A Technical Manager's Guide to Note-Taking

Ever had that moment where you know you wrote something down about that important meeting last month, but now it's lost in the digital void? As a technical manager, I often find myself drowning in a sea of information. Between team meetings, one-on-ones, technical alignment sessions, and those random 3 AM epiphanies, keeping track of everything can feel like herding cats.

Over the years, I've tried different strategies to manage my notes and ideas, searching for the best way to stay organized. In this blog post, I'll walk you through the methods that have worked for me.

Introducing Brewtiful

To make it a bit more interesting and tangible, I have come up with a fictional company called Brewtiful. They make smart coffee machines that use mood detection (through facial recognition) to brew the perfect cup for each customer. When you're grumpy, it automatically makes your coffee stronger. The machine essentially says, "You look like you need an extra shot today," but with more algorithms and less judgment.

The notes are written from the perspective of Talia Miller, a technical manager at Brewtiful. I created them using various LLMs including OpenAI's GPT-4.5, Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Google's Gemini 2.0, so please take the content with a pinch of salt.

The Principles

The goal isn't some perfectly pristine, Instagram-worthy system. It's about building something that catches the important stuff and lets you retrieve it without sacrificing your lunch break to frantic searching. Structure is good, but flexibility is key.

Folder Feng Shui

First things first: carve up your digital world into sensible chunks. Think high-level domains of your life as a manager. Using Talia at Brewtiful as our guide, her note folders might look something like this, with each main folder having a _springboard.md file – kind of like the lobby or mission control for that section:

• Journal: Talia's daily brain dump. Meeting notes, random decisions, action items she swears she'll get to.
• Leadership: Big picture stuff. Management ideas Talia's pondering, company policies she needs to remember, notes on that T-shaped skills thing she wants to try.
• People: Talia's cheat sheet for remembering who needs what – like that Grace totally lit up talking about machine learning and that Henry might start alphabetizing the coffee pods if he doesn't get a meatier task soon.
• Product: Where the Brewtiful product dreams (and nightmares) live. Business cases, roadmap shenanigans, feature sparks.
• TechnicalNotes: The land of cryptic diagrams and acronym soup. High-level designs, API handshakes, and the settled dust from architecture arguments.

Meet the Zettelkasten Method

Okay, "Zettelkasten" sounds way more complicated than it is (thanks, German!). It's a clever system from Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who used it to manage his research incredibly effectively. While a true Zettelkasten can become a massive academic knowledge web, we're not going full PhD-thesis-mode here. Instead, we'll borrow its most powerful principles – to allow us to build our own interconnected web of notes, tailored specifically to our job.

Here are the key aspects that make this approach so valuable:

1. One idea = one note: Resist the urge to cram everything into one giant mega-note. Keep each distinct thought separate, like ingredients for a recipe instead of one questionable stew. Makes things way easier to find and connect later.

2. Link Like Crazy: Use wiki-style links like [[api_spec]] to connect ideas. Your notes start forming relationships like characters in a corporate soap opera.

3. Tags, You're It: Slap on some tags (like #urgent-ish) or use YAML front matter (fancy speak for organized labels at the top of the page) to structure your ideas. Think hashtags before they were cool.

Why bother? These principles help you to connect the dots between wildly different things. That one production incident suddenly clicks with the budget approval needed from Talia's boss for further training initiatives. The bigger picture snaps into focus, helping you make smarter decisions later.

The Tools

The right tools can make all the difference in creating a system that works seamlessly.

The Magic of Markdown

Markdown is like HTML's chill cousin who doesn't need fancy tools or complicated syntax. Just some basic formatting like:

Text Only

# Big Important Heading

**Bold statement about deadlines**

- [ ] Task I'll eventually get to
- [x] Task I'm claiming credit for now

But the real fun starts with editor support for:

• Wiki Links: [[Double brackets]] are your friends for weaving that web.
• To-do Lists: Keep track of all those promises you made in meetings
• Mermaid Diagrams: Whip up quick diagrams in your notes without firing up some clunky diagramming tool that hates you.

Here is an example of a simple Mermaid diagram that could represent the Brewtiful coffee machine's workflow:

graph TD
  A[Grumpy Human] -->|Stares Blankly| B[Brewtiful Machine Sensor]
  B -->|Scans Face| C[Brewtiful Classification Engine]
  C -->|Brews Coffee| D[Brewtiful Coffee Dispenser]
  D -->|Human Drinks and lights up| E[Slightly Less Grumpy Human]

VS Code: Your Note-Taking Command Center

If you're not using VS Code for note-taking, you're missing out. It's like a Swiss Army knife for developers and managers alike. You can:

• Edit: Duh, of course. But with Markdown preview, you can see how your notes will look without switching apps.
• Version Control: Use Git to track changes. Ever wish you could "undo" that one time you accidentally deleted a whole folder? Now you can.
• Search: Find all mentions of that critical feature across your entire note system in seconds. No more "I know it's somewhere in here..."
• Extensions: Add tools like Foam for visualizing connections between notes or Markdown All in One for keyboard shortcuts that speed up your workflow.

Why This Actually Works

Unlike rigid productivity systems that require you to overhaul your workflow, this approach grows with you naturally. Start small—create a few notes after your next meeting, link related ideas, and let your system evolve over time.

The best part? It’s all in plain text files—easy to version control, search, and share with your team. No proprietary formats or subscription fees required.

So next time someone asks, “Didn’t we discuss this last month?” you can confidently pull up your interconnected notes and say, “Yep—and here’s exactly what we decided.”

In the end, the goal is to create a system that works for you, not against you. By using a combination of folder organization, the Zettelkasten method, and the right tools, you can build a note-taking system that helps you stay on top of your game as a technical manager.

To have a look at the fictional notes on Brewtiful and a more technical explanation, check out my github repository: Link