Ask HN: How to take digital notes? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to take digital notes?

1 pointinteratx4 comments

I am at that stage of my career where I'm constantly in meetings or holding discussions. I need to get better at taking digital notes but cannot find a good resource that's easy to ramp-up on. I find it hard to concentrate and type at the same time. Here are the situations that are particularly difficult for me :

* Doing a one-on-one with someone

* Summarizing a meeting / discussion that I am leading

* Notes around new things I discovered online or offline (through hallway conversations)

* Anything that was given to me in paper form few mins before the meeting

Some annoyances:

* Not all software is approved for usage

* Anything with online sync (outside of the company) is a no-go

* Paper-based notes aren't searchable (esp if you're looking back few years)

* Currently on a simple `.txt` file setup that I brain-dump once a day for 15 mins

I've spent years trying different things. From those e-pens with little scanners in the head that scan what you write on the special grid paper (what the were those called?), to tablets, to scanning paper notes, to txt files. Any half-baked idea that came out, I tried it.

I've settled in microsoft onenote. You can organize things nicely. You can take pics of paper docs with phone scanner software and import them as PDFs and onenote will OCR them. I sync between all my devices, but I believe you don't have to do that. And it's free and works nicely on the mac. (also tried evernote - hated it)

If I'm running a meeting, I leave the voice dictation thing open and let it try to transcribe what I say. it's crude, but it captures things that I would forget. (fn key twice on the mac, dunno on other os'es)

I think voice dictation talks to the microsoft home (and has been disabled for my company's one note). At this point my salary is just enough to compensate for a surface pro or surface book to take notes. I think one note + surface pro + surface pen might not be a bad option.

How about an internally hosted copy of "paperwork"? https://cloudron.io/store/rocks.paperwork.cloudronapp.html

https://github.com/twostairs/paperwork/tree/2

The second link doesn't work but I was able to visit https://github.com/twostairs/paperwork. Looks interesting, definitely will give it a try. Thanks!

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