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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News loves their note taking apps. I've seen at least a dozen apps this year that have solved the exact same problem in just about the exact same ways.

Am I the only one that still uses pen and paper? To me, there's a certain je ne sais quoi about closing my laptop and putting my phone away, grabbing a pen and my notebook, and brainstorming without technology.

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I do most note-taking on paper. Problem with paper is that it's not searchable, as I discovered to my cost trying to find some specific reference details for a job I did last year and am repeating today. My problems are probably more due to ad hoc disorganisation - particularly, sometimes going off-piste and making critical notes on random sheets of paper, away from my main notebooks.

I'd love some kind of e-paper solution, in a notebook form, but I've no idea how it could gracefully and capably mimic the act of turning pages and having a chrono-spacial awareness of where the content in each of those pages lie.

In some far future we'll have paper-thin writeable electronic displays and can literally make a notebook to rule them all, but it'll be a while. And even then, likely very expensive.

> Problem with paper is that it's not searchable, as I discovered to my cost trying to find some specific reference details for a job I did last year and am repeating today.

Our brain works wonders, yet mysteriously. I can somehow locate notes I wrote by hand on notebooks years ago. I remember the sketches, the color and size of the notebook, the location on the shelves ... and sometimes, finding the note isn’t important because I have actually memorized it.

It could a visual memory thing, reinforced by 20+ years of pen and paper school system. Were I 20 years younger and having been taught on tablets/xxx, I could have developed a different long term memory system. As of today, writing down notes on my computer feels like offloading my brain to disk. When writing notes of paper/iPad, it feels like writing to my brain.

I definitely agree that our brains work wonders and I'm not denying the main point you're making at all, but there is also an element of confirmation bias inherent here because you'll never look for the notes you don't remember taking. Going over old notebooks I've been astonished at the patterns I've uncovered of thinking about similar ideas and having similar insights over and over, each time not recalling that I've been on the same path at an earlier time.

Oh you are right for sure but it’s a whole different point.

I don’t know how our memory works and I guess our passion / interest plays an important part, as your conscious thoughts revisits those subjects as a routine.

I am just noticing how the multidimensional characteristics of hand written notes seem to provide “more ways” to search and explore our memory. Just like having both a spatial and a full text indices.

I employ a simple version of the bullet journaling method. I maintain an index at the beginning of the book where I add topics and the page numbers that I have information about it on. Still not ctrl-f speed of course, but I am not flipping through my notebook trying to find the right page. For your situation, I'll probably right down the job reference on the page of the day, and then add a `Job References` entry in the index and add the current page number beside it. At the end of each year, I'll digitize everything important for archival purposes (usually very little), and move over ongoing collections (like book list), to the next notebook.

How much space have you found is good for an index?

Not the poster you asked, but I keep one at the end of a notebook for exactly this reason: I don't have to guess how much space it will need.

Okay, this works!

I have thought about this in the past, keeping it all documented on notebooks, but indexing is one part that has made me question how to organize them.

Thank you!

And you write it backwards from the end? Otherwise I don't see how this solves the issue.

Yes? I've also considered doing the index only when the notebook is full, allowing 10 pages or so. Haven't tried it yet.

This sounds sort of like what Remarkable[0] claims to be (not affiliated). I pre-ordered one because I'm very similar with my notes - I have a ton of ad-hoc notes taken on legal pads floating around.

[0] https://remarkable.com/

Request for HN submission: in-depth Remarkable 2 review after months of daily use. Have they got a good data format & transfer story? Does the tech work?

Context: every time Remarkable hits Hacker News I'm intrigued, but I couldn't pull the trigger on a pre-order. I love the idea they're selling.

I too would appreciate such a review. I have a preorder for v2 but no experience with the first version of the device.

The customers at the top of the preorder queue for v2 got their tablets about a month ago[1] so the number of people able to write such a review will be limited for the next month or so.

Worth noting there is open source tooling for modding/ssh access to remarkable tablets[2].

[1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000264587...

