I Think in Notes

I have been taking notes since I was about seventeen. More than forty years, by now.

It began with journals and handwritten notebooks. Many of them are still sitting on my shelves. Later came digital systems: first TiddlyWiki, then Evernote, eventually Obsidian — along with various small tools I built for myself along the way.

The tools have changed. The underlying habit has not.

I do not only take notes so I can remember things later. I take notes to find out what I think in the first place.

Writing as a Way of Thinking

Thoughts often feel much clearer in your head than they really are.

The gaps only become visible when you try to put them into words. Ideas that seemed obvious suddenly turn vague. Two thoughts that appeared to fit together reveal a contradiction. A passing observation opens up a question you had not even noticed before.

Writing does not simply preserve a thought. It changes it.

I often begin with little more than a vague feeling or a half-formed idea. As I write, a structure starts to emerge. I add something, disagree with myself, rewrite a sentence, follow an unexpected connection. By the end, the thought is no longer the same one I started with.

In that sense, notes are not containers for finished ideas. They are where ideas take shape.

Working on Ideas — and on Myself

I studied philosophy and psychology before eventually finding my way into software development. My notes have always moved between those worlds.

I record technical solutions, develop product ideas, describe observations and try to make sense of larger patterns. At the same time, I use notes to observe myself. What is occupying my mind? What is changing? Which patterns keep returning? Where have I changed my opinion, and why?

A single note often means very little. The interesting part emerges over time.

Only through a series of entries can I see how an idea developed or how my perspective shifted. Notes make possible a kind of work that is neither purely intellectual nor purely personal. I work on a subject while also watching the person who is working on it.

That may also be one of the differences between a note and a finished piece of writing. A finished text tries to show clearly where you have arrived. Notes preserve the detours, doubts and intermediate stages as well.

From Notebooks to Knowledge Archives

Over time, individual notebooks turned into large digital archives.

TiddlyWiki gave me my first real sense of what it meant to connect ideas. Evernote became my main archive for many years. Thousands of notes accumulated there: texts, fragments, recordings, references, drafts and unfinished lines of thought.

For a long time, that worked well.

Then it became increasingly obvious how dependent such an archive was on the software in which it had been created.

A personal knowledge archive grows over years, sometimes decades. During that time, the company behind the software may change its prices, its business model, its technology or simply its priorities. And an export function does not necessarily mean that your data remains genuinely usable. Links break. Attachments become difficult to manage. Formats are awkward to process. Structure gets lost.

My move from Evernote to Obsidian was therefore not simply a switch from one app to another. It forced me to confront a more basic question: who does a knowledge archive really belong to?

In theory, the notes had always been mine. In practice, they were trapped inside a system from which they could only be extracted cleanly with a considerable amount of effort.

So, as a developer, I began building my own converters and small utilities. Not because I was looking for another software project, but because I wanted to get my own thoughts back into a form that was open, searchable and likely to remain useful.

When Thinking Becomes a Dialogue

Over the past few years, the way I take notes has changed again.

A large part of my thinking now happens in dialogue with AI. Instead of writing a thought into a note and developing it alone, I speak it out, refine it, get challenged, discover another angle or arrive at a provisional structure.

This suits the way I naturally think. For me, thinking has always been dialogical — even when the other side of the conversation was only an empty page.

But this new form of thinking creates a new problem.

A conversation can be highly productive and still disappear almost completely afterwards. Valuable ideas remain buried in long chat histories. Something that felt important today may be nearly impossible to find a few weeks later. Dialogue helps generate thought, but it does not automatically create a useful knowledge archive.

In the past, the note itself was often the thinking process. Today, part of the thinking happens in conversation, while the note takes on a second role: it has to distil, preserve and make the result accessible again.

That does not make note-taking less important. It makes it more difficult.

Notes That Last

After more than forty years of taking notes, I am no longer interested only in how to capture something quickly.

I am interested in how thoughts can remain useful over time.

How do you store notes without tying them to a single piece of software? How do you search a personal archive without handing it over to the next platform? How do you turn thousands of old entries back into living material? How do you turn a long AI conversation into a concise note that will still make sense a year later?

And which tools do you actually need?

Diaporeo is where I explore these questions. I collect thoughts, experiences and small tools from a life of taking notes.

Not because I have already found the perfect system.

But because thinking about notes has long been one of the ways I think.