So, I wanna talk about this thing I tried a while back, someone called it the ‘Brooke Trent’ method, I think. Saw it mentioned somewhere real brief, maybe an old forum post? Sounded dead simple for keeping track of my project notes and random ideas.
The idea, as I understood it, was basically hyper-minimalism. Just raw text files, specific naming conventions, dumped in one big folder. No fancy software, no databases. Sounded good, right? Less overhead, supposed to be faster.
I jumped right in. Decided to give it a go for about a month with all my new stuff. Started creating these text files, trying to follow the naming rules I vaguely remembered. Something like . Seemed easy enough at first, just typing away in Notepad.
Man, it got messy fast. Faster than I expected. After just a couple of weeks, that main folder was already feeling pretty chaotic. Finding anything specific felt like digging through a pile of unsorted papers.
The Search Nightmare
The biggest pain point quickly became searching. Yeah, sure, you can use the basic file search on the computer, but it was just awful:
- My naming wasn’t always consistent because, well, I’m human. Sometimes I’d forget the exact format, or use a slightly different keyword. One day ‘proj’, the next ‘project’.
- Searching inside the files across hundreds of these little texts? It was slow. Really slow. And half the time it pulled up stuff that wasn’t really what I wanted.
- Linking between notes? Forget about it. That was basically impossible unless I wanted to manually type filenames everywhere. And if I renamed one file? All those links were instantly broken. It was just pure pain.
I thought about maybe writing some simple scripts. You know, something to help manage it, maybe automatically build an index file or validate the names. But then I stopped myself. That just felt like I was starting to rebuild a proper notes application from scratch, using duct tape and wishful thinking. That totally defeated the whole ‘simple’ point of the ‘Brooke Trent’ idea, didn’t it?
I found I was spending more time fighting with the file naming and searching than actually writing down my thoughts or getting any real work done. It just didn’t scale well, not even for my relatively small amount of personal notes and project logs.
Where I Landed
So, did I stick with this ‘Brooke Trent’ thing? Nope. Not a chance. I think I ditched it after maybe six weeks of growing frustration. I went back to something a bit more conventional, something with actual features like tagging and linking built-in, though I still try to keep the workflow itself pretty straightforward.
It was a useful experiment, though. It hammered home a good lesson. Sometimes these ultra-minimalist, ‘one weird trick’ systems sound cool and elegant in theory, but the basics – like easy search, reliable linking, maybe some simple organizing tools – they exist for very practical reasons. Often, trying to avoid one kind of complexity just introduces another kind, and sometimes it’s a much worse, more annoying kind of complexity.
Maybe the original ‘Brooke Trent’ method was slightly different and I misunderstood it, or maybe it just works for people with superhuman discipline. Who really knows? But for my day-to-day grind, it was definitely a dead end. Just figured I’d share that little journey, maybe save someone else the headache of trying to make it work when it just doesn’t fit.
