Search your notes first

Do you sometimes feel like you write your notes but then forget what you have notes about and feel like a notes system is where information goes to die (like it so often does with corporate intranets)?

Adopt a mindset (and enhance it with some tools) of searching your notes first.

Whenever you’re about to start an online search, open up your notes first and search there. It will help you interact with your valuable notes more and lets you see what you have in your notes. It also exposes the gaps of knowledge by returning nothing useful for searches that are about topics you haven’t made notes about yet.

Starting from your notes can also create a trigger to create a note and record what you end up learning from your research.

Depending on your notes system, you can also integrate it to your searches so you don’t necessarily need to open your notes system everytime.

If you use Obsidian and omnisearch, you can integrate search results from your notes into your favorite search engine.

If you use Obsidian and Raycast or Alfred, there are ways to integrate your notes search to them using extensions/workflows like https://www.raycast.com/KevinBatdorf/obsidian (for Raycast), https://github.com/hauselin/obsidian-alfred (Alfred) or https://github.com/chrisgrieser/shimmering-obsidian (Alfred).

By making it easier to search your notes increases the likelyhood that you will. And more you search your own notes first, the more likely you are to find value in your notes and interact with them.