16 ms·

Thinking with pen and paper

187 points by ljvmiranda 4y ago

flakiness 4y ago
For me pen and paper being beneficial is a strong signal of an interesting project. A large part of day-job work doesn't deserve the pen and paper - We just need to track TODOs, links and some other bullet points for them. Digital tools are very good at these because it's optimized for them. On the other hand, if a problem demands the flexibility and the visual capacity of the pen and paper, it's a good sign of the sufficiently large intellectual problem space it contains.
- d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
  Great point here. I recently was fascinated by a new topic and filled two notebooks of 200 pages with my notes written with a fountain pen.
megamix 4y ago
Great write up! I use pen and paper to off load my mind
egypturnash 4y ago
Is Zettelkasten the new Getting Things Done yet? I feel like I'm seeing essays about How I Zettel with the same frequency I used to see essays about How I GTD back when 43folders was pioneering the genre of "productivity influencer". (edit: amusingly enough, I find this near the end: "I also mentioned Zettelkasten many times in this post, but I don’t do that anymore–I just did a 1-month dry run and it felt tiring.")
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  Yeah, I think it is. I never went all in on GTD, but some principles stuck with me: key is having a trusted system where I can capture things that will then SHOW me those things when I need to see them. I used Omnifocus for a while, but eventually migrated to OrgMode as a better fit for my life (even though I'm not really an emacs person overall).
  - euroderf 4y ago
    > a trusted system where I can capture things that will then SHOW me those things when I need to see them. The related principle that sticks with me is, your mind is more for processing/doing things than for simply storing them.
- ticviking 4y ago
  It seems to me that it is. I find it productive, probably because it helps me collect the various ideas and notes from things I've read into a single place, and is a good mindfulness practice.
- vavooom 4y ago
  I've come to the limited experience conclusion that Zettelkasten is a great tool if you are doing detailed non-fiction writing, blogging, or research, and plan to for more than a year. Outside of these scenarios its just storing information that you may/ may not ever refer to or recall.
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    Nailed it. I've used "Linking Your Thinking" much more successfully for organizing notes in Obsidian when I want to be able to quickly access them. Here's the summary: Make lots of indexes, or "Maps Of Content". An index can point to a other pages, including other MOCs. It can also have its own text. There, that's 95% of it. I have a top-level "Index MOC" page that links to my "Work MOC" (which links to projects I'm working on), "Orders MOC" (that links to a bunch of pages for local restaurants and what my wife likes ordering from them), "Diablo MOC" (because I play a lot of Diablo 3 and keep notes on how to optimize characters), etc. In short, it's a way to turn a mess of pages into a web of links that I can easily click through if I want to.
    - larve 4y ago
      I combine both freely. I have a "wiki" part that's mostly starting pages for individual topics, a structure notes part that are a cross between a draft article and an index page. They're concepts I'm trying to work out. A Zettelkasten part with linked "claims" where I put original thoughts. And tons of free form logs and blog post drafts and topic driven writing. It's all linked together and it's a lot of fun. here's the public part: https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/Public/INDEX https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/Public/INDEX
- BeetleB 4y ago
  A comment from a few days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32227826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32227826 Basically, over 90% of people invoking Zettelkasten do not know what it is. It's definitely not a tool suitable for most folks.
lancesells 4y ago
If you have a notebook / sketchbook / journal and it needs to be held open with an object look for another notebook [1]. It seems trivial but that is a poorly designed notebook. 1. https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/assets/png/pen-and-paper/blank.jpg https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/assets/png/pen-and-paper/bla...
- emadabdulrahim 4y ago
  My Midori notebooks lie flat. Not sure what's going on in that picture
lbriner 4y ago
I think OP touches on it but even with a graphics tablet, there is no way I can create simple drawings and sketches on the computer compared to pen and paper. Even a simple box in powerpoint is: 1) Check if you are on the correct ribbon 2) Click the box icon (unless you have millions of shortcuts setup) 3) Drag and drop it 4) Maybe change the defaults which you don't like (colour, thickness etc) 5) If you are typing text in it, that rarely works out well without clicking other buttons On paper: draw box and write text - simples.
- galleywest200 4y ago
  I am not sure why it needs to be this complicated for a graphics tablet. Open paint software -> use stylus to draw square.
thenoblesquid 4y ago
Even a simple to-do list. Crossing an item off with pen on paper provides a much more satisfying feeling of accomplishment than deleting the task or striking through the text in an app.
mikeholler 4y ago
I started bullet journaling with pen and paper and it has changed my life. Intentionality -- that's exactly right. When I write I feel intentional. I've also dove into the world of nice paper and fountain pens. I've always had hand cramps when writing, whether using a cheap Bic or a Pilot G7. With fountain pens, that's all gone, and writing is effortless. You can get started with this cheaply by getting a platinum preppy fine or extra-fine pen ($4), and a bottle of ink ($10). You want a fine or extra-fine nib, because anything else will feather and bleed on cheap paper, but fine or extra-fine works just fine on cheap paper. Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll rarely need to refill it.
- tartoran 4y ago
  > Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll rarely need to refill it. Please expand on this. I’m utterly confused as to what you mean and why you’d need it.
  - bbonamici 4y ago
    idk op's specifics, but some pens use ink cartridges; by sealing the body of the pen, you can fill it with ink, have way more capacity and you can refill it.
    - ubermonkey 4y ago
      Why tho? Sure, there are some converters that are notably, notoriously small (Namiki Vanishing Point converters are infamous for this), but in those cases it's simple to use carts instead. (In the Namiki case, the carts last weeks and weeks.)
      - soogwoog 4y ago
        So you can use different inks other than compatible carts?
galleywest200 4y ago
I love pen and paper. I have chronically sweaty hands so an iPad + stylus + note app works best for me currently, but its the same idea.
melling 4y ago
How about adding “Notation as a Tool for Thought” in some form? https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm Might be a different notation needed depending on the subject.
douglaswlance 4y ago
How do you ingest the data for inspection over time?
jmull 4y ago
Interesting how the tool integrates with the mind. I used to strictly be a pencil and notebook person... to be mentally engaged fully (whether that is thinking, problem solving, planning, recalling, etc.) I had to use pencil and paper. But improvements in text editors, and their convenience, lead to me using them more and more to capture ideas, lists, etc., and one day I realized I had switched. Now I need to use sublime text to be mentally fully engaged. If I could find something better I'd try switching again. Needs top-notch text editing integrated well with something like Apple Pencil. (Apple notes app is subpar when it comes to text, doesn't integrate text and pencil drawing/writing very well, and although I just want basic drawing/writing tools, it doesn't do that very well either.)
- criddell 4y ago
  On my iPad I use GoodNotes and it's pretty good. I've also tried Notability and it's quite good as well but GoodNotes is what I started with and it's what I'm most efficient in. One of my kids uses OneNote from Microsoft. Their notebook / section / page metaphor seems too fiddly for me although I know some people like it.
nunodonato 4y ago
Would love to read the author's thoughts after using a Supernote for a month
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chadash 4y ago
