5 ms·
Notes on paper (2023)
- philoinvestor 3y agoHands down one of the most important things for high productivity and thinking. I remember a line that said something like. "I don't write on paper, I THINK on paper."
- bayindirh 3y ago> I don't write on paper, I THINK on paper. I do the same and many people don't seem the understand that.
- philoinvestor 3y agoSad how few people actually have a consistent "thinking on paper" discipline.
- voussoir 3y agoHi, this is my article and your post came into my RSS feed. I'm surprised my website has visitors! Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks
- alexpotato 3y agoHow do you store the individual paper over time? e.g. do you have a special binder with clear sleeves etc?
- voussoir 3y agoI actually can't remember that well, but I don't think I used anything special. There might have been a few courses where I just used a paper folder with simple pockets inside, and some courses where I used a three-ring binder with section dividers for the courses. I would set the paper in between the dividers and it would stay there well enough by friction without any help. The total number of pages for each course was never very high because we were on quarters instead of semesters. If there were a lot of pages I'd probably add some sleeves to secure the pages -- but I would be fine with putting several pages in each sleeve rather than one page each. After the course was over I put the pages into 9x12 clasped folders and that's where they piled up until I did this scan. Thanks!
- rambambram 3y agoYou have interesting articles. You might want to set up an RSS feed for your 'writing' page, because I definitely want to keep updated on new posts.
- voussoir 3y agoThanks! Here's the link, it's at the bottom of the article list but I suppose it doesn't stand out well enough. https://voussoir.net/writing/writing.atom https://voussoir.net/writing/writing.atom
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoI can't see it on /writing at all, but Feedbro does pick it up. Putting it in each article would save a little hunting
- voussoir 3y agoThanks for your feedback, I've added it to the footer of each article and made it more distinct on the main page.
- rambambram 3y agoThanks! You can also make it auto-detectable (on the homepage or each page), basically every feedreader can pick that up.
- cloudbonsai 3y agoI'm also a habitual paper-note taker, and found your note pleasant. Good work! Addendum: I maintain a loose leaf binder that documents important ideas/decisions I made during the cource of life. So this habit can be extended to broader domains as well.
- specialist 3y agoYour handwritten notes are more polished than my final rewrites. Setting aside my pen(person?)ship envy, nicely done. I know I should consider scanning my notes too.
- velcrovan 3y agoHandwritten notes can be very useful in the short term. But there is often this impulse to implement some kind of digitization/archival system for them as well. I wonder how many people who have done this have found real value in the digitized notes?
- sph 3y agoDigitized notes are a good idea in theory, in practice most notes are write-only and are never read back ever again. Add the fact that writing a note by hand is proven to be a much better memory aid than storing it in a computer. I suffer from terrible memory retention because of ADHD, so I need to rely to external storage more than most people—yet after obsessing about note taking for a while I reached productivity enlightenment: I really do not need to remember and categorise most of my thoughts and notes. I produce millions of ideas every day, and I have, hopefully, other 50 years ahead of me of potentially interesting thoughts I might feel I want to remember, only to collapse under this ever-increasing weight of nonsense, of things that seemed important one day, and really were not in the grand scheme of things. No, these days I write, seldomly, on a paper notebook. I embrace my terrible memory and use it as a tool, to aggressively cull every extraneous thought du jour. If it's important, it'll come up again. If it's truly important, it'll keep me awake at night. That is the real problem of digital notes: they never fade away. The only things I keep in Org Mode are memories from decades ago I am sure I will want to reminisce about when I am 80. Like my family tree, the list of video games I loved as a kid, the important dates of my life.
- crestfallen 3y agoIn my experience (FWIW) there is value in archiving and preserving notes and other documents. Typically that value is realized when you actually go back to them. That's the hard part. If you can make that a habit, you're off to the races.
- voussoir 3y agoI agree that I will probably never use these notes to go back and actually learn anything. I did this scanning project because I wanted to shred the paper and be rid of it, but I felt I should keep it digitally because it's so cheap and easy to. It seems sad to just discard work, even though the actual knowledge is still contained in the textbooks and, hopefully, my brain. But the doodles are worth more than the lecture notes from a nostalgia perspective.
- kushan2020 3y agoWhat good quality pen do you recommend ?
- twojacobtwo 3y agoHaving gone through a pen collecting phase, i think you need to give some details. 1. A budget. 2. Writing preferences and handedness. 3. Preferred writing surface/media. 4. Body type For 2, that would include: a) tip type - rollerball, ballpoint, fountain, or 'marker'. b) tip size/diameter (essentially contact surface area) e.g. 0.17mm-1.0+mm c) 'ink' type - gel etc. Handedness matters mostly because left handers typically want the fastest drying ink. Writing surface (paper) is important because it can drastically change how a pen writes (especially for fountain pens). The body type might include approx. thickness (compared to an average pencil maybe), body material (metal, plastic, wood), contoured grip (yes/no, material?), and retractability. If you don't know any of those, I would say just try to define what quality would mean to you.
