Taking notes is easy. Making sense of them later? That’s the part that always broke me. I’m lying. Taking notes hurts my soul. I kinda hate it and telling myself to embrace the suck is not helpful.
I’ve tried everything: elaborate systems, minimalist systems, digital, analog, hybrid. Most collapsed under their own weight. The ones that didn’t still left me with a pile of fragments I never had the energy to reassemble.
So many Moleskins. So much illegible scrawl. My handwriting has a very short best before date for interpretation. If you know, you know.
Then, almost by accident, I stumbled on a workflow that actually worked. It wasn’t a new app, a revolutionary framework, or a productivity guru’s manifesto. It was a perspective shift in when and how I made sense of what I captured.
Here’s how it happened.
The Struggle Bus of Good Intentions
For years, my note-taking was a mess. In meetings, I’d scribble in notebooks, type furiously in OneNote, or worse, try to structure things in real time and miss half the conversation. I’d walk out with pages of half-formed thoughts, more bullets than a John Wick movie, and arrows pointing God knows where. Worse was the sinking feeling that I’d just wasted an hour. I would never revisit the notes because they had no long-tail meaning.
I tried everything:
-
Apple Notes: The Comfortable Junk Drawer For a long time, this was my default. It still is. Fast, everywhere, Siri-friendly. A beautiful, searchable paradox, full of insights I could never find when I needed them. No structure, no guilt. Just… stuff. It scaled into chaos, not clarity.
-
The Forever Notes Framework I’m not alone. About a year ago, Matthias Hilse came up with a framework to tame Apple Notes for him and shared it here. I admire the idea: atomic notes, linked thinking, a personal knowledge garden. The perpetual journal thing is chef’s kiss. It’s essentially a digital Bullet Journal. I tried. I really did. But it demands more upkeep than I can sustain. During busy stretches, it collapses into another graveyard of broken promises. I’m still using it for weekly and quarterly planning. That’s working well. Take what resonates and discard the rest.
-
Obsidian: The Fiddly Era Redux Plugins, backlinks, constant refactoring. It was like owning a high-maintenance sports car, I spent more time tuning it than driving it. Eventually, the friction outweighed the benefits. The two happiest days in a Jag owner’s life? The day they buy the car and the day they sell it. Obsidian is kinda like that. I promise to not try it again. Probably. You can check out Obsidian here.
-
Plain Text (VS Code + Git) This is my writing studio. Solid, calm, durable. Version control without ceremony. I’ve always loved it for both blogging and long-form work. A folder tree brimming with simple text files has been with me for decades. But plain text isn’t built for meetings. It’s great for capture, terrible for sense-making. You cannot simultaneously listen to budget explanations and type out intricate markdown headers. VS Code is a great text editor. GitHub is a great place to keep your files safe, but not for everyone. Any cloud solution and backup strategy will do the job.
-
OneNote A sprawling, multi-layered maze that required more mental energy to organize than it returned. I use this for work by default because we’re a Microsoft shop and a bunch of people share OneNote notebooks. It integrates with the entire Office suite and I’m told it’s amazeballs by its adherents. I don’t see it. Not for me anyway. Something about floating textboxes on an infinite white canvas damages my calm. I have notes and notebooks in sections and pages everywhere. It’s horrid. And I hate it. OneNote is free for personal use.
-
Plaintext Productivity as a Philosophy I love me all the low-friction tools and open formats. Michael Descy has put together the best approach I’ve seen with Plaintext Productivity. But even plain text doesn’t solve the core problem: I could capture everything and still understand nothing. Plaintext and markdown are language, but they are not tools.
So I kept searching.
Spoiler Alert! An AI Workflow
A few months ago, I was testing Microsoft Copilot for something unrelated. On a whim, I opened it during a meeting and typed:
I'm in a meeting. Don't respond unless I ask you to. Just capture facts, ideas, and actions as I share them.
No structure. No formatting. Just raw fragments.
I didn’t have to think about where to put things. I didn’t have to fight with bullet points or indentation. I just listened and talked in the meeting, tapped a few words, and stayed present.