in general, I use my computer for taking notes. But I recently started using pencil and paper for designing quick low-fidelity mockups for things that my team is going to implement and it's wildly better than working on the computer for several reasons: - pencil/paper is just so much quicker - if you think it, you can draw it... quickly. It's more flexible. - key advantage: when non-engineers (or even engineers) see higher fidelity mockups, it's very easy to get caught up on some of the details like where a button goes or how big the font is. With pencil/paper, everyone realizes that it's a rough sketch and that the final product isn't going to look this way. After I write things up, I scan them with an app to a PDF file and then email that out (or attach to a ticket). Of course, pen/pencil isn't great for final designs... there's no substitute for a high-fidelity mockup of what somethings is supposed to look like. But I find it very useful to start with the UX and then work on things like CSS last. Some key tools I use: notepad: $5 pencil: $7 (I really splurged here for the pentel Orenz, my favorite mechanical pencil, but a $1-2 pencil will be 95% as good) 6" ruler: $1.76 1/2" binder (I like to keep my drawings): $4 I've thought about investing in a ReMarkable tablet, but I find it hard to justify the cost since pen/pencil work so well.
account-5 4y ago
Pencil, for me a pencil is much better than any pen. Pencil and paper, square paper A4 or A5.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > square paper A4 or A5. You mean paper with a grid of squares on it, right? Because all the DIN A-series paper formats are rectangular, not square (as I first misread your meaning).
iancmceachern 4y ago
I started buying custom printed notebooks from the scientific journal companies. For $10 a journal you can get a very niche hard cover journal, with page numbers (if you like), plain, ruled or grid paper, and embossed with your name (or whatever). It's so satisfying. Combine that with a nice fountain pen and ink and it's quite the experience. It's my proffered way to take notes, think through problems.
iammjm 4y ago
Last year i went in the other direction: analog to digital. Onenote is my tool of choice - it's basically a really awesome piece of paper: you can write per hand on your tablet, you can type to text, you can create lists, tables, convert handwriting to text, insert audio, photos, shapes, screenshots, first text, copy text to and from other apps, tag information, hyperlink other pages and notebooks and even pieces of text; you can host in in cloud or locally, the page is unlimited and you can cluster notebooks into sections and notebooks, move and copy pages around and even collaborate with other people in real time. It's on all devices you use, synced. It's everything your notebook is plus so much more. Hands down best room I've ever used.
jxy 4y ago
People thinking pen and paper is simple have intentionally made it simple. Have you considered how many different kinds of paper/notebooks/slides/cards, kinds of pen/pencil/brush? Soon you'll start fiddling with your pens and papers, as some comments here have already started suggesting their personal favorite, including making your custom "eye dropper" pen. Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt, ed note.txt , my previous notes more notes ... my last notes a now just write you new notes down don't worry about anything don't even worry about editing previous lines just write and done . w q And that's it.
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > People thinking pen and paper is simple have intentionally made it simple. > Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt, <ed session snipped> And that's it. Surely that's also intentionally making a digital interface simple? I mean, both kinds—all kinds—of interfaces can be made simpler or made more complex depending on the user's tastes. That fact itself doesn't, I think, speak to any virtue or lack thereof on the part of any interface paradigm.
- ontouchstart 4y ago
  cat > note.txt <<EOF … EOF
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    cat > note.txt <<EOF cat >> notes.txt <<EOF
    - ontouchstart 4y ago
      Yes. If we also add date >> notes.txt it would be a great immutable ledger .
tunesmith 4y ago
Any favorite pens with LEDs attached so you can write in poor lighting conditions?
- foldedcornice 4y ago
  I recommend a separate clip-on book light (or clip-on LED light) that is bright, lightweight, and USB-rechargable. If the LED is attached to the pen, the weight (of both the battery and light) will be significant and can tire you out for long writing periods. You would also have a better experience for the light to not move too much while writing, which will happen as you move the pen along the paper.
ubermonkey 4y ago
I do the same thing -- TO START. Initial notes are almost always on paper, in a good notebook, written with a fountain pen. I also almost always have a small notebook and pen on my person. BUT once something becomes a real project I need to track, or if the notes are important enough that I want them searchable later, I transcribe and summarize into the appropriate Orgmode buffer. I retain things written longhand better, but this act of review & summarization is like a turbocharger for that recollection. (Not for nothing, but one old-school study hack I read about back in the 80s was "type up your class notes". It dated from an era before computers, so it wasn't about search or indexing. It was about the act of review inherent in the transcription.)
Cupertino95014 4y ago
Sigh. I really sympathize with this, and I totally think that analog is not dead and will never die. And vinyl records! Despite that, I find that in own writing, I always think I'm going to initiate it on paper, but then I start writing fragments on the computer, thinking about them, revising, etc. etc. I lay it aside & think about it, and then revise some more. In the end, I think it's about as creative as pen-and-paper. I hope. I should try the pen again just to make sure.
- foldedcornice 4y ago
  I've had similar experiences where I didn't need any paper to plan out and write shorter articles. However, screenwriter Thomas Schnauz provided a great example of how handwriting was useful when writing scripts for Better Call Saul. He posted a photo of a cork board with dozens of pinned index cards with handwritten ideas for scenes. It looks like the cards can then be rearranged or substituted out without losing the past drafts: https://twitter.com/TomSchnauz/status/1296912710601306113/photo/1 https://twitter.com/TomSchnauz/status/1296912710601306113/ph... Handwriting has also been useful for taking notes where diagrams and imagery was important, such as when researching what a good user interface could look like, for a web application. You could give it a try if you decide to write an article that analyzes or incorporates a significant amount of imagery, or has a lot of parts, like a lengthy script, fictional story, or in-depth report.
waspight 4y ago
Anyone using any e-ink tablet tool for taking notes instead of pen and paper? Is there any good solutions there yet?
- goerz 4y ago
  The Remarkable tablet is pretty good (although I prefer the iPad, except for in direct sunlight)
lr1970 4y ago
iPad Pro (12.9 inch) + iPencil + GoodNotes (with zip-file backup) gives me best of two worlds. I scribble my notes with iPencil in GoodNotes. GoodNotes does OCR and its search functionality is good. It allows for backups in a form of zip archives (cloud backup option also available). Unlike Notability (subscription), GoodNotes app is one-time-fee.
Syzygies 4y ago
I can remember rolling my eyes at a writer using a mechanical typewriter decades after word processors had taken over. Did they thaw out of a glacier? At the same time I love physical media. As a math professor I defend a widespread preference for blackboards over soul-sucking whiteboards, imagining that musicians will still play grand pianos in a century, and they'll still snicker over Ryan Gosling playing a toy piano under the spotlight in that classic movie "La La Land". I've hoarded Hagoromo chalk; I'm the one with the chalk attaché case in [1]. I've always carried multiple grades of drawing paper, and I've worked through many hundreds of artist grade felt tip pens, scanning all my math notes for thirty years. Then, pandemic. Just as World War 2 accelerated women in the workplace, the pandemic has accelerated the uptake of digital tools for visual presentation. To teach over Zoom, we needed to embrace drawing on a tablet. I understand that the pandemic radically accelerated similar trends in architecture. The algorithmic possibilities of drawing on a tablet are truly addictive; returning to paper feels like returning to a mechanical typewriter. For my purposes, Concepts offers the most involving algorithmic experience; I wrote [2] to support my note taking and diagrams for papers. However, Notability offers the least friction. I can have the same psychological relationship to taking notes on my tablet as I had with phyical paper, with the benefits of algorithmic reuse. (Pushing the envelope exposes how inconsistently Notability handles implicit layers, but one learns to draw around this.) In a few decades, after all living mathematicians have drawn on tablets since birth, math will be far more visual, conveying ideas with far more immediacy. Math communication is now still largely constrained by its resemblance to typeset prose. Ever leave a startup because reading your coworkers' code put you in "Just kill me now!" territory? I did. Mathematicians write the equivalent of bad code, rarely actually machine-checked, to formalize their ideas. Other mathematicians try to decipher this code, to reverse-engineer the ideas. We declare people who can actually do this as having a gift for mathematics. As I learn to teach combinatorics more visually, my classes swell with students who share my frustration. I've come to realize this summer that I pretty much despise mathematics. I can't wait for the visual revolution. This revolution didn't take hold on physical paper; one needs a digital accelerant. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8 [2] https://github.com/Syzygies/concepts-artboards https://github.com/Syzygies/concepts-artboards
