I don't understand the pen/physical notebook thing. It's slow to write, insanely slow to search what you've written, almost impossible to copy or share.
Funny. I was tolling the virtues of my spiral notebook which is always on my desk to a coworker, whom I was trying to get out of some trouble and i got... silence. That notebook is the difference between said coworker and I. She didn't get it.
That notebook is the fastest most accessible tool to capture my thoughts. I can state concisely what was discussed in a team meeting last october before any notetaking tool boots up. I know kids names, birthdays and favorite movies of almost all my coworkers which I can glance without switching windows while sharing my screen.
the impossibility of such content being legible to anyone else and being shared is a feature I value very highly.
i take it where i want, introspect, take notes. No screen. No distractions. I doodle, draw lines, write jokes, whatever.
Pages on the right are work things. On the left are my ideas. Index on the first page tells me exactly where to turn to for that idea and mockups i had on filling tedious forms.
I know when I'm spinning my wheels. I can see the gaps in my thinking from months ago. I can see patterns in human behavior that I would otherwise have not noticed.
The simplicity is a huge advantage. I stopped looking for anything better. I don't try to promote it
either (except on rare occasions). Saved me hours.
I think an analog note taking device (woah!) requires more discipline than a digital one. In the digital world, you can always re-arrange your chaos at almost no cost, whereas you are screwed in the analog world. I'm curious: How do you organize your notes? If you mind to share.
First there's a work notebook and a personal one. both are semi structured, but work one has more structure.
first page is always for index, split vertically and you get roughly 80 entries with about 3-4 words each. one for each page that i number as i go writing through the book. index usually has just pointers to days when i get interesting ideas.
each right page is for 1 week that i label up top. a small margin is dedicated for recurring meetings. using only the right side allows quickly flipping through. rest of the page is for todos and logs.
left pages are for related thoughts, ideas, etc from that week. sometimes overflows but not by much.
For wordy stuff, i use pages from the back of the book. I don't use sentences much. Just few words with lines connecting them.
Thats pretty much it - index, numbered pages and using just the right side per week. It works wonders for how simple it is. You'll find something else that works for you. Don't overthink this. Just start with a structure and let it evolve.
side note - i do use a folder for plain text notes on my work laptop (that i keep open in sublime) for links and text that benefits from copy and paste. i would not care if it all got deleted or leaked out to the world. I also have another folder of interesting bookmarks and articles exported to pdf for reading on a flight on my phone. i have a dozen or so google docs with my thoughts on topics i'm interested in.
> You'll find something else that works for you. Don't overthink this. Just start with a structure and let it evolve.
I'm currently looking at a stack of lovely "Leuchtturm1917" A5 note books. The way I took notes for the last three years has been chaotic, that's why I was interested in your way of doing them. I think, finding a mode of work and let it grow and iterate over time is the way to go. I see room for improvement with regards to how I structure my notes, so that I can find them again - that's what I'm struggeling with in my analog world. So, thanks for your insights, they are really valuable!
What do you do when you make a mistake? Do you use an eraser instead of backspace? That is my major problem with notebooks.
I type much faster on a keyboard, I can read it even a month from now while I can't do that with my own handwriting, and when I make a mistake, I can quickly and easily correct it.
I do almost no organising of my paper notes. The only thing I do is that I add a date to the corner of the first page of when I start making a specific note and I keep index pages where I list page/note titles (or topics, themes, not everything have a title) and a page number.
I often browse my notes even when I'm not looking for anything. I read what I've been thinking previously because that often sparks new ideas and thoughts.
One thing where I find pen and paper superior to digital is that it's easy to write in the margins, draw arrows and annotate. When I got my first iPad and tested out digital notebook tools (with stylus), I was excited about the idea that I can resize and move my existing drawings around.
Then it took me a few days to notice that I don't really ever need that. I don't need my "finished" notes to look tidy or good. I got over the need to have organised and structured notebooks and embraced the chaos.
I guess it's different things for different people. For me, the flexibility of paper is superior to any digital solution because it has the shortest "input lag" or "feedback loop" to my brain. I'm happy to sacrifice other potential benefits for that.
Writing by hand definitely is better for a squirrel brain like me. And searching is overrated, most note-taking is write-only and tends to accumulate without anyone ever reading it back. So optimize for memory retention so you can later form better mental associations with the material, rather than how searchable on a computer it is. Notes on a PC are inert, what you want is to integrate their contents into your brain so you can actually do something with it.
If you want to get the most out of a physics lecture, leave the laptop at home. Instead, bring a spiral notebook and some colored pens. Write everything down the prof writes on the blackboard.
It's remarkable how much of the lecture you'll remember. And when you read your handwritten notes, you'll remember the lecture that went with it.
I managed it for 4 years in college, with usually 3 hours of lecture per day. Was it work? Sure. One was busy the whole lecture. But the results were clear.
My favorite pens at the time were the Pilot pens. Today I love the Tul pens.
I have long since scanned them all in. I should post them on my website, just for fun.
I would copy what they were writing. The professors had 9 blackboards available, and they'd use them all during a 55 minute lecture, and then some. Some would write with their left hand while erasing with the right (!). It was a heluva time for me. Never before or since have I learned so much so fast. Blink and I fell behind.
