in a folder, index cards on a corkboard. I have read the books — How to Take Smart Notes, Building a Second Brain, the one with the Japanese name I always mispronounce.
What I do now is embarrassingly simple.
One folder called notes. Dated files: 2026-03-02.md. Each file gets a header with the date and whatever is pressing. If I want to find something, I use grep. If I want to review the week, I open the last seven files in order and read them.
That’s it.
The thing I got wrong for years was believing the system would do cognitive work for me. It won’t. The weekly review does more than the tool does. The habit of writing things down in a consistent place does more than the linking feature does.
What the tools got wrong
Most note tools try to help you find connections between notes. This sounds like a good idea. In practice, it creates a second job: maintaining the graph. I was spending more time organizing thoughts than having them.
The dated file approach forces a different habit: you write for your future self who will be reading linearly, not searching. That constraint produces better notes.
I still use Notion for project tracking with clients. But the thinking happens in the plain text folder, with no back-links, no tags, and no clever plugin to visualize my mind.