- Archelaos 4y ago
eevilspock 4y ago
I prefer thinking on paper. But I like the compact storage and backup, organizability and most importantly searchability of digital notes. What I really need is a great open source OCR and hand diagram to SVG tool. I hunted to no avail. Anyone got good recs?
user00012-ab 4y ago
I would love to see a site where people posted stuff they have been doing for over a year and it still works for them. Seems like all these blog posts are, "I Started doing this yesterday, and I'm going to do it for the rest of my life... or tomorrow when I blog my next big thing I'm going to do forever." I'm more interested in stuff people have stuck with and actually works for them when the novelty of the medium wears off. I'm not saying pen and paper isn't great, but I'm more interested in the system that evolves if you actually use something over a long period of time.
- bsima 4y ago
  I have roughly ten years of notebooks in a box under my desk. They are all some kind of “bullet journal” method: date at the top of the page, items below, index in the back.
  - tevrede 4y ago
    Do you ever refer back to them?
    - ozzydave 4y ago
      For me, only occasionally, but when I do it’s often a huge help - can save an immense amount of time not re-doing that work. Most of the value is in helping align my thoughts as I go though.
      - bsima 4y ago
        Yeah and sometimes I go back to them just for nostalgia. But truly the archiving doesn't matter all that much. I like the Field Notes tagline: "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now."
- ljvmiranda 4y ago
  Hi there, author here! Been using pen and paper (for knowledge work) since 2017. Hope that helps
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
Walmart sells wirebound grid paper notebooks for cheap. I love them. I use them as my development notebook.
coldblues 4y ago
For me, what feels like quicksand, is writing on paper. I type very fast on my keyboard 120+ WPM. I want to get my thoughts out of my head as soon as possible, and shape them fast with immediate feedback. My notes are very random and they're all over the place, yet all easily interconnected and searchable because of backlinks and some minimal organization. If I were taking physical notes, I would not have as many notes as I have now, and would be less motivated. The computer is an extension of myself at this point, and it feels more natural than writing on paper. I think the author might have chosen the traditional way of note-taking, because he just doesn't have the patience or the particular obsession to tailor the note-taking system. Which is fair, but it might do him a disservice if he ends up impatient with the system he is building now. There is a reason, after all, that so many people switched to digital. Even if the author prefers the romanticized way of old note-taking, it is undoubtedly inefficient. It's an experience akin to using ${Editor} over Vim.
- emadabdulrahim 4y ago
  Efficiency is good but not the most important thing when it comes to thinking, idea generation, journaling, etc.
- tomtheelder 4y ago
  It depends what you're optimizing for. I'm not sure I'd consider volume of notes to be a positive metric. I'm not convinced motivation is either. When I handwrite I absolutely write less. It's harder and slower. But for the types of things I use handwriting for I think that's a plus. I tend to put more thought into what I'm recording. In my personal experience the outcomes are better. I type notes as well, very frequently, but for archival content. Things I want to be able to reference in the future.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > I want to get my thoughts out of my head as soon as possible Why, is there something wrong with them? > I think the author might have chosen the traditional way of note-taking, because he just doesn't have the patience or the particular obsession to tailor the note-taking system. Because nothing says "This is naturally the best way for humans to do something" as clearly as it requiring patience or a "particular obsession", right?
Tomte 4y ago
Does anyone have a good video for hand position with fountain pens? My handwriting is bad, because my hand doesn't "hover", it's firmly planted on the table, and I need to lift it and reposition it every few words. All the videos I've seen make it seem so easy, but when I try to emulate those hand positions, my pen's nib doesn't even reach the paper. They glide effortlessly with the smallest two fingers lightly touching the table. I need to lower my hand so three fingers and the wrist are again very much on the table.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Here is a trick for learning how to make your hand “hover” that I was taught by the old pros when I joined the animation industry. Take a pencil. A wooden one, not a mechanical one. Sharpen it. Then hold it so that the entire side of the exposed cone of graphite touches the paper, rather than the tip. Your thumb will be on one side of the pencil, with all four fingers in a row on the opposite side, rather than sort of clustered around the front of the pencil. Now try to draw some lines. You will get very broad lines and probably have little control, because this grip forces you to keep your wrist still, and gives you very little room for your fingers to move the pencil either. It will feel very weird and awkward at first! You’ll have to make a bunch of big, broad motions because you’ve probably never tried to make fine motions like this with your arm in your entire life. It’s okay, you’ll get better! A great way to get better: take a piece of paper, and draw a circle in the upper left corner, just barely touching the edges of the paper. Don’t worry about making a nice circle, don’t go over it multiple times, just make one simple sorta-circular gesture. Now move to the right and draw another circle, just touching the first one and the tip of the paper. Repeat for a whole row, then do another row that just touches the bottom of the previous row, until you’ve filled the whole page. Your circles will probably look better by the end of the page. I did this every morning as a warm-up for one of my first animation jobs, and the circles got a lot better, and tighter, over the course of not much time. Once you have learnt this, you can easily transfer this new control of your arm motions to tools held in other grips. I mostly work digitally, and have to address the tablet with the stylus’ tip for it to register, but I still move my arm with the fluidity learnt from this exercise. As a bonus this is also a lot better for your arm. Keeping the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Fairy away is very much a thing grizzled old animators wanted to teach the new kids coming in, they’d seen great careers cut short by injuries. (You could also probably keep holding the pen in a more vertical fashion and use a wrist brace to keep your wrist from moving, if this is all too damn weird for you.)
mt_ 4y ago
This how humans have been taking notes for most of the time. Why did the author thought this would be a noteworthy topic for a blog post?
rasengan0 4y ago
"I remember in my college chemistry classes, we were instructed never to tear off or hide any error we made in our lab notebooks. Instead, we should mark it with a strikethrough. " +1 OMG Chemistry notebooks FTW. I was always a pencil person and when the professor literally made us cross out our mistakes it felt gross to see the wasted space for 'nonsense', so inefficient. Only later I come to realize that all creation is not for naught. Observations made and recorded for the record are invaluable when seen from a different time perspective. If DNA can have built in redundancy, then evolution is revealing a good lesson to replicate for note taking as well. People's time horizons are too short when thinking about so called 'ultimate' note taking/brainstorming/productivity solutions. What system did Grace Hopper use? Feynmann? I can take a trip to Mom's and fetch that chemistry notebook to retrieve that 1980s information. No retro hardware, searching for encryption keys, old floppy disk/zip drive media players, no defunct internet companies to contact about 'my' data, proprietary formats to parse, etc. Open that 40 year old notebook and read it. To be sure, I own the iPads/android tablets, note apps, desktop apps, wikis, cloud services and other digital debris that in the end is/was wasted friction, $$$ and energy. Too many dependencies. I stick with a low-end laptop with plain text on vim and emacs -nox and (mobile) self-made paper notebooks and enjoyable wonderful fountain pens [1] I'm really trying to look back toward memory like the ancients but that is the ultimate practice.[2] Life is too short to conform to digital tools. Enjoy both! There is much forgotten freedom to be rediscovered with the analog hand. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
