10 ms·

I've been keeping a paper notebook since I started my MS in computer science, which I graduated from about 10 years ago. It's something that really helps in so

• gdubs 9y ago
  I started using leuchtturm1917 notebooks recently and love them. Mine come with page numbers and several pages of index at the beginning of the book. The paper feel is great.
  • cgore 9y ago
    I'm using one from Fiorentina, it's hardbound with a dragon and a griffin on the cover, I've been using them for a while now. They are really well made, but I mostly like them for the cover :)
    • groby_b 9y ago
      To save the next person 30 seconds of googling around: http://www.fiorentinaltd.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=productdetails&virtuemart_product_id=48&virtuemart_category_id=3 http://www.fiorentinaltd.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart... I like it. I'll still stick with my Leuchtturm :)
      • cgore 9y ago
        That's not it, but I like that one too. That's the right brand though. It's this one: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/home-gift-patina-brown-dragon-with-studs-embossed-italian-leather-lined-journal/27384028 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/home-gift-patina-brown-drag...
  • ChuckMcM 9y ago
    Those look awesome, mostly I've used the ones from Eureka Lab Book[1] which seem similar, although I'm a big fan of mixed graph paper and lined. Which paper rule do you use from Leuchtturm1917? [1] https://www.eurekalabbook.com/lab-engineering-notebooks/ https://www.eurekalabbook.com/lab-engineering-notebooks/
    • kaitai 9y ago
      Dotted. Even better than graph paper if you draw a lot of diagrams/figures, in my opinion. I use Fabriano dotted saddle-stitch as a cheaper and lighter alternative to the Leuchtturm1917, for instance when I'm traveling or at a conference. The paper holds up to any non-calligraphic fountain pen I use.
  • Cd00d 9y ago
    I've been using the Moleskine Cahier XL for 3 or 4 years now, and I love them. Soft cover is flexible for folding back, they're lightweight, a comfortable size for carrying with my laptop, and hold up well. Each book is roughly 8 months of working life. I don't use page numbers though - I do date every single entry. https://us.moleskine.com/en/cahier-journal-brown/p0408 https://us.moleskine.com/en/cahier-journal-brown/p0408
  • _alias 9y ago
    Came here to say this. The included spine and cover labels are a nice touch.
  • ryanobjc 9y ago
    If you are doing fountain pens (which I highly recommend!) then leuchtturm is the only way to go, every since moleskin downgraded their paper quality! leuchtturm has every feature of moleskin and costs less and better paper quality.
• zitterbewegung 9y ago
  I keep a small moleskin book with me with a pen loupe I added as a part of my every day carry. I jot down projects I am working on and it’s great.
• goldenbeet 9y ago
  What sort of things do you put in them? I don't know about you, but I'm not exactly running experiments. Do you have a format that differs from purpose, procedure, results?
  • cgore 9y ago
    I'll start with the date and a big horizontal line. For meetings I'll put the start time and a quick header, then some quick notes, usually not even complete sentences, I'm just scribbling things down to remember. In deep coding, debugging, or infrastructure stuff: I'll keep short notes on infrastructure stuff, URLs, hostnames, ports, function names, file names, lots of breadcrumbs basically. This is often great the next day, where I might not really remember how I got from A to B, but all of a sudden need to make a document describing it for other people to repeat. This is the part that is most like a "lab notebook." If I'm designing something new or exploring something, I'll often sketch system diagrams or the like. I'll maybe try to diagram flow between components, user steps, basic algorithm steps, etc. Think design document, version -1. I'll often intersperse TODOs as well, which I'll try to quickly migrate to something real (Jira here at work, or my iPhone tasks list.) I don't use it for task tracking, although I used to do that.
• Fundlab 9y ago
  I would love to hear thoughts on digital vs hardcopy notebooks
  • cgore 9y ago
    I keep it paper for various reasons. I've played around with digital notes, the main problem is it's hard to sketch stuff quickly, even though I have a nice wacom tablet, and it's horrible with just a mouse or trackpad. And there's always a need it seems to try to edit existing stuff. That's why I use ink. I can't erase and "fix" it.
