My Notebook System
ratfactor.com
ratfactor.com
I now keep notebooks for technical purposes. A note will typically take a page or two. I have a contents page, too, where I list the headings of each page. Contents pages are useful where you have structured information, like in a book. I haven't found them particularly useful in a notebook format, as topics jump around, so you have little idea as to where to look in a table of contents. I do keep an index, though. I'm finding this increasingly important. One twist I've begun adding is to write discursive posts on Wordpress. The notebook contains crucial summarising information, and dates to a blog post where some of the nuances are fleshed out.
There's also value in the more "emotional" aspect of notetaking: basically a diary. I remember that I used to keep a dream diary. Looking back, I realised just how violent my dreams were! They are also fun to look back on, and you can gain insights into your own personality through the broader sweep of time, rather than up close and personal. It can actually be quite interesting.
Less useful, though, is logging the time you brush your teeth.
On the more flippant side ... when I was at university I used to mark on the calendar whenever I took a dump. Being a student, I of course lived in none-too-salubrious circumstances. So I used to like to see if I could stretch things out a little, as it were. Brings a whole new meaning to keeping a log book. Oh, the foibles of human nature.
You should probably forget that I said that.
It was surprisingly informative! On average once a day, sometimes skip a day, sometimes twice on weekends. Almost never more than three times in the same day, unless I was purposely trying for a PB.
But having made these notes, and gained the benefit of actually taking the note, do you ever reference them again? Using digital note-taking systems means that notes can be cross-referenced, searched, and used again in the future. These are additional potential benefits beyond the initial act of bringing it to the surface.
Do you ever refer to the notes again?
I ask this because I take notes, although not as comprehensively, and I'm intending to ramp up my efforts. But I'm converging to a system where I don't just take the notes, but have them migrate into a system where I can find them again, where I can pull them out and synthesise articles, papers, and other forms of output, so I'm interested to know about your context, and how you use your notebooks, beyond the initial creation.
1. Running todo list or quick combo-list of todo's for a specific project.
This is basically throw-away but has some historical interest in that it can be fun to flip back to todo list pages and see what a previous week looked like, in general. There is also interesting signal in the notes itself ... for instance, the more stressed I am, the large and more illegible my handwriting grows.
2. Notes taken on paper from a meeting or class or lesson.
These are often taken on paper for a specific reason (for one thing, when I talk to clients in person, I hate to have a laptop in front of me, even though I could type much quicker than I can write.) These notes I will generally photograph with my smartphone and upload directly to an online note taking system (Evernote has gotten a lot better again recently). I find that Evernote and presumably several other note taking systems are actually pretty good at basic OCR / I can generally search text that is written legibly on these notes. If I add some basic tags or other information to the note after it is uploaded, this pretty much fulfills my needs to be able to interact with the note digitally after the fact.
I know the orthodoxy of ZK states you shouldn’t write something until you have sufficient notes to do so, and some will even go so far as to say you shouldn’t research a specific topic, but having a purpose for my note taking actually makes me stick to it.
$ wc -w wiki/ratf/src/notes.adoc
The "wrap-ups" (the distillation process from daily -> weekly -> monthly -> yearly) is of potentially enormous value and are a direct result of the daily logging. I stand by that.
It's hard to put a value on the notes as a capture system because it's difficult to know what I might have lost without it. I do know that if I don't write down great ideas, they're often lost forever, "Dangit, I had a clever little solution to Fermat's Last Theorem in the shower yesterday, but now I've forgotten it!" I am convinced that capturing them has increased my total idea retention.
Plenty of technical ideas I've jotted down also make it into my wiki and/or website, and those things are potentially referenced many, many times. I have absolutely searched for and found things in the digital daily logs. But as I say in the article, searching is really hard because I remember the "wrong" keywords later.
As you say: "the act of taking the note is of value" and I guess an additional benefit I'm just now thinking of are all of the ideas I have NOT acted upon. By writing them down, I feel more confident I won't forget them. Which means I'm more comfortable about not acting on them "Right now before I forget!" Which means when I see the note again (even just when transcribing the next morning), I've had time to cool off and make a better decision about pursing that thing. (ALL ideas are written down, and 99% of them get transcribed even if I have no intention of pursuing them.) I'll add this to the article.
Finally, once I stopped logging brushing my teeth and that sort of thing, the effort-to-value went way up. :-)
I take notes as I work, and if I write something down that I refer to often or modify and build on, it'll probably get migrated-and-refined to a later page so I can continue to reference it there.