- detaro 4y ago
  In chemistry etc the properly-kept lab notebook is also an almost chain of evidence thing, both for scientific (integrity) and commercial (patents and such) reasons. I.e. never erase, only strike-through so previous error is still readable, numbered pages, each section dated and signed, properly kept index, ... all make it a lot harder to falsify things after the fact. (Nowadays there are also digital record-keeping tools that do timestamped signatures and such instead)
  - GoodbyeMrChips 4y ago
Snitch-Thursday 4y ago
I was recently reading Steal Like an Artist and one of the sections referenced having an analog desk and a digital desk, the former for ideation and creativity modes, the latter for editing and revising modes, and I found that salient. I love my fountain pens and paper, but for permanence and immediacy reasons. It's really hard to put a file attachment for safe-keeping on your hardcover journal. I love OneNote, but for ease of dumping screenshots, digital ink annotations, file attachments, and generally building up context around a bit of specific information reasons. It's really hard to put your sticker from your family-member's letter on your OneNote notebook. And those are two different tasks, just like the desks example above.
runjake 4y ago
A few gripes about the post: 1. It appears the author hasn’t been doing this long, judging by their Twitter feed. I’m more interested when somebody’s been at something for a year or two. The whole “I’ve switched to $thing and it’s changed everything!” is always fun when it was written soon after the switch. Even funnier when you visit it a few months after and they’re back on the old thing. See also operating system switch posts. 2. “Most” notes systems aren’t using Zettelkasten. Most note takers don’t even know what it is. 3. I take handwritten notes and drawings all the time. Then I scan and OCR them into a PDF with my iPhone that goes into Obsidian via Shortcuts automations. This way it’s searchable and I always have them. I don’t have to remember to carry a handcrafted Midori/Moleskine around everywhere.
- tomtheelder 4y ago
  I think these are fair gripes. Would love to add my perspective: 1. I've been handwriting notes for about 2 years now, after typing all my notes before that. I generally agree with the author's points. My take on it, which I think they sort of had their own spin on, is that "notes" is an unhelpfully broad category. You record different things for different reasons. A todo is very different from jotting down a novel idea. So I have an Obsidian vault and a notebook. The notebook is for my ephemeral notes. That includes any information whose lifespan is less than ~1 week, so usually quick thoughts about imminent meetings or todos for the next day or so. It also includes any time I'm taking notes strictly for my sake when the information can be referenced later. For example, my own personal thoughts during a meeting that has shared notes. In my opinion handwriting is better for that sort of stuff: I think it focuses you, it slows down your thinking a little, and it makes you more likely to remember what you wrote. Obsidian is for archival notes. Things I may need to reference in the future. That's where I keep any longer running todos/projects, as well as any more detailed/complex info that I might not remember but want to reference in the future. Not infrequently I'll take something I jotted down in my notebook and add it to Obsidian if it seems like it might be useful in the future. I find this split to be very effective for me personally. YMMV! 2. Totally agree. I doubt most people need or benefit from actually getting into Zettelkasten. 3. That seems very reasonable. I think for me personally it would be a bit of a hassle given how rarely I have a need to go back through my written notes. So yeah tl;dr would be: I think handwritten notes are the ideal way to record information that you're not going to need for more than a few days tops, but I'd hate to have to dig through my old notebooks looking for something.
YeBanKo 4y ago
Tangentially related question, maybe someone can explain why graph/quad/grid ruled notepads are harder to find and way more expensive. I can easily get college ruled notepad for $.50-$1 almost in any department store, but graph ruled are significantly more expensive ($4-$5) and less common.
- drekipus 4y ago
  Market forces. Grid is in less supply because it's not as demanded
  - YeBanKo 4y ago
    It could be the opposite, it is not as demanded because it is not as available. If it were, I thunk people might have preferred it more often.
    - euroderf 4y ago
      Some MBA middle manager decided a grid provides more value to buyers, ergo segment the market for el-cheapo notebooks by boosting the price ?
JonChesterfield 4y ago
I wrote code on paper occasionally. Anyone else? Don't see an existing comment about it. Notebook, multicoloured pen, usually C or lisp syntax. Tends to be thinking through data structures. Kills the temptation to check my work by running it which forces me to think harder about the intended execution. edit: used to use whiteboards for the same purpose but sadly don't have one at present
- wrp 4y ago
  Idea -> diagram -> pseudocode -> code. All on paper. Prefer loose sheets so I can spread them out. Mentally run through it and "printf" to the margins. Concise languages only.
- a9h74j 4y ago
  I once commented to use one color for code and another for everything else (when learning a programming language). It got more upvotes than I would have expected, so others must be coding on paper as well.
- Tcepsa 4y ago
  I still do. Generally data structures and flow more than actual code these days, but sometimes I'll also sketch out an API or something by hand. I find it tremendously helpful for cultivating understanding, designing systems, and solving problems!
sleightofmind 4y ago
What a beautiful site. So easy on the eyes. Thanks.
yawnxyz 4y ago
Articles like this worship the act of writing on paper, not the process of iteratively putting down thoughts and shaping them. I use Notion. I also use paper. I tried using "fancy writing equipment" that ended up too nice for me to scribble on. Because any momentary idea is garbage and not worthy of this nice acid-free, leather bound notebook. So no I have a stack of very cheap legal notepads that I just put whatever I want on. Sometimes I'll rip the pages out. Sometimes I'll trash them. Eventually the good ideas take shape, and I'll move them to Notion
- noir_lord 4y ago
  I do the same, 5mm square a4 and a good biro. For everything else there is markdown.
stereoradonc 4y ago
Another productivity rabbit hole on HN
- euroderf 4y ago
  How about a browser extension that runs a timer until you're done reading all those links that got opened up from a productivity article ? Elapsed time: "Yikes!"
senegoid 4y ago
I feel people (myself included) are drawn to notetaking/PKM topics because there's a fear that others have unlocked a secret to learning the layperson hasn't yet discovered. In my experience observing my peers, aside from intellectual horsepower, thinking about topics from first principles is the best way to learn. This has nothing to do with Logseq, Obsidian, Zettels, paper, workflows, Literature notes, or any other fad. Don't understand something? Go back a step and understand that. Even better if you have to explain it to someone else. Then see how you structure it into a latticework of knowledge, as Charlie Munger would say.
nonoesp 4y ago
I've noticed I write for longer and with greater focus when writing by hand on the reMarkable 2 tablet. Writing in the reMarkable feels as analog as writing on paper does. I can convert my handwriting into digital text and email it to myself for editing and digital archiving right from the tablet. I've also tried handwriting with ink in Moleskine notebooks and transcribing pages with the Google Translate API, which works surprisingly well. I love the analog method. Yet I want to document my writing digitally for easy retrieval when editing and looking for content to publish. What other methods are people using to digitize, transcribe, and archive "analog" handwriting?

