Combine this with the concept of Zettelkasten[3] and you have a wonderful way to organize and store all your notes and writings, and even a way to know at what point you should move your idea from analog to digital (based on it's maturity, e.g. "evergreen state").
1. https://orgmode.org/ 2. https://www.orgroam.com/ 3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten
I recall one academic who said it took 8 years of aggressive use before he felt it paid off.
Every time you want to add a note, you need to put in the effort to find all existing notes that could be related, ponder how your new note fits in with all of them, and make relevant links to the new note. Every once in a while you need to make explicit index/sequence cards, etc.
It's certainly not a "quick capture and move on" system.
I use org mode and org roam a lot, but simply using org roam and linking doesn't mean you are following zettelkasten.
the caveat is that you need to keep your org folder in iCloud. I have a symlink on my MacBook from ~/org to ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs ... then I can access my org folder from my iPhone as well.
How? Can anyone share a polished workflow for converting handwritten notes on paper to plain text ascii (by this I mean an open-source OCR pipeline)?
Of course, I can transcribe my handwritten notes manually. But there is friction there that keeps me lugging a laptop when I can, and simply doing without note-taking when a laptop isn't available.
I often fantasize about finding cheap labor in another country to type it up for me.
There has been a project[2] to publish the rest of his complete works and it is still not done even though it has been going for over a hundred years and has published more than 80 volumes so far.
There's an incredible quote from his wiki page:
It has been estimated that Leonard Euler was the author of a quarter of the combined output in mathematics, physics, mechanics, astronomy, and navigation in the 18th century.
2: The Opera Omnia https://bernoulli-euler-gesellschaft.ch/en/opera_omnia
I'm thinking about printing my photos in a paper photo books to make sure they'll never disappear in case of an icloud misbehavior.
And handwritten letters between diplomats will probably be there long after google decides to shutdown gmail or go bankrupt.
A definite challenge to preservation is navigating the balance between self maintained and trusting it to a company that will disappear one day.
I would still, argue that digital is the better medium for archival as it immediately makes it easier to share and discover.
Make it: After google decides that a chatbot can re-generate any old email perfectly well...
There are various tools I've tried from this classic HN discussion regarding digital tools, from my infatuation over time with fancy pilot g2 pens, to Casio pdas, to palm treos to the HP Compaq TC1000 with Onenote 2003 (pen computer with electronic notebook!) to my ongoing fountain pen habit to my current desire to make the Microsoft courier concept real life by buying an expensive Lenovo Yoga 9i (why are booklet PC form factors so impossible to find!? I would ask), the tool search is a worthy and never ending hobby.
But it was only when I wrote applied the mental process of "capture clarify organize reflect and engage" taught in David Allen's Getting Things Done system did I manage to find what I was looking for: a mental algorithm to respond to all the novel information in my life so it can take its proper place among my existing life landscape.
I was capturing reams of notes in analog or digital but then I never knew what to DO with them, so I just held them just in case I needed them again.
The GTD book is reputed as a personal organization / filing and email advice and that's useful in its own area, but besides the point of the book, which is to equip you to properly assess, digest, and see the landscape of your life.
I really love the mental clarity and confidence that, armed with these great analog fountain pens or great digital capture with Dragon pro 15, the captured notes not only exist, but I know what they are, what they mean to me, what I need to do with them (if any).
I still try out new personal wikis and other new digital (1) and analog tools (steal like an artist book talks about switching between creating in analog and editing in digital as both are more suited those in a general sense), but I now do it knowing that I don't have the nagging desire for 'something more' that I used to expect the tools to unlock, when the tools really function to be force multipliers for how I approach my life's horizons and projects, both old and new, i get to just enjoy the new toy.
(1) I still try to avoid being nerd sniped trying to write my own digital notebook app like Lorien but saving on sqlite with onenote .one file import so I can have Windows and Linux app parity.
Everyone else seems to have opposite experiences, but I've found that getting rid of custom tools, and getting rid of as much original code and support for unusual configurations in the custom tools I do have, has been amazing, one of my very favorite things I've ever done for myself.