vydd.space/tag/notes

Distraction-free Note Taking

Why do note taking apps offer the distraction free mode? I can understand why code editors would offer one. This is because it's easy to get distracted from work. But note taking is not work. Notes don't lead to anything. Taking notes is a distraction in itself. We take notes because our brains are imperfect. If they were perfect, we would just remember everything. Meetings, grocery lists, the Klingon language. But we have to take notes, lose notes, make sure it's OK to discard notes, regret discarding notes, categorize notes, tell other people how we categorize notes, hate other people for categorizing notes differently. And on top of that we get the distraction free mode.

Forget about apps for a moment and consider what Charlie and Lou are doing right now. Charlie is sitting at the desk in the corner of the room, coding. From the kitchen, Lou, busy cooking, asks Charlie to go buy a few missing ingredients for the cake.

The white box is free of sound and free of smell. White box is free of needs. It's endless. White box exists. The letter C appears and is now in the center of the box. White box has a pulsating quality to it. CINAMMON.

Lou enters the room and Charlie is bathing in white light. Something starts burning in the kitchen.

What note taking apps should do is to get out of the user's way as much as possible. The less one needs to write, the better. The less interface, the less time spent searching. No titles. Memories don't have titles. No folder structures. Those work for libraries, but libraries also employ people who operate them. No more supersets of Markdown. Who cares. That won't help us reach the expressiveness of writing on paper. There are many things I can think of and remember that I can't really write down. And who decided that note taking apps should present you with past notes whenever you open the app? What does that help?

It's actually not about the distraction-free mode. It's about note taking apps hitting a local maximum they should get away from. Notes shouldn't just help with remembering, they should be remembering, made of the same stuff. Ideally, it shouldn't be obvious that they are there. That's the ultimate goal. Everything else is a distraction.