Unlike paper, I didn’t have to retype anything later.
Unlike OneNote, I didn’t have to organize anything in real time.
It was the first time I’d ever captured notes without feeling like I was failing at note-taking.
Side note. You don’t have to do this in the chatbot live. Half the time, I just tapped into Notepad or an Apple Note. Doesn’t matter. Just capture the scraps.
The Sense-Making Pipeline
Here’s where the magic happened, not during the meeting, but after.
Phase 1: Neutral Gap Review
If needed, I copy/paste the raw notes into a clean chat. At the bottom of the capture, I say to Copilot:
Here's what I captured. Identify gaps or unclear points, but don't invent meaning. Ask me smart one at a time questions to fill in the blanks.
It would flag missing context, ambiguous phrases, or places where my shorthand was too cryptic. No hallucinations, no assumptions, just a neutral review. It would ask me to clarify when needed. Extract the stuff I heard but didn’t jot down.
What’s weird, is that I didn’t need a copy of the meeting transcript to do this.
Phase 2: Interrogate and Interview
This was the game-changer.
Instead of staring at a wall of text, I’d ask Copilot:
What's the most important decision we made?
What are the open questions?
What's one thing I might have missed?
It forced me to clarify my own thinking, one piece at a time. No overwhelm, no rabbit holes, just a structured conversation that surfaced blind spots I’d glossed over.
Phase 3: Optional Riffing
If I had bandwidth, time or a niggling interest that would not quiet, I’d ask:
`What's a creative way to approach [X]?``How might this connect to [Y]?`
This isn’t about AI generating ideas for me. I use it as a sounding board to explore my own thoughts.
Phase 4: The Roll-Up Summary
Once I’d clarified the key points, I’ll ask for a clean summary:
Give me a structured recap: decisions, actions, open questions.
No fluff, no filler. Just a distilled version of what actually mattered.
Phase 5: Publish to Loop
It’s a trivial button click to push the output to a Microsoft Loop page, title it with the date and topic, and drop it into the appropriate workspace. No admin, no restructuring. Just a modular, shareable artifact.
Why This Actually Works
1. Light Capture Preserves Presence
I don’t fight note structure during meetings anymore. I just capture raw material.
2. Sense-Making Happens
Post-meeting, when I have bandwidth, AI acts as a facilitator (not a replacement) for thinking. By shifting the organization and clarification effort to the post-meeting window, I utilize my available cognitive bandwidth.
3. Facilitated Thinking Wins
The one-question-at-a-time model surfaces gaps I’d otherwise miss. Facilitated thinking beats solo note cleanup. That’s it. That’s the tweet. Every time.
4. Fits My Existing Systems
The fragments map naturally to any existing setup. No new frameworks, no extra steps. You can even dump it all into OneNote, you monsters.
5. Loop Finally Makes Sense
It’s content-centric, not document-centric. Notes become modular, live objects—not static files gathering digital dust. Yeah, I think I’m starting to finally understand the paradigm shift Loop represents. All the Notion users can slow-clap now.
Who This Is For
-
As a general rule, don’t put sensitive or confidential info into AI. This is for personal sense-making, not classified discussions.
-
Works for:
-
Faculty: curriculum planning, research discussions.
-
Students: clarifying lecture notes, brainstorming.
-
Anyone who’s tired of staring at a wall of text and wondering, “What was I even thinking?”
-
-
This complements, not replaces, official notes. Use it alongside Teams Notes or meeting minutes.
Less Guilt, More Clarity
I don’t dread reviewing my notes anymore. I don’t feel guilty about abandoned systems. I’m not “taking notes”. I’m co-authoring clarity with a tool that asks better questions than I do on my own.
It’s not perfect. It’s not for every situation. But for the first time in years, my note-taking system aligns with how I actually think. Thankee sai.
The Open Experiment
I’m still exploring this. Testing reverse-conversation patterns, tweaking the prompts, seeing what else sticks.
If you’ve struggled with note-taking, try this for one meeting this week. See what happens. You might be surprised. I was.
Do your future self a solid: one meeting, one workflow, zero chaos.