Regarding the space management, there are many solutions straight out of the programming world, of course: utilize both sides of the notebook, reserve a minimum number of pages per topic, keep an index with free pages, etc. But there are some hardware ones as well, I'm trying Atoma notebooks (https://atoma.be) these days.
Everything is related.
- 4 pages at the back are reserved for index.
- Daily journal starts at the back.
- There is no obligation to have regular entries in the daily journal.
- ◦ denotes a past event; ◦ hh:mm denotes an upcoming or past event.
- → denotes a task.
- "circled" → denotes a completed task.
- strikeghrough denotes a cancelled or refiled task.
- ¿ optional task, not sure about something ?
- "-" is for all types of second-level bullets.
(As a side note, I mostly do task organization on the computer, but sometimes in a journal as well.)
- Topics start at the front.
- Topics are free-form.
- A new year starts a new journal. (I don't care for the new year resolutions though. At best, a list of side quests I'd like to do.)
Even with the capture downside, I don't think that I can do away with paper and pen. There's something invigorating about using paper that no keyboard or screen could replicate. More in touch with your brain and with your own words, that your feelings flow better into the ink. It is something that makes me enjoy writing.
I've considered e-ink devices in the past but I don't see much value from them. They're a fancier way to draft things at best, in my case, and a worse PKMS/Todo list if anything compared to dedicated tools. I'm paying for an extra device that gives me a bunch of things I won't use, anyways.
As another poster mentioned about the ReMarkable, the Boox works just fine offline. I do use mine online, e.g. for reading HN as I prefer the E-Ink screen for text. But as for note-taking, everything I do is offline, including moving the PDF documents to the desktop via ADB.
My solution was:
- Take notes on paper
- Scan with Genius Scan (free) or similar
- Upload to Microsoft Document Intelligence on Azure to get character recognition and a PDF output (standard OCR sucks for handwriting; also free for up to like 50 docs a month)
- Tidy up the text and store in Mediawiki long-term (you can also upload a copy of the OCR enabled PDF) (FOSS)
- File paper notes
- Throw paper notes once module is complete
I've recently gotten an iPad and the most effective use case for it is to open up an infinite canvas and do active recall by drawing everything from (mostly) memory allowing me to find more connections, avenues to explore, and debate an idea.
Eventually, I have to put those connections back into prose but I haven't gotten to that yet.
Anyone else into what my high school biology teacher loved referring to as "pseudo-arachnomorphic diagrams" (Mind Maps[1] / Spider Diagrams)?
They're still my primary paper-based realtime note taking method. They seemed to get a lot of attention a couple of decades ago, but I don't hear them mentioned much recently.
Lots of online/local Mind Map tools available, but I've never really gelled with them (though you do get self-organisation of the nodes!). Once in the digital realm I'm more likely to make notes in Markdown.
Speed-hacks like shorthand and stenographers' machines are for copying exactly what was said, not consuming and understanding it. I would be very surprised if there were not very old studies moldering in a paper journal somewhere investigating the information retention of secretaries / stenographers compared to "naive" note-takers.
I migrated to fountain pens and haven't looked back. Partially, it's because I enjoy the experience itself as much as writing, but partially it's because they've forced me to become even more deliberate.
I'd highly recommend it!
Someone who is typing a fast paced one time lecture, who can then take their time afterward to digest, is going to do much better than the "slowness is a feature" hand writer.
I've seen this first-hand with people taking handwritten notes in meetings
The learning curve is very gentle, you could learn it in a day. Honestly the hardest part is getting used to reading it fluently.
You can also look into various systems of abbreviations developed for telegraph (Evans basic English code), or you could look into using Yublin, which is basically taking all 2-letter combinations and assigning the most common 676 English words to them. Personally I like the idea of Yublin, with the addition of suffixes to modify common words so the word "add" might be "ad" in Yublin, but to make it "addition" you might turn it into "adn" and to further modify it to "additionally" you could write "adnly". This way you get more words out of your limited number of bigrams instead of polluting it with a word plus all it's commonly used variations. Write that shit in Orthic and you'll be flying.
Food for thought.
Yes! Nearly all my notes are mind-map-ish. I’m a visual thinker/planner with ADHD and mind-map style “spatial notes” are the only ones that make sense to me when writing and reviewing later. I’ve tried a few methods of moving this process to digital over the years but nothing sticks like pen & paper.
2. Obtain paper and ink that works well with the pen.
3. Practice cursive handwriting.
Possibly get a 2x improvement in speed.
I can keep years of notes in a file which I can take and access anywhere whenever I want.
I like the pilot precision v5 pens because they come in a lot of different colors and the point is very fine.
