Things to take notes about

Lots of people have ideas about what kinds of things you should take notes about, or what you should use your notes for. I’m collecting some of these ideas as I run across them, with currently no commentary on whether they are useful or meaningful to me. I’m thinking about how I want to structure my own notes as I find myself coming back to Obsidian more after a bit of a hiatus.

This person uses notes about

things they are doing and have done, including any decisions they make, however small. This helps with picking up work where they left off
things they want to do, to help prioritise what to work on next, and to recall what ideas they had for a project that didn’t get done for whatever reason.
drafts of things they are writing - “no need for a separate app”
Things they want to remember, like quotes and references, not necessarily as part of a project

Their time-bound things relating to projects and publishing live in folders Now or Next, depending on whether current or future. There’s a note in at least one of the folders for each article they are writing, or project the are currently or want to work on. These notes are structured with a scratchpad at the top, and a log of what they did at the end. They have a separate Notes folder for the last category of non-actionable things, and an Archive for things that are completed or no longer relevant. They reference the PARA method from Tiago Forte.

This person uses project-active-resource-archive notes (note this is not PARA with areas). Their active notes are for time-based things (running todo list)m and things that happen or are relevant on a recurring basis.

This person has a multi-layered approach to taking their notes ad a developer

Daily notes, to help them understand where their time goes
Meeting notes, created when the meeting is scheduled. This isn’t notes/minutes from the meeting, rather gathering context and ideas in the run-up to the meeting, then capturing the most important points for them in addition to the general minutes, and any follow-up tasks they have.
Running notes, documenting all the work they do, including dead ends (Recording cancelled tasks is important). This is like a lab notebook of what you did/learned. It helps you get back in flow on a task if you are pulled away, and retains context around decisions you made in the process. Later they extract key points from these
Topic notes, self-contained well-written notes about a single topic. These are share-able, publishable or can be sent to colleagues. They publish some at /snacks on their site.
a Brag Document! Or rather two, one for their job and one for nice things people said about/to them

Some people do their daily note in one big text file:

Mike Grindle puts everything in one file. Tags and search are vital
Ellane W doesn theirs like a bullet journal with signifiers at the start of each line
Dan Lucraft includes an “80-character diary”, kind of a line-a-day thing for nerds. They also run 30-day trials of a habit, which is cool (not quite a single big text file, but related)
This person keeps task list in there too, so they can see what they’ve completed. I don’t think I want that, but I get the value

I’m intrigued by this as a way to force me to record memories/what I did there, and pull out anything that might have a use in other places into other places - refactoring enforced by limits in ability to link. Make more use of the note refactor functionality from Obsidian