187 points by ljvmiranda 4y ago

For me pen and paper being beneficial is a strong signal of an interesting project. A large part of day-job work doesn't deserve the pen and paper - We just need to track TODOs, links and some other bullet points for them. Digital tools are very good at these because it's optimized for them. On the other hand, if a problem demands the flexibility and the visual capacity of the pen and paper, it's a good sign of the sufficiently large intellectual problem space it contains.

d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
Great point here. I recently was fascinated by a new topic and filled two notebooks of 200 pages with my notes written with a fountain pen.

megamix 4y ago

Great write up! I use pen and paper to off load my mind

egypturnash 4y ago

Is Zettelkasten the new Getting Things Done yet? I feel like I'm seeing essays about How I Zettel with the same frequency I used to see essays about How I GTD back when 43folders was pioneering the genre of "productivity influencer". (edit: amusingly enough, I find this near the end: "I also mentioned Zettelkasten many times in this post, but I don’t do that anymore–I just did a 1-month dry run and it felt tiring.")

ubermonkey 4y ago
Yeah, I think it is. I never went all in on GTD, but some principles stuck with me: key is having a trusted system where I can capture things that will then SHOW me those things when I need to see them. I used Omnifocus for a while, but eventually migrated to OrgMode as a better fit for my life (even though I'm not really an emacs person overall).
- euroderf 4y ago
  > a trusted system where I can capture things that will then SHOW me those things when I need to see them. The related principle that sticks with me is, your mind is more for processing/doing things than for simply storing them.
ticviking 4y ago
It seems to me that it is. I find it productive, probably because it helps me collect the various ideas and notes from things I've read into a single place, and is a good mindfulness practice.
vavooom 4y ago
I've come to the limited experience conclusion that Zettelkasten is a great tool if you are doing detailed non-fiction writing, blogging, or research, and plan to for more than a year. Outside of these scenarios its just storing information that you may/ may not ever refer to or recall.
- kstrauser 4y ago
  Nailed it. I've used "Linking Your Thinking" much more successfully for organizing notes in Obsidian when I want to be able to quickly access them. Here's the summary: Make lots of indexes, or "Maps Of Content". An index can point to a other pages, including other MOCs. It can also have its own text. There, that's 95% of it. I have a top-level "Index MOC" page that links to my "Work MOC" (which links to projects I'm working on), "Orders MOC" (that links to a bunch of pages for local restaurants and what my wife likes ordering from them), "Diablo MOC" (because I play a lot of Diablo 3 and keep notes on how to optimize characters), etc. In short, it's a way to turn a mess of pages into a web of links that I can easily click through if I want to.
  - larve 4y ago
    I combine both freely. I have a "wiki" part that's mostly starting pages for individual topics, a structure notes part that are a cross between a draft article and an index page. They're concepts I'm trying to work out. A Zettelkasten part with linked "claims" where I put original thoughts. And tons of free form logs and blog post drafts and topic driven writing. It's all linked together and it's a lot of fun. here's the public part: https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/Public/INDEX https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/Public/INDEX
BeetleB 4y ago
A comment from a few days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32227826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32227826 Basically, over 90% of people invoking Zettelkasten do not know what it is. It's definitely not a tool suitable for most folks.

lancesells 4y ago

If you have a notebook / sketchbook / journal and it needs to be held open with an object look for another notebook [1]. It seems trivial but that is a poorly designed notebook. 1. https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/assets/png/pen-and-paper/blank.jpg https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/assets/png/pen-and-paper/bla...

emadabdulrahim 4y ago
My Midori notebooks lie flat. Not sure what's going on in that picture

lbriner 4y ago

I think OP touches on it but even with a graphics tablet, there is no way I can create simple drawings and sketches on the computer compared to pen and paper. Even a simple box in powerpoint is: 1) Check if you are on the correct ribbon 2) Click the box icon (unless you have millions of shortcuts setup) 3) Drag and drop it 4) Maybe change the defaults which you don't like (colour, thickness etc) 5) If you are typing text in it, that rarely works out well without clicking other buttons On paper: draw box and write text - simples.

galleywest200 4y ago
I am not sure why it needs to be this complicated for a graphics tablet. Open paint software -> use stylus to draw square.

thenoblesquid 4y ago

Even a simple to-do list. Crossing an item off with pen on paper provides a much more satisfying feeling of accomplishment than deleting the task or striking through the text in an app.

mikeholler 4y ago

I started bullet journaling with pen and paper and it has changed my life. Intentionality -- that's exactly right. When I write I feel intentional. I've also dove into the world of nice paper and fountain pens. I've always had hand cramps when writing, whether using a cheap Bic or a Pilot G7. With fountain pens, that's all gone, and writing is effortless. You can get started with this cheaply by getting a platinum preppy fine or extra-fine pen ($4), and a bottle of ink ($10). You want a fine or extra-fine nib, because anything else will feather and bleed on cheap paper, but fine or extra-fine works just fine on cheap paper. Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll rarely need to refill it.

tartoran 4y ago
> Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll rarely need to refill it. Please expand on this. I’m utterly confused as to what you mean and why you’d need it.
- bbonamici 4y ago
  idk op's specifics, but some pens use ink cartridges; by sealing the body of the pen, you can fill it with ink, have way more capacity and you can refill it.
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    Why tho? Sure, there are some converters that are notably, notoriously small (Namiki Vanishing Point converters are infamous for this), but in those cases it's simple to use carts instead. (In the Namiki case, the carts last weeks and weeks.)
    - soogwoog 4y ago
      So you can use different inks other than compatible carts?

galleywest200 4y ago

I love pen and paper. I have chronically sweaty hands so an iPad + stylus + note app works best for me currently, but its the same idea.

melling 4y ago

How about adding “Notation as a Tool for Thought” in some form? https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm Might be a different notation needed depending on the subject.

douglaswlance 4y ago

How do you ingest the data for inspection over time?

jmull 4y ago

Interesting how the tool integrates with the mind. I used to strictly be a pencil and notebook person... to be mentally engaged fully (whether that is thinking, problem solving, planning, recalling, etc.) I had to use pencil and paper. But improvements in text editors, and their convenience, lead to me using them more and more to capture ideas, lists, etc., and one day I realized I had switched. Now I need to use sublime text to be mentally fully engaged. If I could find something better I'd try switching again. Needs top-notch text editing integrated well with something like Apple Pencil. (Apple notes app is subpar when it comes to text, doesn't integrate text and pencil drawing/writing very well, and although I just want basic drawing/writing tools, it doesn't do that very well either.)

criddell 4y ago
On my iPad I use GoodNotes and it's pretty good. I've also tried Notability and it's quite good as well but GoodNotes is what I started with and it's what I'm most efficient in. One of my kids uses OneNote from Microsoft. Their notebook / section / page metaphor seems too fiddly for me although I know some people like it.

nunodonato 4y ago

Would love to read the author's thoughts after using a Supernote for a month

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

chadash 4y ago

in general, I use my computer for taking notes. But I recently started using pencil and paper for designing quick low-fidelity mockups for things that my team is going to implement and it's wildly better than working on the computer for several reasons: - pencil/paper is just so much quicker - if you think it, you can draw it... quickly. It's more flexible. - key advantage: when non-engineers (or even engineers) see higher fidelity mockups, it's very easy to get caught up on some of the details like where a button goes or how big the font is. With pencil/paper, everyone realizes that it's a rough sketch and that the final product isn't going to look this way. After I write things up, I scan them with an app to a PDF file and then email that out (or attach to a ticket). Of course, pen/pencil isn't great for final designs... there's no substitute for a high-fidelity mockup of what somethings is supposed to look like. But I find it very useful to start with the UX and then work on things like CSS last. Some key tools I use: notepad: $5 pencil: $7 (I really splurged here for the pentel Orenz, my favorite mechanical pencil, but a $1-2 pencil will be 95% as good) 6" ruler: $1.76 1/2" binder (I like to keep my drawings): $4 I've thought about investing in a ReMarkable tablet, but I find it hard to justify the cost since pen/pencil work so well.

account-5 4y ago

Pencil, for me a pencil is much better than any pen. Pencil and paper, square paper A4 or A5.

