The note-taking app craze. And why RemNote keeps me sane
The Paradox of Choice
The competition among note-taking apps is wild. New tools are popping up every week. Medium’s vibrant community is working hard to stay on top of things. Just see this post. I stay out of this race to find the perfect tool and let me tell you why.
Anyone trying to find an ideal note-taking app will inevitably experience the paradox of choice: you feel anxious because you gave up other opportunities by choosing one option. Even worse, your choice isn’t meaningful because you can easily change it. The abundance of choice brings about dissatisfaction and demotivation — the exact opposite of what any consumer striving to find the perfect product is trying to achieve.
Why is it so tempting to go down the rabbit hole anyway? Because modern note-taking tools promise a lot. They promise to increase your productivity and make your life more organized by providing you with all the shiny features: calendars, daily notes, TODO lists, templates, integrations, plugins, visualizations, etc. If one tool is not fulfilling the promise, maybe the next one will.
Pick one thing you care about
To avoid falling victim to the Paradox of Choice, I dumbed down my search to a single problem that I wanted to solve: knowledge curation. For me, that meant strong support for spaced repetition feature built-in into note-taking capabilities. Once I did that, RemNote appeared on my radar instantly.
RemNote has many of these all-in-one features, but at its core, it’s just a text editor with a twist. The twist is that you can turn every information into a flashcard. That’s it. I don’t care about anything else.
Best tools get out of the user’s way
A few months ago, my wife asked me for a tool to help her prepare for some certifications. I opened up RemNote in her Web browser and showed her how to do forward flashcards, multi-step flashcards, and image occlusion flashcards. In less than 10 minutes, she was doing actual work. Instead of learning the tool, she was building up her knowledge base and preparing for her tests. And she passed with ease.
The important part is: once I showed her how to make flashcards, she could use RemNote for months without any issues or questions. The tool became transparent, and she could entirely focus on her goal. That’s what I call “productivity.”
Flashcards in RemNote
Excellent flashcard capabilities are the only reason why I started using RemNote.
The idea that I can type “>>” to mark that everything right to these characters is a hidden part of a forward flashcard is just fantastic. The same applies to backward and two-way flashcards. You can figure out what characters to use to make these flashcards.
Cloze flashcards are similarly easy to produce. You can mix them with other flashcards. The same sentence can appear in your flashcards queue as a forward flashcard and a cloze flashcard at another time.
You can copy-paste an image into RemNote and create a flashcard by occluding parts of that image. Imagine watching a YouTube lecture and seeing a nice slide comparing two technologies. You make a screen-shot, paste it to RemNote, occlude things you would like to see as flashcards, and you’re done.
What’s even better, you can embed flashcards into other flashcards. You can have a multi-step flashcard with different types of flashcards embedded within it. In RemNote, flashcards are as natural as the text itself.
Know what the weakest point of your tool is
I could list many pros and cons of RemNote, but that’s not the point. I know why I use RemNote. But I also know what bothers me the most.
Namely, my biggest issue is that, compared to ReadWise, it’s hard to add information to RemNote. It can be typed in or copy-pasted. There is also a RemNote clipping extension for Chrome, but that’s about it.
It’s hard to add text/images from paper books or connect other apps, like Instapaper or Pocket, or Kindle. That’s my single most significant issue when it comes to RemNote. If RemNote added integrations similar to ReadWise, I would stop using ReadWise right away.
Summary
The quest for the best note-taking app is a fool’s errand. It’s tough psychologically. It drains your attention and budget. Instead, find a tool that does the essential thing best and stick with it. Even if it’s vim.
