For me it's mostly about being able to find stuff. For example, I save links (with some notes) that I've seen that day, and weeks/months later I'll remember "I read an article about $THING" or "I saw a repo that was similar to $THING" and I'll be able to find it.

Omnisearch is really good: https://publish.obsidian.md/omnisearch

Same - they are too low quality for me to decode more than 8 hours afterwards.

I use a similar system at work.

Off the top of my head, I have used it to put links together — for example, a Stack Overflow description of some bug, the official documentation, and maybe copying in the exception or the error message.

Then I've sometimes done the same thing when I'm doing ops on a broken system.

Other times it's copying in a specific query or a link to a query in Application Insights.

Other times it's the ticket I was working on, a comment from a coworker, and maybe a few references to either tickets or files. Very rarely is this professional or looks nice. It's just that I need one place where I can put multiple things that fit together.

I find that retrieval does drop off very quickly. But that's just to say most of the value is front loaded. And we should not underestimate the value of being able to answer 'da fuck was I doing yesterday'. Context switching is expensive. But in many ways it is also unavoidable. If you context dump at the end of a workday, it's that much easier to return to it later.

The other thing I do is because the note system I use can I can drop in Hashtags. Yeah, I know. Not exactly HN friendly. What that means is I can find all the times I ran into the same issue, sort of weaving a meta thread through my work. It's really hard to explain, but it's one way of treating notes as not just segments of text.

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