In retrospect, I sorely wished I had set up a cassette recorder and recorded all the audio. It would be a gold mine today, as all those lectures are lost to time.
On the other hand, I had no money to buy cassette tapes at the time.
I never learnt much in those sort of lectures. Eventually I figured out I needed to study the material before the lecture and use the lecture to cement what I had already learnt or occasionally answer questions that had come up.
I also use a notebook and pen constantly as a software engineer - but never when I need any of the properties you just mentioned.
It is absolutely the wrong tool for any long-term information store. Ephemeral think-it-through process notes only. Obsidian for anything that should live longer than the current problem I’m trying to solve.
I used to have a hybrid setup of paper as an offloading tool + Notion as a knowledge management system. However, since moving to Obsidian, I've never felt the need to use paper. Adding a line item in my daily note is much faster and efficient for me
Only to an extent. I write fast enough with pen and paper that my thinking is the bottleneck — which isn't really that fast. I don't need to write down everything I think so it also acts as a filter and processor of those thoughts.
> insanely slow to search what you've written
Compared to digital notes system, sure. But the way I use my notes, I don't usually need a full-text search to find stuff. I remember what I've been working on, I often browse through my notebooks to revisit ideas and most often these notebook notes are kind of a "working copy" where the search relevance is often just for the feature so it only needs to be fast to search for a few days or weeks.
I also do copy many of my notes down in digital format too when there's something worth capturing for long term storage for the sake of searching for example.
> almost impossible to copy or share
100%. Sharing is not a consideration for me, these are my raw pure thoughts and explorations, they don't often make much sense to other people as-is. Sometimes I may take a photo of a UI sketch or something to share if needed but otherwise when I have something to share, I write it based on my notes rather than sharing my notes as they are.
Searching through a physical notebook does take a few moments, but the upside is all of that context you get to drink in during the search.
I typically get through a couple of B5 pages a day, so homing in on the thing I want to look at is a matter of opening the notebook to roughly the right fortnight and then flicking through up to a dozen pages in either direction. A tenth of a second per page is enough to scan for major events - what projects was I working on at the time? Were there any major interruptions to my flow, or changes in direction?
And then, once I've found the right day, seeing the detail of everything I was doing at the time triggers a flood of memories - I remember all of the conversations, decisions, problems, and ideas that were current at the time of the entry in question.
I've tried a number of digital notetaking systems, but none has been able to give me so much context so quickly as a paper notebook.
In the context of this post it's not about preserving or sharing the thoughts. Writing, in this case, is a "thinking tool". Forcing yourself to materialise the thoughts as actual, written, text helps form clear ideas.
that’s so alien to me. for me, writing by hand is frustrating to the point of distraction. if I want to think clearly, my best bet is to do it silently, in my head.
To me, if the problem is too complex, or more likely, if I expect to be distracted by family and chores, "building in my head" is not the best option as it all falls apart and need to build it up from scratch (though admittedly faster than last time).
I use A4 sheets of paper, pens with different colours and fluorescent markers. Nothing beats that for me (and I have a iPad Pro with stylus) and I use emacs with org mode too.
I use an automatic scanner to store the important papers as documentation. Now you can even send those to gemini or google cloud to digitalise it for cheap.
At any given time I have four sheets of paper over my desk that I can see in parallel, but I could have 8 or 10 for complex problems with areas equivalent to engineering or architectural blueprints.
Having said that, I can draw and paint very well as I was interested since childhood and had formal training. Probably is not for everyone, but it is for me.
I believe that is the beauty. It makes you be intentional, your mind slows down at a pace that does a double write to your brain (helping you remember better). If remembering with your brain is the RAM, then writing it down is the ROM.
I use a notebook. It forces me to slow down. I don´t like to cross/erase blocks of text so I actually think about what I'm about to write before writing it. It helps the same way rubber duck debugging does.
They aren’t optimising for speed, sharing, or searchability. Notes of this type aren’t an inadequate database, but a tool for thinking. Note-takers visualize and symbolise their thinking while they work through a problem. Writing and drawing reduce cognitive load and externalise information so it doesn’t have to be held in memory. Notes also create a useful record of that process so you can see how you got to your solution. Notebooks are just a convenient UI for that process.
I took the pen+notebook idea a bit further, I use pen+paper (a sheet of paper).
To me, none of the qualities you listed matter when it comes to sketching ideas, thinking about problems, staying on track while problem solving. When I'm done with the task, I read through my notes once and throw it out.
that's probably the most important thing. it forces you to slow down and think it through and actually absorb it.
Searching what I have written in the past would be useless for me because it wouldn't necessarily make sense. It's more about the physically writing it out.
In comparison it’s much faster to draw, infinitely more portable and much less distracting. I use pen and paper for self notes that are throwaway in nature or exploring ideas. For artefacts that are meant to be shared with others I use a computer
I like it when trying to work things out/design things as I can easily scribble down quick drawings to keep myself right. This is much easier with a pencil and paper than trying to do it on a computer to me.
Division on this topic reminds me of the division between those who prefer light vs heavy development tools. Some enjoy mastering and wielding powerful tools, but others see them as a distraction.
people's brains all work differently and for some of them manually writing help them think better, and apparently your are not in this case. I don't think there is much else to understand.