If it continues to be useful beyond that and outside of its original context, it gets moved into my digital, searchable notes. Which is more like a personal snippet library/documentation thing than notes.
But anyway yes I reference them, but absolutely not in the way you would reference something that came up in a text search, and I don't go looking for them in a comparable way or expect them to behave like that. It's a different system with different uses I have a car but I still ride my bike most places you know?
Or just linking them into big trees of cards like a wiki.
There are time when I search for information only to realize that they are already in my notes already.
I rarely refer to previous notes (digital or paper) even as a researcher.
Looking at these notebooks, I'm amazed and appreciate the self-discipline that the author has exercised.
But a question one should always ask: what could I have done with all that time if I hadn't put it in taking notes? (Write a whole novel?) That's the dreaded question of _opportunity cost_. You can spend your time only once!
EDIT: I also strongly agree with the utility of paper note-taking as frictionless system and with the author's choice of pen & ISO based date/time formats.
Other than that I just note all to-do's with checkboxes and write short notes, sometimes I work out a project idea into a larger plan. I number the to-do's to see if that becomes useful some day, and to force me to consider how old some of them are.
On Mondays I review the last week and the first Monday of the month I do a thorough review of the last, deciding if each unchecked item is still relevant and moving the ones that are over to this month.
But the first point is the most important.
I don't give much on the whole self optimization spiel. But I took the parts from Bullet Journal that worked for me. And added my own parts through trial and error.
Nowadays I do task management with pen and paper as I can only agree with the quote above. I have yet to find something faster or with less friction.
Some of the tasks reference other sections of my bullet journaling, like to do items, time logs, journaling, and daily praise.
I tried using a bunch of different apps on my phone. Square peg, round hole. And toting around a physical journal is a helpful nudge to stick with the program.
YMMV.
I personally use markdown pretty exclusively for my notes, but I do find myself needing to open up my laptop for that. If I'm not around one, I'll jot something down either on paper or on my phone, but I still need to manually copy it over to my git-backed markdown on laptop. I'd love to avoid that manual step if possible.
It's kinda rambling, but scroll down to the middle for the list of apps I've settled kni
But noting done some small idea/to do while I am talking to a client is still quicker on paper in my notebook that always lies open next to me.
So what?
- scan paper notes... still don’t have it searchable. Plus notebooks are not that easy to scan
- pay someone to transcribe it: probably not cheap, plus privacy issues
- something like remarkable: quite a lot more expensive than pen and paper
Anyone have any suggestions on this front?
Some notes you can take while you're sitting at a machine. You can probably type as fast as you can write, possibly faster, so typed notes can go straight into whatever system[0] you use.
Other notes occur when you're walking, or eating, or meditating, or exercising. For those I have two processes. One is simply use the "Notepad" app on my Android phone, hit the microphone, and dictate directly. The other is to write it on paper and mark it as "unfiled". These are unrefined notes. Later I revisit them and convert them into the first type of note, and, as above, insert them into my system, then mark them as "filed" (or just delete them).
But how do you insert them into your system? For some people it's just a case of recording them in a searchable repository, and there they leave them until such a time as they perform the right search.
However ...
In my opinion, the value of a note-taking, note-preserving system is not in simply having lots of notes. For me, the value is in the "conversation" that I have with my repository. That conversation happens whenever I choose to interrogate the system, but it also happens as a part of the process of inserting notes.
Inserting notes is an active process. I don't just "write and forget-until-searched". Inserting a note means finding a place to insert it, devising and using hashtags, connecting this note to other notes, creating backlinks, adding annotations to other notes, and generally enriching the whole system.
It's working for me.
[0] This is entirely another kettle of fish.
Basically paper with a patten on it that can be read by a camera in the pen. The pen can then transmit that to your main computer.
It’s not new tech but it is pretty cheap and solves the scanning issue.
Moleskine[2] amongst others sell something like that but ther non-premium paper is available too.
I think UK social services used to use them at one time. Much cheaper and less likely to be stolen than a tablet.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_paper
2. https://www.moleskine.com/en-gb/shop/moleskine-smart/smart-w...
The primary reason is that for any notes that I want to put into my digital database, I have to do a lot of editing anyway. My first draft notes are full of short-hands, dangling sentences, struck out words, back-and-forth thoughts; while I need them to be self-contained, clear, more bullet-point-ish, and better organized inside the computer. So I might as well just type a second draft.