[2] https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

Most notes I don't need to look at ever again after they've served their purpose, be it a month or three minutes of use. For the ones that do, I will use my notes to write a digital writeup, usually with more detail and references throughout with the explicit intention of making it comprehensive for when I forget everything in 6 months. I find the process gives me all the benefit of paper and all the benefits of digital, but supercharged because I am recalling from a written note at the same time to synthesize these ideas into a new format.

Has anyone found a good method of taking photos of notebook pages? I used to user Evernote, and even experimented with their proprietary OCR dot paper but it never really stuck because Evernote isn't great (and the searchability of words sucked)

bullet-journal -style numbered pages with an index goes a long way. my digital notes sometimes simply reference a journal # and page #.

> brainstorming without technology.

But what are pen and paper but really old technology? :-) And given they were able to revolutionize human thought, it seems possible that other such wins are out there, waiting for us to find them.

(I do agree with the sentiment that pen/pencil are currently the best we've got along multiple axes, probably with the exception of search.)

And technology that some people were suspicious of in the past. If I recall correctly, Socrates was not strongly in favor of writing. He thought its use would weaken the memory. And there is some evidence people in cultures without writing have much better memories. So no technology is without it downsides.

When I went back to school to get my CS degree, I developed a pretty strict habit of only taking my lecture notes by hand, usually by printing out the lecture slides in advance and then annotating them with a bright turquoise fountain pen ink. Nowadays, for work, I use Org mode. Apart from the convenience of always having it to hand in my editor, being able to insert hyperlinks in my notes to specific lines in our source code is a game changer.

I'm the same, a lot of personal projects have notes on paper.

But I've been keeping a daily work-journal for the past few years, and that has been very handy. I have one org-mode file for each company I've worked in, and each day I insert a new block with headings that make sense "Meetings", "Stories/Tickets/Projects", "Problems", etc.

I make notes of commands, recipes, and tag things literally so get an integrated tag-cloud and this is exceptionally useful when I want to lookup how I did something a few months ago, or more!

Do you mean that you have a tag-cloud in Org? Is there a package for that?

Uploaded a cut-down version of my diary.org file here:

https://github.com/skx/org-worklog

That shows the tag-cloud and the necessary magic to update it on-save.

Thanks, that's a great example of how Org documents can integrate code that provides interactivity. I shared it on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/jj2ok0/skxorgworklog...

I cannot get it to work with M-x new-day, is there something other I need to do than have the document open? Thanks for sharing btw.

You need to evaluate the lisp at the bottom of the file, so that `M-x new-day`, `M-x today` and the other stuff gets loaded.

I've got a bit of code in my init-files that does that automatically, that's linked to in the readme. But as a quick alternative you can scroll down to the end, to the line that starts:

    "(defun new-day"

Select that line, and all the way down to the line that reads "(require 'ob-org)", and then run "M-x eval-region". That will evaluate the region and make the two new commands available.

Otherwise copy and paste the lisp from here into your emacs init file, and reload everything:

https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.md...

That will cause anything named `skx-startblock` to be evaluated automatically from an org-file on-load, and will also run the contents of `skx-saveblock` before saving any org-file, if present.

I saw now that I have to evaluate two lines of code, how do I set up my dot-files so that this happens? I am kinda lost.

Have you tried to combine that with caldav?

I have a table which contains all the distinct tags which have been used within the document, along with a count of how often they've been used. Clicking on the tag-name shows all the places it is used - via org-tags-view.

I guess I call it a tag-cloud, even if it isn't formatted like one would imagine on a web-page.

No package, just a bit of lisp-magic. I'd be happy to share an example if it were useful.

I feel like you are enthusing about a Damascus steel paring knife to an audience that runs a commercial kitchen.

You’re not wrong, it’s just that note management apps are vegetable chopping machines, and we’re desperately in search of a Robot Coupe.

I use multiple media.

