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The most important improvement to my note taking was the elimination of a computer. Ideas, digressions, illustrations, concerns, and more are difficult to trans

The most important improvement to my note taking was the elimination of a computer. Ideas, digressions, illustrations, concerns, and more are difficult to translate to a machine using a keyboard or mouse. A tablet is better, but the fidelity of a drawing app isn't as good as paper. Paper, it turns out, is always "on". There's no battery to worry about, no booting up and loading the app, and no Slack notification interrupting your flow. Paper calms you, because you know it never ever interrupts. I've really enjoyed evolving the tools I use for notes. Right now I take all notes in a large dotted moleskin using a Rotring Pro. Turns out the more enjoyable a tool is to use, the more likely you are to use it. The notebook is the lower end Moleskin ($20 for a 3-pack), and that's a nice balance between quality and feeling comfortable "wasting" a page.

tartoran 7y ago
Notetaking on paper feels the best. I was thinking of a moleskin sized note scanner that outputs to a moleskin sized e-paper device. The device could sit at the end of the notebook and contain a whole archive of notes.
cgriswald 7y ago
I like Moleskin, Leuchtturm1917 and similar because they are bound nicely. For applications when I'm okay with spiral bound I really like Mead's Cambridge Limited. They're more expensive, but have a great paper-feel and the covers aren't too flimsy. My process is to write everything in mechanical pencil, then review and trace over certain things (depending on topic) with Pigma pens with archival ink.
- notjustanymike 7y ago
  What pencil do you use?
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    Pentel Graphgear1000 0.7mm I prefer the thinner lines of a 0.5mm pencil, but I'm old enough that it's pretty obvious I'm never going to learn to not break the tiny leads. Edit: A Japanese friend introduced me to Pentel's black erasers. I've found what appears to be the same product in the United States, but they're shorter, so I generally try to find some place I can buy them from over there, despite the extra cost.
arminiusreturns 7y ago
I also use moleskins and and there is another factor I have become more aware of lately; taking notes on paper seems more secure from prying eyes. So I sit down every so often and go through my moleskins to digitize notes I want in my system, but I have found on paper I speak more freely on topics because I'm not self-censoring as much, and therefore sometimes skip digitizing entire pages. This seems like an extremely powerful factor the more I dwell on it. The downside is now I am developing a rather large paper notes collection that I don't want to burn.
dboreham 7y ago
This is fine until you lose the paper/notebook. Computer notes tend to be un-forgettable and also open to machine indexing and searching. As a Moleskine aficionado, one thing to mention is that I prefer the squared paper, soft cover, and certain colors (depending on the subject). They make 3 or 4 different sizes, all in hard and soft cover, and I believe around 4 colors. Frustratingly one tends to never find all permutations in stock in any particular store: invariable the combination you're looking for is not there. Even via Amazon every option is not in stock at any particular time. However, I recently discovered by chance that there are Moleskine corporate stores. I visited the one in Century City Mall in Beverly Hills: they had absolutely every combination of size, cover, paper, color available, and actually some options I had never seen before such as a "double thick" version of the 8x5.
criddell 7y ago
> the more enjoyable a tool is to use, the more likely you are to use it That's why I often use a tablet and stylus for anything I intend to keep. I enjoy using the gear. I like having pens and markers created exactly how I like them and they never run out. I like being able to make my paper as big as I want it to be. Sometimes I want blank paper, sometimes dot grid, sometimes lines, etc... and I can have them all in the same notebook. I like that my handwriting is recognized and I can search it. It's great being able to paste in an image that I capture with the camera or find on the web. It's nice being able to move a paragraph to make space for something I forgot. I don't have trouble with Slack or email because they aren't installed. No notifications are allowed on the tablet, except for OS-related ones (ie an update is available). That said, I do still use a paper and pen all the time as well. I like paper and pen in meetings to capture and then after the meeting I format and transfer the notes to my digital system. I like pen and paper when I'm on the phone because I like scribbling and doodling as I talk. Basically the divide comes down to what is ephemeral and what I want to keep. Anything that needs to last has to be digital for me.
- 100721 7y ago
  I, too, thoroughly enjoy using a tablet. I have been on the hunt for something that has an organizational structure like graphs, paired with support for pen inputs. Right now I've been using OneNote and it is falling victim to the described problem of greater and greater segmentation of ideas. Right now, it seems like the only real solution is to homebrew something that hits the Microsoft API and associates document IDs to contexts, then launches OneNote for the given document when it comes time to view/edit.
  - criddell 7y ago
    That's a really interesting idea. My problem with a graph structure is that ultimately I end up with notes that fit more than one bucket. For that reason I usually gravitate to a structure built on tags.
julian_t 7y ago
I’d love to be able to use paper notes, but I’ve always found writing physically uncomfortable, and my writing is so bad that even I can’t necessarily read old notes! And how do you find “all the notes about GCC” without some kind of library index system? So for me it’s text files in Markdown, shared between my devices, with a variety of ways to search and display them.