CRConrad 4y ago
> square paper A4 or A5. You mean paper with a grid of squares on it, right? Because all the DIN A-series paper formats are rectangular, not square (as I first misread your meaning).

iancmceachern 4y ago

I started buying custom printed notebooks from the scientific journal companies. For $10 a journal you can get a very niche hard cover journal, with page numbers (if you like), plain, ruled or grid paper, and embossed with your name (or whatever). It's so satisfying. Combine that with a nice fountain pen and ink and it's quite the experience. It's my proffered way to take notes, think through problems.

iammjm 4y ago

Last year i went in the other direction: analog to digital. Onenote is my tool of choice - it's basically a really awesome piece of paper: you can write per hand on your tablet, you can type to text, you can create lists, tables, convert handwriting to text, insert audio, photos, shapes, screenshots, first text, copy text to and from other apps, tag information, hyperlink other pages and notebooks and even pieces of text; you can host in in cloud or locally, the page is unlimited and you can cluster notebooks into sections and notebooks, move and copy pages around and even collaborate with other people in real time. It's on all devices you use, synced. It's everything your notebook is plus so much more. Hands down best room I've ever used.

jxy 4y ago

People thinking pen and paper is simple have intentionally made it simple. Have you considered how many different kinds of paper/notebooks/slides/cards, kinds of pen/pencil/brush? Soon you'll start fiddling with your pens and papers, as some comments here have already started suggesting their personal favorite, including making your custom "eye dropper" pen. Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt, ed note.txt , my previous notes more notes ... my last notes a now just write you new notes down don't worry about anything don't even worry about editing previous lines just write and done . w q And that's it.

JadeNB 4y ago
> People thinking pen and paper is simple have intentionally made it simple. > Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt, <ed session snipped> And that's it. Surely that's also intentionally making a digital interface simple? I mean, both kinds—all kinds—of interfaces can be made simpler or made more complex depending on the user's tastes. That fact itself doesn't, I think, speak to any virtue or lack thereof on the part of any interface paradigm.
ontouchstart 4y ago
cat > note.txt <<EOF … EOF
- CRConrad 4y ago
  cat > note.txt <<EOF cat >> notes.txt <<EOF
  - ontouchstart 4y ago
    Yes. If we also add date >> notes.txt it would be a great immutable ledger .

tunesmith 4y ago

Any favorite pens with LEDs attached so you can write in poor lighting conditions?

foldedcornice 4y ago
I recommend a separate clip-on book light (or clip-on LED light) that is bright, lightweight, and USB-rechargable. If the LED is attached to the pen, the weight (of both the battery and light) will be significant and can tire you out for long writing periods. You would also have a better experience for the light to not move too much while writing, which will happen as you move the pen along the paper.

ubermonkey 4y ago

I do the same thing -- TO START. Initial notes are almost always on paper, in a good notebook, written with a fountain pen. I also almost always have a small notebook and pen on my person. BUT once something becomes a real project I need to track, or if the notes are important enough that I want them searchable later, I transcribe and summarize into the appropriate Orgmode buffer. I retain things written longhand better, but this act of review & summarization is like a turbocharger for that recollection. (Not for nothing, but one old-school study hack I read about back in the 80s was "type up your class notes". It dated from an era before computers, so it wasn't about search or indexing. It was about the act of review inherent in the transcription.)

Cupertino95014 4y ago

Sigh. I really sympathize with this, and I totally think that analog is not dead and will never die. And vinyl records! Despite that, I find that in own writing, I always think I'm going to initiate it on paper, but then I start writing fragments on the computer, thinking about them, revising, etc. etc. I lay it aside & think about it, and then revise some more. In the end, I think it's about as creative as pen-and-paper. I hope. I should try the pen again just to make sure.

foldedcornice 4y ago
I've had similar experiences where I didn't need any paper to plan out and write shorter articles. However, screenwriter Thomas Schnauz provided a great example of how handwriting was useful when writing scripts for Better Call Saul. He posted a photo of a cork board with dozens of pinned index cards with handwritten ideas for scenes. It looks like the cards can then be rearranged or substituted out without losing the past drafts: https://twitter.com/TomSchnauz/status/1296912710601306113/photo/1 https://twitter.com/TomSchnauz/status/1296912710601306113/ph... Handwriting has also been useful for taking notes where diagrams and imagery was important, such as when researching what a good user interface could look like, for a web application. You could give it a try if you decide to write an article that analyzes or incorporates a significant amount of imagery, or has a lot of parts, like a lengthy script, fictional story, or in-depth report.

waspight 4y ago

Anyone using any e-ink tablet tool for taking notes instead of pen and paper? Is there any good solutions there yet?

goerz 4y ago
The Remarkable tablet is pretty good (although I prefer the iPad, except for in direct sunlight)

lr1970 4y ago

iPad Pro (12.9 inch) + iPencil + GoodNotes (with zip-file backup) gives me best of two worlds. I scribble my notes with iPencil in GoodNotes. GoodNotes does OCR and its search functionality is good. It allows for backups in a form of zip archives (cloud backup option also available). Unlike Notability (subscription), GoodNotes app is one-time-fee.

Syzygies 4y ago

I can remember rolling my eyes at a writer using a mechanical typewriter decades after word processors had taken over. Did they thaw out of a glacier? At the same time I love physical media. As a math professor I defend a widespread preference for blackboards over soul-sucking whiteboards, imagining that musicians will still play grand pianos in a century, and they'll still snicker over Ryan Gosling playing a toy piano under the spotlight in that classic movie "La La Land". I've hoarded Hagoromo chalk; I'm the one with the chalk attaché case in [1]. I've always carried multiple grades of drawing paper, and I've worked through many hundreds of artist grade felt tip pens, scanning all my math notes for thirty years. Then, pandemic. Just as World War 2 accelerated women in the workplace, the pandemic has accelerated the uptake of digital tools for visual presentation. To teach over Zoom, we needed to embrace drawing on a tablet. I understand that the pandemic radically accelerated similar trends in architecture. The algorithmic possibilities of drawing on a tablet are truly addictive; returning to paper feels like returning to a mechanical typewriter. For my purposes, Concepts offers the most involving algorithmic experience; I wrote [2] to support my note taking and diagrams for papers. However, Notability offers the least friction. I can have the same psychological relationship to taking notes on my tablet as I had with phyical paper, with the benefits of algorithmic reuse. (Pushing the envelope exposes how inconsistently Notability handles implicit layers, but one learns to draw around this.) In a few decades, after all living mathematicians have drawn on tablets since birth, math will be far more visual, conveying ideas with far more immediacy. Math communication is now still largely constrained by its resemblance to typeset prose. Ever leave a startup because reading your coworkers' code put you in "Just kill me now!" territory? I did. Mathematicians write the equivalent of bad code, rarely actually machine-checked, to formalize their ideas. Other mathematicians try to decipher this code, to reverse-engineer the ideas. We declare people who can actually do this as having a gift for mathematics. As I learn to teach combinatorics more visually, my classes swell with students who share my frustration. I've come to realize this summer that I pretty much despise mathematics. I can't wait for the visual revolution. This revolution didn't take hold on physical paper; one needs a digital accelerant. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8 [2] https://github.com/Syzygies/concepts-artboards https://github.com/Syzygies/concepts-artboards

