Paper Notes (2019)

This is great! I totally agree with the concept of just taking notes in sequence. Notes are a record of moments in your life. The act of taking notes quickly, without distraction, and moving on, is so important.

Organizing notes in any other way besides just a sequence (especially heirarchical folders, which is how most apps organize) gets cumbersome.

It becomes a combination of analysis paralyasis (which category best fits this note I'm about to take? What if it fits into multiple categories? Too bad, it can only live in one folder) and a quagmire of trying to keep the data organized and findable in the future.

It's a lot easier to just keep a log of every note and then add just enough tagging that you can find it later when you need it.

I was fed up with all the other note apps out there, and created one that accomplishes all the goals I have personally always wanted. Those goals are - make note creation front and center, work natively on every major platform, sync instantly to all my devices, and have a very powerful filtering and full-text search engine for retrieval.

Please sign up if you are interested, it is currently in alpha. https://notebrook.app (ALPHA2020) gets you started in the browser right away. Create an account and sync your notes anywhere (native apps on every platform will be available soon).

Hit us up at hello@notebrook.com to sign up for the mailing list to get more information on future releases!

I have a stack of about 30 Moleskine notebooks I've gone through over the past 10 years. I mostly work at the computer, so I keep the notebook open in front of me while I work and I usually wind up creating a checklist each day of what I intend to do, then use the pages to draw out ideas or sketch thoughts. Sometimes I find myself writing something to try to remember it. I try to look at the previous day for continuity but otherwise rarely need to look back. I also use it for meeting notes.

I put a unique sticker on the front of each one so I can sort of associate the time / topics with the notebook. Otherwise they all look identical.

It's not really that organized, but it helps me keep focused on tasks each day and sketch out ideas.

I agree with the spirit of this post but I’ve found large page-count and portable notebooks that work fine for me. Hobonichi makes nice ones, so does Midori. I always do a few things:

1) number the pages and date the entries. 2) Place an index at the beginning of the notebook that I fill out as I go. This way I can flip to the index and find the pages where I wrote about a thing. 3) The Bullet Journal concept of moving incomplete tasks forward into collections has really helped me.

I go through about one unlined pocket-sized Moleskine per year. Portability trumps all else. I agree that append-only is the way to go; I put a table of contents at the end of each notebook and a header line with the date at the top of each page. (I use the dates rather than page numbers in the table of contents.) I've been doing this since about 2005. Everything goes into the same notebook: notes on "virtual virtual memory" (2020-01-28), notes on foreign exchange rates here in Argentina (2020-01-28), notes on prices of laptops in the store (2020-01-28), a list of things to fix (toilet, clothing, remote control) (2020-01-30), designs for flexural dial indicators (2020-02-01), an explanation of Cantor's diagonalization proof (2020-02-06), thoughts on multitouch UX design (202-02-06), etc. I don't write anything private in the notebook, so I can show it to people. (For the same reason, I write it in Spanish instead of English.)

In order to have space for later commentary, I initially write the notes only on the right-hand pages — the left-hand pages stay blank, then get more stuff added to them later, which may be references to other notes I added later, extensions of the idea, or sometimes just random notes that don't seem to deserve their own note.

I initially wrote in rollerball, but I have the notebook with me all day every day; after a few unfortunate incidents with rain and spilled drinks, I switched to only waterproof markings. I'm using an 0.3mm mechanical pencil, which is my favorite, but I use plain ballpoint pens when that's all that's available. Their ink is oil-based, so it resists water, though not dry alcohol or grease. I can write much smaller with the pencil, so the notebook lasts longer.

I did try using a local brand here in Argentina that apes the Moleskine, called BRÜGGE. I greatly regret it. The cover came unstuck from the notebook after less than a year — apparently the shitheads used a pressure-sensitive adhesive like the one in Scotch Tape rather than traditional bookbinding adhesives like wheat paste or hide glue. A few years later, my girlfriend admired the BRÜGGE notebooks in a store; I warned her, but she wanted one. The same thing happened to her, so it wasn't just a temporary quality mixup — the company is really targeting that abysmal level of quality! Unfortunately BRÜGGE is displacing Moleskine from more and more stationery shops here. (I got mine from Librería Artística Catalinas for US$16; I think they have relocated now to Córdoba 746, Capital Federal. That's also where I got the mechanical pencil, although they didn't have any leads harder than HB.)

Lately I haven't been keeping my address book in the notebook, but when I did, I used a hash table with separate chaining; I numbered the lines in the address-book section, and had a "successor" column. At the beginning of the address book was the hash table itself, a matrix whose rows are groups of first letters (of the person's name) and whose columns are groups of third letters; so "María" whoever would end up in row LM, column QR. If she was the first person in that cell, I'd just write the line number there, but if not, I would add her as a successor at the end of the chain. Difficult to explain (especially to non-programmers) but easy to update and search. Insertion is not worst-case constant time because you can't insert at the beginning of the chain — the paper is WORM rather than strictly read/write.

Here's a sample page, in Spanish, photographed at 5 megapixels: https://is.gd/nbshot

Notes on my computerized notetaking practices are at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23388381

I still take most of my notes in Google Keep. I can type faster than I can write. My notes are always on the cloud, searchable and editable from any device.

I also created Markdown Notes a few years ago, but haven't used it much after university.

I still use paper for disorganised thoughts, doodles and short-lived notes, but digital notes are hard to beat for everything else.

I take notes serially on those $.79 spiral notebooks from the drugstore. When full, I scan them, and toss them.

The author notes an improvement in convenience going from Moleskine to Field Notes. I found it even better to use A7 size notebooks (from Japan). They are a bit cramped to write in, but fit better in a shirt pocket.

I don't really like small notebooks, I've been using artist sketchbooks recently which have worked out pretty well. When I'm done with them, I slice through it and scan the sheets

Writing notes is nice, but typing on a laptop is too convenient with all the editing tools. Great for class and meetings, but for project notes and other things where I will actually have to reference the material pretty repeatedly, can't beat rewriting your notes into a running text file and grep.

Looks about 80% of the way to a zettelkasten.

Paper notes...the ultimate way of not being hacked. Different set of risks, of course, but it's a certain sense of security if you know what I mean.