Nothing beats the fluidity, ubiquity and the sheer aesthetic quality of pen on paper. Excellent for diagrams and notes as I am discussing something on a call, or explaining things (mostly yo myself) consuming information dense video or audio content.

But I don't always have my notebook on me, and I tend to loose bits of paper easily. So to capture thoughts, I use "email thyself" on my phone.

Every once a few weeks, I clear out my inbox. Most notes go to junk. Some get cross referenced. Fewer still become actual files in my git repo.

My git repo is just a versioned bunch of files with upto 2 levels of hierarchy.

This works amazingly well, for capturing information. no lock-ins, no fear of losing content, frequently gets cleaned up and cross referenced with version history (which I dont mind losing as I have dates in the text files themselves).

What I haven't figured out (yet) is a sustainable way to regularly go back to the content I've collected to keep them rolling through my memory without it being an overwhelming amount of work.

Refreshing things regularly is the best, most effective way to find patterns and make better connections. Haven't broken that code yet.

Something extremely relevant I've been considering pursuing: https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/medium-method

My coworker exclusively uses pen and paper, I don't know how she does it. I keep a little throw-away notepad around for brainstorming / diagramming, but nothing beats a keyboard & mouse for text manipulation.

Cons: Not searchable, not interconnected, following references is very slow

Pros: There seems to be something inherently meaningful (read: brain lights up, it’s got sensory depth and intellectual weight) about doing tactile pen/paper notes since many people report better engagement and higher retention when doing pen/paper (myself included)

I use pen and paper for heavy brainstorming, specially when thinking about abstract concepts. But, at some point, I need to sit at the computer and put those notes in order.

I have never used note taking apps though. I normally just draft some text, prepare some slides, or write some pseudo code if it is a coding problem.

> I've seen at least a dozen apps this year that have solved the exact same problem in just about the exact same ways.

They only solve the problems the same way when viewed from distance. If you look closer, there often is a significant difference in some details which make them fundamental different tools.

> Am I the only one that still uses pen and paper?

I try it from time to time, and then fail over the shortcomings of paper. Additionally, with paper it's hard to manage digital content. Having a unified system for everything, that on top can even be automated is the real endgame of personal data managment.

> and brainstorming without technology.

Brainstorming is something differnt. It generates temporary data which you can throw away after wards. For this of course is paper better or a whiteboard. But you are supposed to clean up the results of the brainstorm-session and make something more lasting out of it, and for this digital media is better on long terms.

I use good old windows notepad and save them on my desktop. I tried almost anything, rocketbook, asana, one note, pen and paper.

Simplest one was notepad and always worked for me.

Yep, visually ̶s̶h̶i̶t̶t̶y undistracting, lightning fast, available everywhere and dead simple. Want hierarchy? Make folders. Want to cut across the hierarchy? Make links. Want to search? Use a search tool. (You can even use grep now in a WSL session.)

> brainstorming without technology

I think there are 2 different use cases:

- note taking as building a knowledge base (ex: 'how to add a route permanently in CentOS') where pen & paper is clearly inferior (not searchable, not available everywhere once it becomes bigger than a notebook)

- brainstorming and here I would argue that the first step is just thinking before writing anything.

Every time a new note app is suggested, I get deja vu here. HN quickly jumps into the alternative apps, pen and paper, longhand and memory retention, image and link insertion, searchability vs marginalia, org-mode, and those who covet the almighty e-ink solution.

Note apps and todo list apps. There are a million ways of thinking about personal information and no chance that we’ve explored the full space (UX, focus, features, integrations) yet.

- I made one around 2007. Perfect for a niche, but there are infinitely many niches.

I use both, because resilience matters more to me than efficiency.

Moleskine Cahier quad-ruled paper journals (with a modified/hybrid bullet-journal approach) ... plus RoamResearch.

Some day I may get around to writing about my system.

I love pen and paper. My arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome, however, do not. I miss writing by hand.

I do, but digital paper, via the Onyx Boox Note 2

I do that too.

And afterwards I scan the page for archival.

paper is a technology

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