For notebooks, I prefer the Leuchtturm 1917 series. They come with page numbers, a space for TOC, a pocket in the back for stuff, two book marks, and lots of different sizes and colors and page layouts.
That's important because the other important thing about hand notes for me is one book per topic, and keep them different colors because they will pile up and it helps with differentiating them.
In what way could it possibly be relevant? Do you actually believe that the author could suggest a universally suitable pen and paper type? What if he'd had his best results with toilet paper, a sugar thermometer and a soot/diarrhea/lemon juice blend for the ink? Would his advice be any more complete?
The moment you lose sight of the habit and instead pay homage to paper and pens, its a fetish instead of a practical discipline.
"Practice the hard thing until you are good at it" isn't as fun of a topic as "what can I buy?"
See any subreddit about cameras, guitars, ham radio, etc.
Generally people don't write with diarrhea for a good reason. I think anyone suggesting positive results would be suspect.
As for pens, I use the Uniball Jetstream 0.38 ballpoint--fine point, doesn't skip, and I prefer ballpoints. I used a Coleto Hitec C multi-pen for a while, but the refills are skinny and run out of ink quickly, and I like the feel of the Jetstream ballpoint better. (The refills for the regular Coleto Hitec are much thicker and last a lot longer...but skip horribly. Life is too short.)
I have three primary things I write on, mostly todos for home yard or office, groceries and hardware or tools to buy, and bands and songs to listen to, and the occasional song lyric.
The first is a mini clipboard made from a 3" x 4" piece of cedar shingle and a mini binder clip holding a 4x6 craft paper card folded in half, giving me four sides to write on. On the back side I keep a one-year calendar printed on standard letter paper and folded down to fit where I keep track of my band gigs.
The next one is a standard wire-bound 4x6 note book, mostly for work todos using sort of a bullet-journaling type of progress system.
The third at this point is a regular letter sized clipboard holding scrap one-side-blank printer paper, mostly for meetings.
Then I frequently take pictures of any of these pages so I have a dated copy on my phone.
They also all get added to with typical 3x3 sticky notes in mostly neon colors.
Finally I also do lots of writing in Obsidian, notes in source files with Sublime Text, and sometimes even the StickyNotes Windows app.
My philosophy about this over the last few years is that its better to write something down anywhere on whatever system, even on multiple systems, rather than to try to adhere to one format all the time.
// NOTEBOOKS
- Pocket x 2 books, dotted, soft cover. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015NG44ES
- A5 x 4 (2 x personal journal, 2 x work journal) (OPTIONS: Moleskin: A5 dotted, hard cover; fun colors; Lechtturm191: A5 dotted, hard cover, fun colors: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDYQKJLC?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_...)
// NOTEBOOK CASE
Galen Zipper A5 folio x 2 colors
Personal book: https://www.galenleather.com/products/leather-zippered-a5-le... , -
Work book: https://www.galenleather.com/products/leather-zippered-a5-no...
// PENS
- Uniball Micro 0.5mm x 2 boxes. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CRDU8QY?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_...
// BAG
- Think Tank Retrospective v2 shoulder bag: https://www.amazon.com/Think-Tank-Retrospective-Shoulder-Mes...
SUGGESTIONS
- I cut off the bookmark strings that the books come with - always gets snagged
- Be honest
- Use your imagination
- Have fun!
I suspect the real advantage of handwritten notes (for those who benefit from them) is that writing them fulfills a learned ritual for putting the brain in learning-mode. So, might as well match the environment as closely as possible, and prioritize familiarity over some quality.
Anyway, I can write obnoxiously small with my draftmatics, so I don’t see how the process could be optimized by a fancier pencil or pen anyway.
https://brianschrader.com/archive/the-practicals-of-writing-...
But I'm in the process of upgrading my pen. I ordered a TWISB ECO.
I usually use Pilot inks, I currently have a dark blue that I've added a touch of old green to. I absolutely love it.
However had, for anything else I use the computer, and I style everything the way I need via HTML+CSS for the most part. I don't use HTML directly but a simpler and easier to use template, which is programmable (via ruby). There I also make use of javascript and have a multitude of effects to use. I can use the browser to research past content I stored and it is visually pleasing. And it takes not as long as handwriting either. So while I do use pen and paper still and probably will for the rest of my life, I am mostly in the digital era myself. I don't understand why I'd want to use pen and paper. Granted, I have to archive a lot of things, but I use various USB sticks and USB-connectable harddiscs; these don't take that much space away, compared to pen and paper written stuff or other hardcopy books. I don't think I will go back to the only-pen and only-paper, ever. I am not saying digital-only has only benefits, but if I compare all advantages and disadvantages then the digital lifestyle has more benefits. For instance, I don't need to store hardcopy books anymore (I still have them, I still use them, I still like them, but whenever I am about to purchase anything anew, I ask myself whether I want to have physical space be occupied by a book. Often the answer is no, if I can just use a .pdf instead.)