  • oftenwrong 9y ago
    I prefer digital because... 1. It can be searched 2. It can be backed up 3. It is accessible from nearly anywhere
    • copperx 9y ago
      It's also incredibly easy to misplace files and forget that you wrote notes altogether. I've lost many notes.txt throughout the years. I've recently forced myself to use Evernote, which for me is better than any file-based system, but it is a bottomless pit with poor discoverability. A physical object doubles as a reminder.
      • oftenwrong 9y ago
        With respect, that seems like less of a problem of digital note-taking in general, and more of a problem of the specific digital note-taking systems you have tried. Using notes.txt files is a bit like writing notes on napkins and leaving them scattered about. I don't know anything about Evernote, but I'd be interested to hear what issues you had. What works for me is taking notes via email. Backing up, organizing, searching, and distributing email is more-or-less a solved problem, and my note-taking inherits those solutions. I can read and add notes from my phone and from my computer, with the ability to choose from a plethora of applications. I have multiple backups of my email around the world via standard email syncing. My email host has been 100% reliable in not losing my emails, as well. If I want to migrate to a different email host, that is trivial.
• Raphmedia 9y ago
  > Use ink, not pencil Ink will run when wet. I recommend taking notes with a pencil.
  • dezzeus 9y ago
    It may not last for long on the paper, that's why it is suggested to use ink.
    • criddell 9y ago
      I have 20 year old notebooks that are mostly filled with pencil and I refer to them occasionally. They are all perfectly legible still and I used a wide variety of pencils.
    • oasisbob 9y ago
      For true lab notebooks pencil is unacceptable because of their erasability, not longetivity. A formal lab notebook is used in such a way to provide a nearly immutable record. That's why corrections are done with a single line, blank space is blocked out, the notebook is bound with numbered pages and used chronologically, etc.
      • SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
        In a college chemistry class I took our lab notebooks had carbon(less) copy paper for every page. It made handing work in easier, but it also made an unerasable copy of the original record. Quite handy.
  • kajecounterhack 9y ago
    Use the cheap bic ballpoints. They don't run or smudge.
  • beaconstudios 9y ago
    I use Staedtler pigment liner pens (http://a.co/i0tN5Bz http://a.co/i0tN5Bz) and they have never run on me. The different widths really help for sketching vs writing vs annotating too.
• canadianwriter 9y ago
  All this is party of the bullet journal system. For those curious: http://bulletjournal.com/ http://bulletjournal.com/ I love it and use it as my main journalling system.
  • chrisweekly 9y ago
    Yeah, bulletjournal (w/ some ui stolen from sliceplanner) works great for me.
    • krrrh 9y ago
      That’s the first I’ve heard of sliceplanner which looks interesting. Are you using an official sliceplanner journal so you can benefit from the cloud ‘sync’, or just copying the radial calendar idea into a regular paper journal? The one way manual sync seems a bit gee-whiz since the biggest issue for most would be getting calendar invites from the cloud back onto paper.
      • chrisweekly 9y ago
        Yeah I did buy one actual sliceplanner but didn’t like the form factor and never integrated it digitally. Agreed it’s a “gee-whiz”/ meh feature, for my uses anyway. But I loved its visual time-tracking idea and lifted that into my custom bulletjournal system. I use terrific little paper journals (Moleskine Cahir quad-ruled 5x8, one per month.) I crafted a circular clockface template which I stash in the back cover flap, and use to draw a 12h clock for each day, in pen. (I put am stuff inside the circle, and pm outside, to account for overlap in my ~15h days in a single clockface.) Having the paper journal completely offline and separate from phone or laptop is ideal for me - not just for time-tracking and planning, but also for ideas and misc notes. There’s something special about a graph notebook and a good pencil (GraphGear 1000 0.5mm, best $11 I ever spent).
    • diab0lic 9y ago
      I'm assuming you're doing a radial daily plan in a regular notebook. I'm curious about: 1) Why you felt this would help you? (Do you have a lot of tasks in a typical day? Or did structure help you stay on track?, etc...) and 2) To hear a little more about how you're using it. Is it in place of the daily module? Or alongside it?
