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Comment by carlivar | Hacker News Reader

Why I carry a paper notebook

Battery life - infinite

Handwriting recognition - I can recognize my own handwriting.

Document centric workflow - The document is definitely front and center.

Share Everything - in the paper notebook, everything is shareable, and shared in the same way. Either take a picture of the pages, type them in somewhere else (and edit while you do so), or make a photocopy. Optical Character Recognition may be possible but would arguably be adding unnecessary complexity.

Expandability - either purchase more notebooks, or use the 3-Ring Binder (tm) model to expand the capacity of your existing device.

Community - the paper notebook is no wonder device. The spiral notebook was patented in 1935 and has a large community of nearly all of western civilization.

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Cheap shots.

Speaking as a huge fan of the Newton MP 2000 (which I kept using for years after the Newton was cancelled):

1) You can search your meeting notes. I had four or five years of meeting notes that could be instantly (well, by late 90s standards of "instantly") searched.

2) You could point it at any IRDA printer and just print stuff. (I was astonished by this when I discovered it worked, because the first IRDA printer I got was made long after the Newton was cancelled.)

In contrast to this, most of my paper notes (and I've gone back to paper) end up being lost, and those that aren't lost are horribly disorganized. Generally, the half life of paper notes -- for me -- is perhaps a month.

> most of my paper notes (and I've gone back to paper) end up being lost, and those that aren't lost are horribly disorganized

I agree that this happens, but it is your own decision. Until the 20th century, scientists had to maintain notes of everything they did in notebooks. They kept them organized and accessible, despite having to use handwritten notes.

Ah yes, every scientist has beautifully organized paper notes. Of course.

Why use word processors? Quill and ink has served us for generations.

Not so cheap shots then!

Countering the usefulness of free text search of one's notes with "you can do it manually" doesn't even rise to the level of a cheap shot -- it's ridiculous. Which is my point.

>>You can search your meeting notes.

I never face this issue, very simply because after you use a real notebook for a while, you learn to organize information. Indexing information by date, topic etc is common for seasoned notebook users.

> In contrast to this, most of my paper notes (and I've gone back to paper) end up being lost, and those that aren't lost are horribly disorganized.

Conversely, I've had lots of PDAs through the years, and any notes I took on them were lost long ago.

You forgot security & encryption - noone else can read your handwriting.

SHA - secure handwriting algorithm

Pitman shorthand! Haha.

:) Actually Ford Shorthand was made in part for this purpose (loose obfuscation) and is much easier to learn since you can write out full words instead of learning abbreviations.

http://www.fordshorthand.com/

Ha, my handwriting is definitely security through obscurity

Downsides:

Search - How do you grep or Ctrl-F your notebook to find out that one command you ran three weeks ago to fix your dev environment?

Copy/Paste - If I ask you for a copy of your notes, you have to retype it out. I can yank and paste into my e-mail client.

In addition, I have to quibble with expandability. Yes, I can buy additional notebooks, but I have finite desk and drawer space. Moreover, the cost of searching increases nonlinearly as the number of notebooks increases. Meanwile, grep runs approximately as quickly on 1kb of notes as it does on 100kb of notes.

I use Org for my lesson notes, and all other notes, but I always capture with pen and paper. It's way more straightforward and there are no distractions and no limitations, I can write, draw, etc. Then I type them, after the fact, into the relevant org file, so that I can edit and share more easily. So, I capture on paper, and store and manipulate on the computer.

That's a good strategy, but as a programmer, I'm at the computer 90% of the time anyway. It's much easier for me to have another vim window open or whatever than it is for me to have a physical notebook sitting alongside my keyboard.

I concur, though note that I am talking about taking notes during an activity like a lecture or a meeting. While on the computer I'd never bother myself writing stuff on paper.

>Handwriting recognition - I can recognize my own handwriting.

I can't do that

Ultimate security then - neither you nor others can read your handwriting!

This defeats rubber hoses.

Ugh. Why do some techies feel the need to show off their bigger/better "tool"?

There is almost never one tool to use in every situation. Fluidity is key: Use the right tool for the job. Solo and need to take quick notes you can search on? Newton. Love a keyboard? PC/Mac w/ Evernote or OneNote. Want to stand up in front of a bunch of people and show them an idea in real-time? A white board.

I personally have a notebook I write in when taking notes on a computer would be just plain rude (in front of prospects and clients) and at other times, I organize my thoughts in Workflowy. Some of my meeting notes go directly into our CRM. The right tool, for the right job, at the right time.

Totally agree. Some people think low tech works for them, some like high tech....

At the end of the day it's whatever works for that particular person at a particular time. I wouldn't say that people shouldn't try different things for a week just to see how it works, because you don't know what you don't know, and don't know you don't know it until you see a blog post like this, but there is no one-size-fits all solution to transferring info from your brain to a medium.

Wacom has a digitizing pen that looks cool, a good trade off it looks like; but I'm with you, you'll have to pry my moleskin from me before I lug around some crap. Now if that moleskin just happened to be digital...

Don't you have a nagging thought that you could buy a decent tablet for the cost of 8 Moleskines?

If you can find a "decent" tablet for $120, I'd like a link. The cheapest decent tablet I know of is the nvidia shield, which runs $199.

Why do people like those things so much, anyway?

Searching through it isn't the best, but at least the ergonomics of flipping through pages is way more comfortable than waiting to scroll through an ebook.

Searching a notebook is not an issue, as it may be accelerated using physical hashtags... "bookmarks", if you will.

Hmmm... I fear the bookmark-based search index is far from scalable and limited to ~10 terms. Compare this to the prospect of having every word indexed, and you'll have to agree that the digital version if far superior if reasonably fast searching is one of your requirements.

> Handwriting recognition - I can recognize my own handwriting.

This feature doesn't work for me so often...

Not only that, but the shape of my own handwriting conveys to me the emotional state I was in when I wrote the note. I know whether I was in a hurry, stressed, relaxing, or whether I had nothing to do and was daydreaming. This distracts me from actually reading the contents of my notes. Sometimes it stresses me to read notes I wrote in a hurry.

You know the best thing about a paper notebook is that it is compatible with every human being in the world (at least it has the potential to be). Just look at the note and you can understand it pretty much straight away. Not need for some tool to parse it into human readable format.

Assuming you're not dealing with a language barrier.

if you draw a house or a car or a map, I think you'll not find many people that won't understand those items.

;-)

> every human being in the world

It's not compatible with blind people or people who don't speak the language of the notebook.

One of the wonderful things that computers have done is to vastly improve the ability of people with disabilities and speakers of any language to access vastly more information than they could before.

You clearly don't think photographs of handwriting are a very good method for sharing or you would have submitted your post as one.

Good luck fitting a dozen three ring binders into a single pocket.

Something in the water? Why does everybody think that one can not transfer from notebook to the computer, or have to carry all their corpus of notes with them? Paper is easier to use when listening to a lecturer, or drawing some spontaneous idea.

Photographs of handwriting are good enough, millions of students use such method. It is so good that even Google Books uses it, no?

I've taken plenty of paper notes, but I would never scan handwritten text into a computer and call that good.

Sometimes a canvas is better than text, and sometimes text is better than a canvas. Paper is cheap, but it's not inherently better at these tasks. A computer can much more effectively organize your notes while being as compact as the situation calls for.

IMO photographs of handwriting don't get you anything other than not having to carry multiple old notebooks around. If you want to make handwritten notes more useful than they are on paper, you will have to type them in (which is what I do).

I actually do carry a paper notebook.

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