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It’s fashionable to say that the best note taking system is pen&paper, but I think it ends up being a disservice to the idea of registering knowledge. I think w

by htk 6y ago

It’s fashionable to say that the best note taking system is pen&paper, but I think it ends up being a disservice to the idea of registering knowledge. I think written and digital have completely different pros and cons. I love to physically write things down on a moleskine, but I decided to not storage knowledge there, I just dump things from my short term memory to act upon them in the short term. I tried storing knowledge there but when I needed later I didn’t have the notepad with me, or it was in an old one etc. Digital note taking has several disadvantages, but at least it’s always with me. Like they say about cameras, the best one is the one that’s with you. Having created several note taking apps (the latest being Mindown), I’m deeply interested in the note taking problem, but it seems to be impossible to create the ideal one. Sometimes we want “simple”, other times we want advanced features. This is the first layer of challenge I see in the note taking world, but I can peel this onion in almost endless layers...

mannschott 6y ago
I'm familiar with this conundrum. I've been taking notes, managing tasks and appointments on paper since 2015; before that I took most notes in Emacs org-mode and managed some tasks there, and some in OmniFocus. Lack of search is a definite disadvantage of handwritten notes. Here's what I've done to blunt that: (1) Every notebook begins with a few pages for a table of contents. (2) When a notebook is full, I scan it in as a PDF. (3) I type up the table of contents to make it searchable and add that to the PDF. (4) The PDFs are all available on my phone. I am generally able to find things this way, but it is not as convenient as i-searching around a giant buffer in Emacs or using something like deft.el. For the moment I am continuing in this fashion, but I do periodically consider switching back to using a computer for note taking. Perhaps some day I will.
- Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
  There are "smart notebooks" that make it relatively easy to send your handwritten notes to the cloud. The problem is that, at least when I checked a couple of years ago, they had no OCR, and only uploaded images to which you could attach a name, so they are not especially helpful when it comes to search. I hope in a few years, with good OCR, they will be a good solution for those of us stuck in this dilemma.

by htk 6y ago

mannschott 6y ago

I'm familiar with this conundrum. I've been taking notes, managing tasks and appointments on paper since 2015; before that I took most notes in Emacs org-mode and managed some tasks there, and some in OmniFocus. Lack of search is a definite disadvantage of handwritten notes. Here's what I've done to blunt that: (1) Every notebook begins with a few pages for a table of contents. (2) When a notebook is full, I scan it in as a PDF. (3) I type up the table of contents to make it searchable and add that to the PDF. (4) The PDFs are all available on my phone. I am generally able to find things this way, but it is not as convenient as i-searching around a giant buffer in Emacs or using something like deft.el. For the moment I am continuing in this fashion, but I do periodically consider switching back to using a computer for note taking. Perhaps some day I will.

Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
There are "smart notebooks" that make it relatively easy to send your handwritten notes to the cloud. The problem is that, at least when I checked a couple of years ago, they had no OCR, and only uploaded images to which you could attach a name, so they are not especially helpful when it comes to search. I hope in a few years, with good OCR, they will be a good solution for those of us stuck in this dilemma.