• Niten 9y ago
  Do you attempt to group your notes by subject and project within the higher-level chronology? I also keep a paper notebook for software engineering, but I find it less convenient than my old chemistry lab notebooks were. The problem is that in my software engineering job, I must alternate between tasks and meetings many times a day. So either I keep things strictly chronological and have a difficult time maintaining a usable table of contents, or I have a new page for each of the day's projects, at the cost of constantly jumping from page to page and inefficient use of the notebook's space. I've yet to find a happy solution.
  • ptero 9y ago
    On paper notebooks -- I keep one, too, and I tried subject grouping which always failed for me within a few months. I now write clearly visible headings and maintain chronological order. I often color code the headings: just underlining or highlighting the title with subject color makes it easy to find. Thid, with chronological order ingeneral, works well for me in lieu of a table of contents. YMMV.
    • qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago
      I keep one, too. I don't bother with keeping subjects. I thread them - there are references pointing to different page numbers everywhere - just like computers do.
  • vidarh 9y ago
    I'm experimenting with a combination of loose sheets of paper in a binder, and re-writing. I tend to favor rewriting to summarize coupled with archiving as I find I rarely actually go back and review the notes otherwise, and rewriting them tends to lead to summarizing and compacting and excising unnecessary information, while I can keep the old pages. (This is especially relevant for things like task lists, plans etc., where things often change substantially over time, though it's important not to overdo it and "lose" context etc.)
    • wwkeyboard 9y ago
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• pklausler 9y ago
  I use Quo Vadis notebooks with unlined creamy French-milled thick paper that is absolutely wonderful to write upon with a fountain pen.
• bluenose69 9y ago
  I've used notebooks for decades. I buy a kind that is pre-numbered, and in which the pages larger than 8.5x11 inches, so I can tape in graphs and printouts of US letter size. During my PhD, when I was scared of losing things, I made photocopies of my books when I completed them, and kept the copies in a separate location ... now I can scan them. I have a simple cross-reference scheme. To refer to a result on page N of book M, I write [M.N]. If it's a certain figure or equation on that page, I just write e.g. [M.N.f3] or [N.M.e5]. So far, I think this is all quite conventional. But I do one more thing that's simple but has proved to be very helpful. I write forward references in the top margin of pages. So, if book 10 page 3 refers to book 2 page 9, I write <10.3> in the top margin of page [2.9]. This simple scheme makes it really easy to take care of ripple effects of errors. Oh, and you've got to use pen, and you've got to use clean cross-outs when you find errors. Otherwise you'll get hopelessly lost.
  • cgore 9y ago
    I'll occasionally take a scan (actually usually a photo with my iphone) as a super quick way to share a diagram. I'd love to get them all scanned in and indexed somehow. That would be the best of both worlds.
  • kqr 9y ago
    Now I'm curious. From an archival standpoint, wouldn't a pencil be better than a pen unless you're using some really high quality ink? I find that ink degrades much faster than graphite when it is exposed to light and moisture.
    • bluenose69 9y ago
      India ink is a good solution to this problem. Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph pens are good for this application because they have a nice mechanism for breaking through dried ink on the tip of the pen. Even a ballpoint pen is quite good for being moisture resistant, although I don't use them so I don't know much about fade resistance except a guess that black is best. The idea of not using a pencil is to prevent changes later. It's really important not to make changes that cannot be tracked. The best is to cross out, write in new text, and sign+date in the margin. Leaving lots of space helps in this. Frankly, though, I've seldom found small changes. When an analysis turns out to be wrong, I simply make a new entry. With my forward- and backward-referencing notation, it won't matter if the new entry corrects an error later in the day, or a decade later. I've never worried about sunlight because my books remain closed on a shelf, when not in use. As for water, choosing a good ink helps a lot (even my fountain pen scrawls can resist quickly-dabbed-up tea stains), but making copies/scans is really a great solution. An addendum to my earlier post -- it helps to title each entry (which often corresponds to a day or two of work), and to type those entries (plus dates, book number and page number, and also some keywords) into a file that can be searched. I recommend one line per entry, and a format that is uniform enough that you can use grep (or similar) actions to produce specialized tables of contents for individual projects, years, etc.
• jl6 9y ago
  Exactly my scheme! You are going at about the same rate too: I’m on about page 1500 since 2009. My one difference is that I don’t keep my notebooks. I scan them then discard the originals. I’ve got so much material hoarded that the only way I can afford the storage is to keep digital copies only.