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How to Take Smart Notes

Sönke Ahrens

Recommended by 1 person on the record.

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

Fatih Arslan recommends it
Write notes in your own words, connect them to existing notes, and let ideas emerge from the connections. I wrote a whole blog post about this, so go ahead and read it. Highly recommended.

on arslan.io · 26 Dec 2025

This book on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.