tartoran 7y ago

Notetaking on paper feels the best. I was thinking of a moleskin sized note scanner that outputs to a moleskin sized e-paper device. The device could sit at the end of the notebook and contain a whole archive of notes.

cgriswald 7y ago

I like Moleskin, Leuchtturm1917 and similar because they are bound nicely. For applications when I'm okay with spiral bound I really like Mead's Cambridge Limited. They're more expensive, but have a great paper-feel and the covers aren't too flimsy. My process is to write everything in mechanical pencil, then review and trace over certain things (depending on topic) with Pigma pens with archival ink.

notjustanymike 7y ago
What pencil do you use?
- cgriswald 7y ago
  Pentel Graphgear1000 0.7mm I prefer the thinner lines of a 0.5mm pencil, but I'm old enough that it's pretty obvious I'm never going to learn to not break the tiny leads. Edit: A Japanese friend introduced me to Pentel's black erasers. I've found what appears to be the same product in the United States, but they're shorter, so I generally try to find some place I can buy them from over there, despite the extra cost.

arminiusreturns 7y ago

I also use moleskins and and there is another factor I have become more aware of lately; taking notes on paper seems more secure from prying eyes. So I sit down every so often and go through my moleskins to digitize notes I want in my system, but I have found on paper I speak more freely on topics because I'm not self-censoring as much, and therefore sometimes skip digitizing entire pages. This seems like an extremely powerful factor the more I dwell on it. The downside is now I am developing a rather large paper notes collection that I don't want to burn.

dboreham 7y ago

This is fine until you lose the paper/notebook. Computer notes tend to be un-forgettable and also open to machine indexing and searching. As a Moleskine aficionado, one thing to mention is that I prefer the squared paper, soft cover, and certain colors (depending on the subject). They make 3 or 4 different sizes, all in hard and soft cover, and I believe around 4 colors. Frustratingly one tends to never find all permutations in stock in any particular store: invariable the combination you're looking for is not there. Even via Amazon every option is not in stock at any particular time. However, I recently discovered by chance that there are Moleskine corporate stores. I visited the one in Century City Mall in Beverly Hills: they had absolutely every combination of size, cover, paper, color available, and actually some options I had never seen before such as a "double thick" version of the 8x5.

criddell 7y ago

> the more enjoyable a tool is to use, the more likely you are to use it That's why I often use a tablet and stylus for anything I intend to keep. I enjoy using the gear. I like having pens and markers created exactly how I like them and they never run out. I like being able to make my paper as big as I want it to be. Sometimes I want blank paper, sometimes dot grid, sometimes lines, etc... and I can have them all in the same notebook. I like that my handwriting is recognized and I can search it. It's great being able to paste in an image that I capture with the camera or find on the web. It's nice being able to move a paragraph to make space for something I forgot. I don't have trouble with Slack or email because they aren't installed. No notifications are allowed on the tablet, except for OS-related ones (ie an update is available). That said, I do still use a paper and pen all the time as well. I like paper and pen in meetings to capture and then after the meeting I format and transfer the notes to my digital system. I like pen and paper when I'm on the phone because I like scribbling and doodling as I talk. Basically the divide comes down to what is ephemeral and what I want to keep. Anything that needs to last has to be digital for me.

100721 7y ago
I, too, thoroughly enjoy using a tablet. I have been on the hunt for something that has an organizational structure like graphs, paired with support for pen inputs. Right now I've been using OneNote and it is falling victim to the described problem of greater and greater segmentation of ideas. Right now, it seems like the only real solution is to homebrew something that hits the Microsoft API and associates document IDs to contexts, then launches OneNote for the given document when it comes time to view/edit.
- criddell 7y ago
  That's a really interesting idea. My problem with a graph structure is that ultimately I end up with notes that fit more than one bucket. For that reason I usually gravitate to a structure built on tags.

julian_t 7y ago

I’d love to be able to use paper notes, but I’ve always found writing physically uncomfortable, and my writing is so bad that even I can’t necessarily read old notes! And how do you find “all the notes about GCC” without some kind of library index system? So for me it’s text files in Markdown, shared between my devices, with a variety of ways to search and display them.