There are notebooks specifically made to be easily scanable, eg. https://www.leuchtturm1917.com/whitelines-link.html
Another options are binders, so that you can just take out the pages, put them into a feeder and scan all of them. ... or you can rip a notebooks spine and do the same thing, but have a ripped notebook.
That said, I tried various tablets, galaxy note devices, scanning ... and mostly use paper still. No worries about battery life, free form, nicer pens and the biggest benefit: a big desk allows you to just have multiple pages next to each other, open previous notes on the side and draw freely on all of them. A tablet/ereader can replace one page, but not multiple at the same time. Sure, search, version control, copy&paste and easy backups would be nice, but not enough of an advantage over paper.
I've always thought that a new class of ultra rugged, old Nokia but with apps type device is needed. Maybe some kind of special purpose smaller than a phone digital notebook could solve this.
It wouldn't need much computing power at all, since it could do everything via Bluetooth link to a real phone. With a memory LCD the battery would last weeks.
For me, I'm so out of practice with pen and paper that I could probably learn a new input method as just easily as I could learn to write without stopping to think about every letter, so maybe even a keychain sized device would be possible.
If i had digital notebook that i could write by hand, and it all went to my nextcloud, i think i would use that more than typing things down with onscreen keyboard.
When I was in college I had folders of notes and it's read and updated regularly. Once I got issued a work laptop; the personal one sometimes don't get turned on in days... and rapidly became outdated.
Do you have a phone (doesn't have to be one you're using)? At least on android, you can install syncthing and use it as a middleman. I use emacs org mode for many of my notes and this system works well. My computers are NEVER online at the same time but the phone is always on so it will always be up-to-date with the latest files. It also serves as another backup location. Works wonders.
My pen of choice is the space pen, also with a clip that lasts very well. The ink isn’t the best, but the clip and click action make it very good for a pocket notebook.
ETA: I love my dad. He does this.
For digital handwriting, I use MS OneNote with my Boox tablet but almost any modern tablet will do. MS OneNote also has the best handwriting to text feature I've found; which is useful to make reading past notes easier.
Another thing I've been using is Google sheets. Google Sheets makes it convenient to write short bullet point type notes under certain categories such as it is structured like this:
First column (area) - Second Column (sub-area) - Third Column (details)
Example:
Shopping - Groceries - Items to Order
It's a sort of backlog and it's entirely digital and it gets reorganised constantly. Some of it is a freeform list of ideas I liked at some point or another. Some of it is what I absolutely need to do during the day. Some of it is what I absolutely need to do in the following week.
I've tried various software mechanisms, but it always ended up being too tedious.
Would love to see the hardware device in a small portable format!
I don't use notebooks as much nowadays, though. I tend to have a computer closeby or I've found the iPad + Apple Pencil or a whiteboard surprisingly good for most things.
It's very satisfying to tear out a page after I'm done with it.
I carry these in my pocket but I’m lucky if they last 30 days before the covers and spine disintegrate.
If you really do have a genuine question then we'd all benefit from seeing it asked and answered. If you're simply saying that in your opinion this is all a waste of time, then either have the courage to recognise that that's what you're saying and say it out loud, or don't say it.
I'm disappointed that you're not being constructive. I'm sure you don't really care about my opinion, but since you felt free to express yours, even if only in this coded form, then so I'm feeling free to express mine.
I just wanted to know if there was one thing that was worth doing all this for, because my opinion is that logging your data -quantitative data- doesn't make you better. That's all.
As an example, I've tried to take my own advice and asked the rich question here:
> I have argued my question and told you my opinion on self logging and quantified self. I don't understand what else I should be asking.
I feel like I've explained clearly why your initial reply has been down-voted, why people have asked you for clarification, and how that could all have been avoided. So I guess I have nothing further to add on that issue.
I find your comments about your note-taking interesting ... I wish you had given them in your initial reply, because then it would have been a top-level, information-rich comment. But I assume you had your reasons for replying as you did.
Thank you for the clarifications ... I think this discussion is complete.
- I don't have to rely on my possibly faulty memory about the details of past events. My logs often have considerably more detail than I remember over a year later, and I have already identified one instance where what I remembered was inconsistent with an email (not one of my logs, to be clear) I wrote at the time. I trust the email more than my memory.
- I can answer when something happened with full-text search.
- I can read through the logs chronologically to see the evolution of my thinking on many topics.
When I tell others about my daily log a lot of people seem interested in possible mental health benefits. I can say that I don't see any mental health benefits in my case. I don't write a gratitude journal or anything like that, as such things always seemed forced to me. I focus mostly on summarizing what happened in the day and what I'm thinking about that day.