Archelaos 4y ago

eevilspock 4y ago

I prefer thinking on paper. But I like the compact storage and backup, organizability and most importantly searchability of digital notes. What I really need is a great open source OCR and hand diagram to SVG tool. I hunted to no avail. Anyone got good recs?

user00012-ab 4y ago

I would love to see a site where people posted stuff they have been doing for over a year and it still works for them. Seems like all these blog posts are, "I Started doing this yesterday, and I'm going to do it for the rest of my life... or tomorrow when I blog my next big thing I'm going to do forever." I'm more interested in stuff people have stuck with and actually works for them when the novelty of the medium wears off. I'm not saying pen and paper isn't great, but I'm more interested in the system that evolves if you actually use something over a long period of time.

bsima 4y ago
I have roughly ten years of notebooks in a box under my desk. They are all some kind of “bullet journal” method: date at the top of the page, items below, index in the back.
- tevrede 4y ago
  Do you ever refer back to them?
  - ozzydave 4y ago
    For me, only occasionally, but when I do it’s often a huge help - can save an immense amount of time not re-doing that work. Most of the value is in helping align my thoughts as I go though.
    - bsima 4y ago
      Yeah and sometimes I go back to them just for nostalgia. But truly the archiving doesn't matter all that much. I like the Field Notes tagline: "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now."
ljvmiranda 4y ago
Hi there, author here! Been using pen and paper (for knowledge work) since 2017. Hope that helps

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

Walmart sells wirebound grid paper notebooks for cheap. I love them. I use them as my development notebook.

coldblues 4y ago

For me, what feels like quicksand, is writing on paper. I type very fast on my keyboard 120+ WPM. I want to get my thoughts out of my head as soon as possible, and shape them fast with immediate feedback. My notes are very random and they're all over the place, yet all easily interconnected and searchable because of backlinks and some minimal organization. If I were taking physical notes, I would not have as many notes as I have now, and would be less motivated. The computer is an extension of myself at this point, and it feels more natural than writing on paper. I think the author might have chosen the traditional way of note-taking, because he just doesn't have the patience or the particular obsession to tailor the note-taking system. Which is fair, but it might do him a disservice if he ends up impatient with the system he is building now. There is a reason, after all, that so many people switched to digital. Even if the author prefers the romanticized way of old note-taking, it is undoubtedly inefficient. It's an experience akin to using ${Editor} over Vim.

emadabdulrahim 4y ago
Efficiency is good but not the most important thing when it comes to thinking, idea generation, journaling, etc.
tomtheelder 4y ago
It depends what you're optimizing for. I'm not sure I'd consider volume of notes to be a positive metric. I'm not convinced motivation is either. When I handwrite I absolutely write less. It's harder and slower. But for the types of things I use handwriting for I think that's a plus. I tend to put more thought into what I'm recording. In my personal experience the outcomes are better. I type notes as well, very frequently, but for archival content. Things I want to be able to reference in the future.
CRConrad 4y ago
> I want to get my thoughts out of my head as soon as possible Why, is there something wrong with them? > I think the author might have chosen the traditional way of note-taking, because he just doesn't have the patience or the particular obsession to tailor the note-taking system. Because nothing says "This is naturally the best way for humans to do something" as clearly as it requiring patience or a "particular obsession", right?

Tomte 4y ago

Does anyone have a good video for hand position with fountain pens? My handwriting is bad, because my hand doesn't "hover", it's firmly planted on the table, and I need to lift it and reposition it every few words. All the videos I've seen make it seem so easy, but when I try to emulate those hand positions, my pen's nib doesn't even reach the paper. They glide effortlessly with the smallest two fingers lightly touching the table. I need to lower my hand so three fingers and the wrist are again very much on the table.

egypturnash 4y ago
Here is a trick for learning how to make your hand “hover” that I was taught by the old pros when I joined the animation industry. Take a pencil. A wooden one, not a mechanical one. Sharpen it. Then hold it so that the entire side of the exposed cone of graphite touches the paper, rather than the tip. Your thumb will be on one side of the pencil, with all four fingers in a row on the opposite side, rather than sort of clustered around the front of the pencil. Now try to draw some lines. You will get very broad lines and probably have little control, because this grip forces you to keep your wrist still, and gives you very little room for your fingers to move the pencil either. It will feel very weird and awkward at first! You’ll have to make a bunch of big, broad motions because you’ve probably never tried to make fine motions like this with your arm in your entire life. It’s okay, you’ll get better! A great way to get better: take a piece of paper, and draw a circle in the upper left corner, just barely touching the edges of the paper. Don’t worry about making a nice circle, don’t go over it multiple times, just make one simple sorta-circular gesture. Now move to the right and draw another circle, just touching the first one and the tip of the paper. Repeat for a whole row, then do another row that just touches the bottom of the previous row, until you’ve filled the whole page. Your circles will probably look better by the end of the page. I did this every morning as a warm-up for one of my first animation jobs, and the circles got a lot better, and tighter, over the course of not much time. Once you have learnt this, you can easily transfer this new control of your arm motions to tools held in other grips. I mostly work digitally, and have to address the tablet with the stylus’ tip for it to register, but I still move my arm with the fluidity learnt from this exercise. As a bonus this is also a lot better for your arm. Keeping the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Fairy away is very much a thing grizzled old animators wanted to teach the new kids coming in, they’d seen great careers cut short by injuries. (You could also probably keep holding the pen in a more vertical fashion and use a wrist brace to keep your wrist from moving, if this is all too damn weird for you.)

mt_ 4y ago

This how humans have been taking notes for most of the time. Why did the author thought this would be a noteworthy topic for a blog post?

