Comments

• GeoEng51

  August 15

  @Edmund Interesting idea, but is a root cause analysis applicable in your situation? My understanding is that it is used when something has gone wrong or some complex system has failed, the cause of which is not obvious. One carries out a root cause analysis to determine the true (usually deeply hidden) source of the problem and eliminate it, rather than treating superficial symptoms.

  (However, my understanding of this topic is likely biased by where I have seen it applied, i.e., in engineering applications.)

  What is the problem you are trying to solve? What is the system you are examining?
• harr

  August 15 edited August 15

  @Edmund, my approach to improve the quality of notes can be summarized in one question:

  Do the notes fit their purpose?
• tomp

  August 15

  @Edmund said:
  Today I started a Root Cause Analysis:

  I don't see how one can look for causes, root or not, without knowing in what regards the quality is low. That is closely related to the purpose of a note.

  For example, if a handwritten note is hard to read, the immediate cause might be lack of practice on the part of the writer, or some physical condition that makes writing hard. Those are not the root causes but maybe the problem can be fixed by typing the notes even if the root cause analysis were never completed.

  If the problem were that the notes were too complicated, the analysis would be quite different.
• Edmund

  August 15 edited August 15

  @GeoEng51 said:

  What is the problem you are trying to solve? What is the system you are examining?

  Good questions. Let me improve the problem statement for this example:

  Problem: “Permanent notes often fail to be useful when I return to them for writing.”

  I think it works best when the problem statement names the effect we are observing.

  Edmund Gröpl — 100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.
• tomp

  August 15

  @Edmund said:

  @GeoEng51 said:

  What is the problem you are trying to solve? What is the system you are examining?

  Good questions. Let me improve the problem statement for this example:

  Problem: “Permanent notes often fail to be useful when I return to them for writing.”

  I think it works best when the problem statement names the effect we are observing.

  Good! Getting closer. What did you expect or want from the notes, that isn't happening when you return to them?
• andang76

  August 15 edited August 15

  First, quality would need to be defined. Or rather, the many qualities.
  Each of them could have its own specific paths.

  In software development, I believe it even reaches up to 50 dimensions. (I wouldn't want to go that far in this case).

  I have always liked the Sascha's Flower Idea Model, even if it does not cover all desirable qualities.
  Then there are the "classic" properties like focus, connection, abstraction, and so on, but I would also consider clarity and findability/revisitability, degree of maturity, originality. List can be long.

  Personally, I have never consolidated them all into an exhaustive list; I look for what I need in a specific moment based on intuition.
• tomp

  August 15

  @Edmund said:

  @GeoEng51 said:

  What is the problem you are trying to solve? What is the system you are examining?

  Good questions. Let me improve the problem statement for this example:

  Problem: “Permanent notes often fail to be useful when I return to them for writing.”

  I think it works best when the problem statement names the effect we are observing.

  A good software bug report contains enough information to help the readers understand enough to make a start of fixing it. Let's try that out here - this template is a good enough representative of its kind:

  1. What reproducible symptom(s) do you observe? What actually happens?
  2. How can you make the symptoms happen?
  3. When the symptom(s) happen, what did you expect to happen?
  4. What steps have you taken to diagnose or fix the problem?

  For software, one would also want to know what system and version you have. That's probably not quite right here, but please talk about at least the part of the system that is involved when the symptoms happen.

  E.g., not

  Nothing happens when I double-click on a word

  but

  When I double-click on a word in the edit pane, nothing shows as being selected and attempts to copy the word using CTRL-C fail.
  I changed to a different mouse but got the same behavior.
  I searched on the internet but could find nothing relevant.
  I am using MagicZK v3.25 on Windows 11.

  The symptoms may not be reproducible. In that case, fixing them will be harder and the apparent trigger may not be what you think.