People occasionally ask what app I use for notes, expecting a specific answer, and I think the honest one disappoints them a little: a folder of plain text files, named by date, with no special software behind them at all. The system isn't the file format. It's three small habits around it.
Capture First, Sort Never
Every note starts as a single dated file, named for the day and a short slug, with nothing sorted into folders by topic at the point of capture:
2026-03-14-lighthouse-logbook-idea.md
2026-03-15-garden-succession-planting.md
2026-03-19-sourdough-hydration-notes.md
The rule is that nothing gets categorized while it's being written. A thought about what a slow novel taught me about reading pace and a thought about when to thin carrots go into the same undifferentiated pile, in the order they occurred to me, because deciding on a category at capture time is exactly the moment I'm least equipped to judge what a note is actually about. That judgment comes later, once the note has had time to sit.
Processing Is a Separate, Later Pass
Once a week, usually Sunday evening, I go back through that week's files and do the actual sorting — which ideas turned out to matter, which ones were just noise from a tired evening, and which ones connect to something I'd already written. This is where most of the real thinking happens, not in the initial capture. The garden planting log started life as a single scribbled note about wanting to remember when the peas went in, and only became an actual running table during a Sunday processing pass, once I noticed I'd written some version of "when did I plant the peas" in three separate weeks running.
Linking Backward, Not Forward
The habit that's made the biggest difference isn't capture or processing — it's a rule that whenever I write something new, I spend two minutes asking what it connects to before I file it, and I link back to that older note explicitly rather than trusting I'll remember the connection later. I very reliably will not remember it later. When I was drafting the piece on why interleaved practice beats blocked practice, the two-minute backward-link check turned up an old note from months earlier about switching topics on my commute, which I'd completely forgotten writing and which turned out to be the same idea I was about to write up as if it were new.
Why Plain Text, Specifically
The format matters less than the habits, but plain text has one property that's kept me from ever migrating away from it: I can grep it. When I want to find every note that mentions a specific idea, a specific plant, a specific book, a full-text search across a folder of dated files takes about a second and never depends on whether I originally filed the note under the "right" category — which, per the first habit above, I usually didn't. It's the same instinct that made me appreciate a well-built table of contents on a long page once I started publishing some of these notes properly: the value isn't in a rigid structure decided up front, it's in being able to move through accumulated material quickly once it exists.
What This Isn't
This isn't a productivity system in the sense of getting more done — if anything it slows down the moment of capture slightly, because I'm resisting the urge to sort things immediately. What it's actually optimized for is the thing that used to fail silently in every note app I tried before this: old notes staying findable and connectable years later, instead of disappearing into a folder structure that made sense for about three months and then stopped.