But I'm not you. What works for you may not be a panacea. I work best with notes in a text editor, in markdown. I like to be able to move thoughts around, rearrange them, refine them. That also makes me remember them better. Handwritten notes are not conducive to that.
I have tried over the years to get into hand writing and note taking. It never works. I am so grateful for typing, it has saved my life for decades. I can type ridiculously fast, and it doesn't wear me out.
I have finally stopped apologizing for this, or thinking something is wrong with me. It just isn't for me
This part takes the system beyond just needing ambient light to needing either to stay home or carry a backpack. Use perforated notebooks so you can tear out pages and sort them into binders. I prefer to categorize after filling a notebook for spaced repetition.
Downside is no backlight which many users tout as an improvement, or praise it as a minimalist perk. I don't really agree, but it does mean that the ink surface is closer to the pen so there's less parallax error. It makes it less usable as an ebook reader though, for example on a flight you'd have to use the blinding overhead lights.
Sure the price is comparable to 20+ notebooks. I think if you actually use notebooks, they're good. If you don't, it's questionable whether it'll change your habit. It also doesn't replace the satisfaction of a nice ink pen on nice paper. I have a collection of fountain pen ink that I've used since university (for years of daily lecture notes which is more writing than I'm ever likely to do again - we're talking up to 20 A4 sides a day) and the bottles are still practically full. So good writing equipment can be very economical. There are other issues like no colour (on mine) and PDF support is still ropey.
I won't say they're bad solutions at all, but just that they brought no actual benefits for my use cases so there wasn't a reason to put up with their downsides. The downsides are relatively minor, though. For me, they are cost, the need to charge yet another device, and the inconvenience of the form factor (you can't tear pages out to hand to someone else, they rigid tablets instead of flexible paper, writing on them isn't the most pleasant thing, etc.)
Though when at home/office nothing beats paper and the possibility to visually have multiple pages side by side. Any research article I want to work through I print out, and I buy more paper books now than before I bought the remarkable. Paradoxically, the remarkable helped me realize the incredible value of paper.
I use a Boox E-Ink tablet with the built-in handwriting notes app. It exports to PDF and I can copy everything to my Debian machine via ADB. I absolutely love it. E-Ink is close enough to paper for me, and the EMR (Wacom) stylus is close enough to a pen for me.
The device was worth every penny, even before considering the other uses for it.
A few months ago I sold the rm2 and got an rm3 "paper pro" and despite the $$ it has ROI as a daily driver (alongside Obsidian running on my M4 macbook air).
To be more specific, the ReMarkable 2 had a wildly inaccurate pen tip, but only on like the bottom 1/2 to maybe 1/3 of the screen, which was enough to completely destroy my desire to use it at all. On top of that the software is pretty meh. It wasn't bad so much as it was minimal to the point of being harder to work with than real paper. The UI was clunky and slow. Any real advantage to digital nature (built-in OCR, sorta search) was so poorly implemented that it wasn't worth it.
So I also put those into a text manager and custom keyboard so I can one tap paste them whenever I need. I use the app Snippeta for this.
I use my notebook like everybody else, but list of topics I wanna check late and don't wanna forget, I do like Japanese Mangas, from the last page towards the first page.
So I check which topic I wanna check at the end of the notebook, then I go back to the first pages to cover it, be it a task at work, a hobby project, etc.
And of course, work has its own notebook, hobbies has its own notebook, DIY has its own notebook.
That way I keep things organized, and allows me to draft thoughts before spending time actually looking into them.
The only issue with paper is the edition. My solution has been to use a compact, slim ring binder with a notebook-like feel. If required, you can move sheets to reorganize content, move the most important ones to another place, etc. Until now, the best alternative that I have found is the Kokuyo Campus Smart Ring Binder.
[1] Lion Kimbro. How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think. 2003 https://users.speakeasy.net/~lion/nb/book.pdf
Lately, I've been keeping an "engineering" notebook, using similar technique to the original poster's technique: dated entries and a place for a table of contents (that I need to update).
With a digital tool you don't even need light!
Curious whether the "OCR as soon as possible"workflow would maintain the engaging benefits of paper while eliminating all the issues in the rest of the article
If I do anything to do with math, I need paper; anything else is in markdown.
Recommendation: There are folders that you can add pages to; that way you do not worry about space.
