My go to way of taking notes is sending messages to myself. Previously with Signal’s “Note to self” and now with my own channel with Element. It is fast way of taking notes, but horrible in long run since you cannot group notes or add tags or anything else that you would expect from good note taking tool. I have Nextcloud notes, but I still do it since I am used to it and it is fast way of syncing notes with mobile and PC. Anyone else has interesting ways of keeping notes?
I was using the Signal “notes to self” too when taking notes during talks and conferences. Taking quick pictures of the slides in context was also a key thing for me. Exporting these unstructured notes into a useful notes archive is a pain as you say, especially if there is media too.
I caught myself doing this so often that I ended up building myself an app for this specific workflow. It’s rather simple, just an MVP if you will, but it works well for me. Taking notes works exactly like Signal’s “note to self” but it has some QoL stuff on top of that like separate notebooks and exporting notes and pictures to a single PDF archive. I can then import the PDF archive into Notion, which is my main notes repository. Notion can now parse PDF files and import them as regular Notion pages, which closes the loop for me rather nicely. YMMV ofc
I haven’t published it to any app stores yet (might do in the future) but the source code is available here if you’re technically savvy and happy to build and install it yourself.