rasengan0 4y ago

"I remember in my college chemistry classes, we were instructed never to tear off or hide any error we made in our lab notebooks. Instead, we should mark it with a strikethrough. " +1 OMG Chemistry notebooks FTW. I was always a pencil person and when the professor literally made us cross out our mistakes it felt gross to see the wasted space for 'nonsense', so inefficient. Only later I come to realize that all creation is not for naught. Observations made and recorded for the record are invaluable when seen from a different time perspective. If DNA can have built in redundancy, then evolution is revealing a good lesson to replicate for note taking as well. People's time horizons are too short when thinking about so called 'ultimate' note taking/brainstorming/productivity solutions. What system did Grace Hopper use? Feynmann? I can take a trip to Mom's and fetch that chemistry notebook to retrieve that 1980s information. No retro hardware, searching for encryption keys, old floppy disk/zip drive media players, no defunct internet companies to contact about 'my' data, proprietary formats to parse, etc. Open that 40 year old notebook and read it. To be sure, I own the iPads/android tablets, note apps, desktop apps, wikis, cloud services and other digital debris that in the end is/was wasted friction, $$$ and energy. Too many dependencies. I stick with a low-end laptop with plain text on vim and emacs -nox and (mobile) self-made paper notebooks and enjoyable wonderful fountain pens [1] I'm really trying to look back toward memory like the ancients but that is the ultimate practice.[2] Life is too short to conform to digital tools. Enjoy both! There is much forgotten freedom to be rediscovered with the analog hand. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

detaro 4y ago
In chemistry etc the properly-kept lab notebook is also an almost chain of evidence thing, both for scientific (integrity) and commercial (patents and such) reasons. I.e. never erase, only strike-through so previous error is still readable, numbered pages, each section dated and signed, properly kept index, ... all make it a lot harder to falsify things after the fact. (Nowadays there are also digital record-keeping tools that do timestamped signatures and such instead)
- GoodbyeMrChips 4y ago

Snitch-Thursday 4y ago

I was recently reading Steal Like an Artist and one of the sections referenced having an analog desk and a digital desk, the former for ideation and creativity modes, the latter for editing and revising modes, and I found that salient. I love my fountain pens and paper, but for permanence and immediacy reasons. It's really hard to put a file attachment for safe-keeping on your hardcover journal. I love OneNote, but for ease of dumping screenshots, digital ink annotations, file attachments, and generally building up context around a bit of specific information reasons. It's really hard to put your sticker from your family-member's letter on your OneNote notebook. And those are two different tasks, just like the desks example above.

runjake 4y ago

A few gripes about the post: 1. It appears the author hasn’t been doing this long, judging by their Twitter feed. I’m more interested when somebody’s been at something for a year or two. The whole “I’ve switched to $thing and it’s changed everything!” is always fun when it was written soon after the switch. Even funnier when you visit it a few months after and they’re back on the old thing. See also operating system switch posts. 2. “Most” notes systems aren’t using Zettelkasten. Most note takers don’t even know what it is. 3. I take handwritten notes and drawings all the time. Then I scan and OCR them into a PDF with my iPhone that goes into Obsidian via Shortcuts automations. This way it’s searchable and I always have them. I don’t have to remember to carry a handcrafted Midori/Moleskine around everywhere.

tomtheelder 4y ago
I think these are fair gripes. Would love to add my perspective: 1. I've been handwriting notes for about 2 years now, after typing all my notes before that. I generally agree with the author's points. My take on it, which I think they sort of had their own spin on, is that "notes" is an unhelpfully broad category. You record different things for different reasons. A todo is very different from jotting down a novel idea. So I have an Obsidian vault and a notebook. The notebook is for my ephemeral notes. That includes any information whose lifespan is less than ~1 week, so usually quick thoughts about imminent meetings or todos for the next day or so. It also includes any time I'm taking notes strictly for my sake when the information can be referenced later. For example, my own personal thoughts during a meeting that has shared notes. In my opinion handwriting is better for that sort of stuff: I think it focuses you, it slows down your thinking a little, and it makes you more likely to remember what you wrote. Obsidian is for archival notes. Things I may need to reference in the future. That's where I keep any longer running todos/projects, as well as any more detailed/complex info that I might not remember but want to reference in the future. Not infrequently I'll take something I jotted down in my notebook and add it to Obsidian if it seems like it might be useful in the future. I find this split to be very effective for me personally. YMMV! 2. Totally agree. I doubt most people need or benefit from actually getting into Zettelkasten. 3. That seems very reasonable. I think for me personally it would be a bit of a hassle given how rarely I have a need to go back through my written notes. So yeah tl;dr would be: I think handwritten notes are the ideal way to record information that you're not going to need for more than a few days tops, but I'd hate to have to dig through my old notebooks looking for something.

YeBanKo 4y ago

Tangentially related question, maybe someone can explain why graph/quad/grid ruled notepads are harder to find and way more expensive. I can easily get college ruled notepad for $.50-$1 almost in any department store, but graph ruled are significantly more expensive ($4-$5) and less common.

drekipus 4y ago
Market forces. Grid is in less supply because it's not as demanded
- YeBanKo 4y ago
  It could be the opposite, it is not as demanded because it is not as available. If it were, I thunk people might have preferred it more often.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    Some MBA middle manager decided a grid provides more value to buyers, ergo segment the market for el-cheapo notebooks by boosting the price ?

JonChesterfield 4y ago

I wrote code on paper occasionally. Anyone else? Don't see an existing comment about it. Notebook, multicoloured pen, usually C or lisp syntax. Tends to be thinking through data structures. Kills the temptation to check my work by running it which forces me to think harder about the intended execution. edit: used to use whiteboards for the same purpose but sadly don't have one at present

wrp 4y ago
Idea -> diagram -> pseudocode -> code. All on paper. Prefer loose sheets so I can spread them out. Mentally run through it and "printf" to the margins. Concise languages only.
a9h74j 4y ago
I once commented to use one color for code and another for everything else (when learning a programming language). It got more upvotes than I would have expected, so others must be coding on paper as well.
Tcepsa 4y ago
I still do. Generally data structures and flow more than actual code these days, but sometimes I'll also sketch out an API or something by hand. I find it tremendously helpful for cultivating understanding, designing systems, and solving problems!

sleightofmind 4y ago

What a beautiful site. So easy on the eyes. Thanks.

yawnxyz 4y ago

Articles like this worship the act of writing on paper, not the process of iteratively putting down thoughts and shaping them. I use Notion. I also use paper. I tried using "fancy writing equipment" that ended up too nice for me to scribble on. Because any momentary idea is garbage and not worthy of this nice acid-free, leather bound notebook. So no I have a stack of very cheap legal notepads that I just put whatever I want on. Sometimes I'll rip the pages out. Sometimes I'll trash them. Eventually the good ideas take shape, and I'll move them to Notion

noir_lord 4y ago
I do the same, 5mm square a4 and a good biro. For everything else there is markdown.

stereoradonc 4y ago

Another productivity rabbit hole on HN

euroderf 4y ago
How about a browser extension that runs a timer until you're done reading all those links that got opened up from a productivity article ? Elapsed time: "Yikes!"

senegoid 4y ago

I feel people (myself included) are drawn to notetaking/PKM topics because there's a fear that others have unlocked a secret to learning the layperson hasn't yet discovered. In my experience observing my peers, aside from intellectual horsepower, thinking about topics from first principles is the best way to learn. This has nothing to do with Logseq, Obsidian, Zettels, paper, workflows, Literature notes, or any other fad. Don't understand something? Go back a step and understand that. Even better if you have to explain it to someone else. Then see how you structure it into a latticework of knowledge, as Charlie Munger would say.

nonoesp 4y ago

I've noticed I write for longer and with greater focus when writing by hand on the reMarkable 2 tablet. Writing in the reMarkable feels as analog as writing on paper does. I can convert my handwriting into digital text and email it to myself for editing and digital archiving right from the tablet. I've also tried handwriting with ink in Moleskine notebooks and transcribing pages with the Google Translate API, which works surprisingly well. I love the analog method. Yet I want to document my writing digitally for easy retrieval when editing and looking for content to publish. What other methods are people using to digitize, transcribe, and archive "analog" handwriting?