- a_e_k 3y ago> retractability As someone who always carries a pen in my pocket when I leave the house, I've come to find this one surprisingly important. Retractable pens have a habit of accidentally engaging and scribbling over the pocket fabric. I exclusively use capped pens for my daily carries now. > left handers typically want the fastest drying ink. Heck yes!
- ryba1967 3y agoTry going through this list to see if anything clicks with you
- ryba1967 3y agohttps://www.penaddict.com/top-5-pens https://www.penaddict.com/top-5-pens
- voussoir 3y agoMy favorite pen is the Uniball Vision Micro. Not the "Elite" model, but the base model sometimes called the "Eye" in some regions. I've been using these for maybe 14 years? And I've got three dozen more in my desk cause you never know when something you like is gonna get discontinued.
- dailyplanet 3y agoWhat scanner and scanning method did you use?
- voussoir 3y agoThey're big Ricoh brand scanners at my workplace and I used the top document feeder which was able to handle big stacks at once. 600 DPI, 1-bit tiff. We have a scanner at home but it's only got a glass bed, that's why I hadn't gotten around to doing this for so long.
- abdullahkhalids 3y agoI had a scanner at my work before, but its feeder always got stuck on input paper. The slightest crease would set it off. I really stopped using it.
- stettberger 3y agoYou would not believe it, but I just created (this week) a Latex TikZ library that helps me to create templates / journal inserts for the use case of handwritten notes. Although I believe in DIN A5 paper, it might be useful for someone: https://github.com/stettberger/notebook https://github.com/stettberger/notebook
- cratermoon 3y agoHow can I get the columns at the bottom, above the page number? Is that possible?
- stettberger 3y agoSure that is directly possible without further tinkering: \notebookpage{todo={[bottom,draw]3},fill dotted,paginate} This will create a dotted page with 3x2 todo notes at the bottom. The todo fields are surrounded by a box (draw), and the page is paginated.
- cratermoon 3y agoPerfect! Thank you.
- dragontamer 3y agoI disagree with almost everything on this list. But that's what makes note taking a personal experience I guess. 1. Buy an automatic counting machine. https://www.amazon.com/Cosco-Automatic-Numbering-6-Digits-026138/dp/B0058TWCQ8/ https://www.amazon.com/Cosco-Automatic-Numbering-6-Digits-02... 2. Number your pages. Number your cross references. Date as it makes sense but always have a primary key (aka page number) to reference any page in your notes. 3. Never use loose paper by themselves. They get lost everywhere and are hard to track. Always have a binding strategy, even the simplest staple combines 10 sheets of paper into logical organization. 4. Prefer 2-hole punch, 2-hole bindings (https://wwwsqp8.officedepot.com/a/products/640746/ACCO-Premium-Prong-Fastener-for-Standard/ https://wwwsqp8.officedepot.com/a/products/640746/ACCO-Premi...) for large documents. Use https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/543712/Office-Depot-Brand-Manila-Fastener-Folders/ https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/543712/Office-Depot-B... for smaller amounts of notes of loose leaf paper. 5. Prefer cheap 70-sheet notebooks. Spend a few minutes with automatic counting machine to label every page: page1 on the front, and implicitly page 1.5 on the back. Only label the fronts of any notebook. Rarely use the back sheet as additional room, but prefer to use new pages. 6. Use notebooks like the FAT filesystem. Write linked lists of subjects. Ex: one set of running notes could be page 4, page 7, page 9, 9.5, 20. Keep the first two sheets (1, 1.5, 2, and 2.5) as reserved for your table of contents / page numbers of your 'files'. 7. Learn the art of rewriting notes. Delete old notes and rewrite them into better organization as you work forward. Anything worth writing is likely worth rewriting. 8. Write so much that most of your writing is trash. That's okay, simply skip the trash during your rewriting passes. You won't know what is or isn't trash until 6 months from now anyway so write everything down. 9. I prefer pencil. But a nice Pentel Kerry. Keep a pocket notebook and the pencil always with you. Rewrite notes from pocket notebook as per earlier rules. 10. Shop at Jetpens.com. or maybe not, you might buy too many things lol. I do admit that impulse buying a 70-page notebook from grocery stores / Walmart / pharmacies is highly important to me. Knowing how to work with a 70-page wire notebook is important if only because they're EVERYWHERE and dirt cheap. Your more permanent notes deserve a more expensive journal (bonus points if they are already prenumbered like LEUCHTTURM1917)
- crq-yml 3y agoI too have my own preferences. What I've figured out about myself is that I like to flip between "practice" materials and "archival". Practice notes are more like your preferences: 70-pager subject notebooks, pencil or ballpoint, clips and manila folders. Those are better for drawing in, because they are thin enough and transparent enough to trace through, and therefore you can refine a doodle into a more developed illustration without leaving the notebook. To go smaller, index cards are very portable and stay rigid enough to work outdoors on improvised surfaces. Those are what I like when I want to build up quick reference. The "archival" materials are art projects: if you've really developed an idea, make it beautiful. This can be 80% tracing off the practice notes through a graphite transfer. Or it can go straight to digital/typed. I don't aim for linked systems of notes at all. What I've found is that either I copy it all into the one place I need, or I don't need it. The copying is the important part. Once that's done, it's been "loaded" in my head as well, and I can move on.
