Summary

Simon Späti reflects on 17 years of note-taking evolution, sharing the system and principles that now power his public writing and livelihood. The core insight he's internalized is that writing is not the output of thinking but the medium through which thinking happens. He advocates for connected notes (Zettelkasten) over folder hierarchies, open plain-text formats over proprietary apps, and minimal friction workflows that encourage sharing. His current stack — Obsidian, Markdown, GoHugo, and Quartz — collapses the gap between private notes and published content to near zero, requiring only a #publish tag and a script. The post is a personal love letter to the practice, arguing that the best note system is the one you actually enjoy using.

Key Insight

A note-taking system earns its worth not by how thoroughly it captures information, but by how frictionlessly it converts private thinking into public sharing — and that requires owning your format and collapsing the distance between note and publication.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 7

  Writing is not the outcome of thinking, it is the medium in which thought occurs.

• 3

  I can say, there's no right way, but I can see it's working for me, as my most interesting ideas grow inside my note taking system, and they power what I share online, and earning a living from it.

• 2

  The note taking should help me and not add more work to me.

• 6

  The app might not be here in 5 years, but your notes will.

• 4

  If you want to Learn in Public and share what you learned more often, I think removing friction is key.

• 2

  I completely own them, so all my ideas and work I put into them, I will own forever as long as there will be computers.

• 1

  This was a little bit of a ramble, but it's really a love letter to my 17 years of note taking.

• 3

  Overshare some times, when the note is still very rough. Because people might give you feedback, that helps your thinking or gives you an angle that you never had before.

Tone

reflective, personal, pragmatic