- cladopa 3y agoI find "one color" notes extremely boring. My mind can't stand it for long. everything looks the same and my mind switches off fast. I use at least 10 different colours (randomly)changing colours per each paragraph or drawing, adding a unique and natural texture to every page so I can recognise them at a glance later. I use 10 Staedtler 432 color pens. This way I can use the two sides of the sheet. If I use markers like the stabilo point 88 instead of only doing one side I would buy more dense sheets of paper like 100 grams per square meter or even 120 instead of using 80g/sqr meter. Automatic feeder scanners like the Fujitsu Snapscan are one of the best investments I ever did. No need for one bit at all and you can even scan books cutting the pages. You can scan at least at 600p full color and at 1200 in black and white.
- voussoir 3y agoThanks for the comment! I like black for myself but I bet your notes look beautiful. I agree with buying heavier paper. I recently bought some 100gsm paper for my notetaking at work, whereas I was previously stealing whatever they had in their printers. It makes a big difference in the enjoyment of writing, and now that I'm printing my own graph pattern on top of it I feel very liberated to use good paper stock. The graph paper I bought throughout school was never my favorite stuff.
- bayindirh 3y agoI prefer to change color per note generally. My daily driver is an A5 notebook, which I divide to two columns for dense note taking. I carry a couple of fountain pens, and change colors per note. Allows me to visually divide notes at great speed. My notebooks are generally are 70gsm, but high quality paper which can withstand wet fountain pens. For serious notes I have cellulose reactive or pigment inks which can't be removed from page without destroying it.
- sevensor 3y agoI have a similar setup, including the A5 notebook and fountain pens. I alternated colors for a while, but lately I've taken to using a stub nib with flamboyant ink to make a header for each note (meeting / subject plus date), and a big piston-filler with an extra fine nib and a more sober ink for the actual contents. I'm far too lazy to keep a table of contents, so this makes it easy to leaf through and find what I'm looking for. Plus I rarely have to stop and fill pens.
- hyperliner 3y ago[dead]
- thegrizzlyking 3y agoRocketbook is a good alternative. https://getrocketbook.com/ https://getrocketbook.com/
- humanfromearth9 3y agoThe front page says to use Pilot Frixion pens. Aren't these toxic (to high levels of lead, iirc)? Are there any other pen types one could use with these notebooks?
- michaelanckaert 3y ago35$ for a notebook? I got nice notebooks for $5 each at some discount store. To each his own but sometimes the product is _not_ worth the price.
- bbor 3y agoBeautiful notes, well done. I’ve just discovered the utility of a notebook and pen for SWE being a long-time heavy user of markdown typed notes. Your arguments in favor of loose leaf paper are quite convincing, though the finality of a notebook can be nice for brainstorming purposes. Now we just need to setup an over-shoulder camera or two, some autonomous LLM interpreters built for ubiquitous (aka not distracting) feedback, maybe a small laser projector, baby you’ve got a stew going…
- Greamy 3y agoI always liked the idea of taking notes on paper, but honestly, after uni, I kind of stopped taking them in that format for personal notes as I felt like I never found whatever I needed when I needed it. In the end, a mix of digitally hadwritten notes in Nebo, and logseq seemed to work best for me.
- lannisterstark 3y ago>Use quality pens that produce deep black lines, not cheap pens that produce off-black or hollow lines. Eh, nah. Nothing wrong with off-blacks. Gray colors as well as other colors are fantastic when written with a fountain pen, even muted ones.
- gtroja 3y agoI like using A3 (folded as 2 a4 sheets) foolscap paper, plain white not ruled. They're usually light (56gr/m2) so they're pretty transparent, making convinient to use graph paper under them as line guides. To assemble them I use a manilla folder for 3 staples (couldn't find the exact name but its like [0]) and 3 binders; In the end they're like this: https://twitter.com/gtroja_/status/1489717293508665349 https://twitter.com/gtroja_/status/1489717293508665349 [0] https://www.kalunga.com.br/prod/pasta-280g-kraft-pardo-225x315-3-grampos-spiral-pt-5-un/584796 https://www.kalunga.com.br/prod/pasta-280g-kraft-pardo-225x3...
- sevensor 3y agoWhen I was in semiconductor manufacturing, I kept a set of notes in LaTeX, with a different chapter for each process layer. I'd print these out and annotate in the margins. Whenever the margins filled up, I would transcribe my marginalia and print a new version. This strategy works best when you're in-office and somebody else is paying for paper and toner. It's not effective in the context I'm in, but it worked great at the time.