I've used all the notebooks
tylercipriani.com
tylercipriani.com
Now I tend to view fashionable office supplies as productivity fetish items. It's easy to geek out on that stuff, but does a better notebook make me more productive? Seems to make me less productive, if history is an indicator.
Yeah, I will occasionally find myself reading reviews of immaculately designed mechanical pencils, or minutely engineered Japanese scissors. But I try not to lose sight of the advantages cheap, lousy stuff has too: disposable, easy to replace, low barrier to use. These qualities are also valuable.
I now use free vendor notebooks from events and random pens. And a £2 flip notebook for daily to-dos.
Also use a single type of pen: a black staedtler fine liner. They in a box of 10.
I generally get small ones and try to do a new one every 6 months depending on how many notes there are.
I instead just got myself a cheap detective-style notepad I can keep in my pocket to write down all the crap the comes to mind, everywhere I am, even while standing up. That's exactly what I need.
You might find that you enjoy the quality of paper of other notebooks, but it gets you over that "this notebook is too nice for my random thought"-block.
I just go for a cheap and cheerful one that I am happy to write any old nonsense in
It makes me feel like a freakin' wizard to pull them out and write in them. It's great. Bonus wizard points for using a nice fountain pen.
I find it to be worth it, considering that even premium office supplies aren't that expensive compared to other life expenses.
I usually actually like working with a somewhat mediocre one, I prefer my computer to have the power and specs of most of the people who will be using what I make, if it works good on mine maybe works good on theirs.
This also lets me treat computers as commodities, essentially disposable. I do not lavish a lot of care on them. Use them, keep them backed up, break them, throw them away.
But then I got this new M1, and I think it is so much better than all the other ones I normally use, including older Macs which I do not consider to have been better than any of the other computers I had. It's so good I want to go buy another one in case my wife is using it and I have to make do with another not as nice computer. To use the lesser computers is irritating to me. I feel less productive without it.
Does the feeling the tool gives you become more important than the task they are intended to perform? If that feeling is you do the task better with the tool than maybe yes.
Notebooks are much less varied in the types of work you do with them. It's mostly pen or pencil to paper kind of work.
It might not be just a feeling but real. Waiting for a window to open. Waiting for code to compile. Waiting for a process to finish. Vs not waiting.
I surely did notice the difference, when I aquired a gaming laptop, compared to my disposible laptops before. It was a huge boost for developing while away from the desktop (but now it is broken and I am thinking about getting an M1, too)
But I like the thinkpad way more. It's sturdier, the keyboard has real keys that stick up and not these horrible chiclet macbook-style keys that every single laptop has now, it has the thinkpad nipple, you can remove/replace the battery by flipping two latches, you can access/replace the hard drive/ssd, ram, wifi card etc. By undoing 6 screws or so, and I just prefer the old thinkpad aesthetic.
I never want to "upgrade" to the modern form factor; I think it's worse in every way. When I work on the modern laptop, and then take out my thinkpad for personal computing, I feel relief at how nice it is to type on the thinkpad! It's crazy. It's very annoying to me that nobody's making laptops like that anymore. I use DWM and other lightweight tools, so the 2011 laptop is snappier than the 2022 one (programmers get worse at their jobs/adbicate any responsibility for performance faster than hardware gets better), but at some point it might be nice to have a faster processor.
You must be young. If I used something like that at work, the young yahoos would laugh me out of the building.
I personally use a 3$ Pierre Cardin for class. It serves me well.
Wouldn't surprise me if the Moleskine paper is less than 70 gsm - I've got some notebooks that claim to be 70 gsm, and the paper has a bit more heft to it than the very thin, soft paper in the Moleskines. I do quite like how nice the Moleskine paper is to flick through, but the amount of bleed is a bit much, so while I do buy a Moleskine monthly diary each year - useful layout, cover feels nice, price not ridiculous, the per-month notes pages (that I typically don't use) act as an ink bleed buffer - I'd be a bit less confident that their notebooks would work as well.
For notes, I buy whatever cheap ringbound A4/A5 squared 70+ gsm paper notebooks I can find on Amazon.
A dollar spent on Moleskine paper is, sadly, a dollar wasted.
That being said, If the pens one likes to use work well on Moleskine, there's no reason why a person shouldn't use it.
Leuchtterm, Clairefontaine, Rhodia, and Tomoe River are some examples of high quality paper. If you want something that's close but quite a bit cheaper Black and Red has some options that work well even with a flexible fountain pen.
I prefer the larger sized, thinner pages books for this reason, I can care less and still take loads of notes
I used to have a pile of coffee mugs piling up at my desk at work. Then I bought an expensive designer coffee mug and only used that one, suddenly my work area is clean.
It's about knowing how you can trick yourself to without any effort increasing your well being. I've flaws, sometimes I can buy then away by tricking myself.
I agree with you 95%. This comment is really just wanting to explain that 5%.
I have found that a little extra money goes a long way, and that a lot of money doesn't ever go far enough.
My bullet journal "daily caries" are:
* Apica CD 5mm grid notebook - $14.00 (one per year)
* Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen - $17.00 (one time purchase)
* Disposable black refills for the fountain pen - $5.00 per 20 (maybe twice a year)
In the realm of fancy pens/notebooks these are pretty cheap, but I really enjoy them. I feel like they are at a very nice sweet spot where they're cheap enough that I could lose them, but not "too good to use".
Maybe I'm lying to myself, but I feel like I journal more often because of how much I like them. It's just nice to use nice things.
Years ago I took some bookbinding workshops. The guy running the program ended up making tons of books for the lessons which he ended up giving away. One of the thing he did was to scribble on the first page so it wasn’t pristine, so that the recipients wouldn’t want to use it for being “too nice”.
I took summer workshops at the North Bennet Street School in Boston. It's in the North End, right down the street from the "One if by Land, Two if by Sea" church. The workshops were fantastic, I would recommend them in a heartbeat: https://nbss.edu/
I took a bunch of them, over I think 2 summers. An intro one, one on leather binding, one on miniatures, one on Japanese binding. This was ~20 years ago, though.
It was a very rewarding activity, it feels really good to make your own books. You get to work with your hands, what you make is cool, and it's all beautiful. I'm incredibly glad I did them.
It's fun to read about this fancy and nicely designed stuff as you say, but the less fussiness around writing for me, the better.
More permanent: generic A5 sketchbooks from artist materials shops. Typically 80 leaves of 100g/m^2 off white plain paper and board covers with sewn signature bindings. Around a fiver each.
Recently discovered somewhere in the middle: Muji 'Pocketnote' A5 plain notebooks with paper covers and a lot of leaves (over 100). Flexible, thin shiny pages (no good for sharpies/gel/ink) but cheapish around three pounds and a nice feel.
None of these are so expensive to become precious.
Long story short you buy these things as jewellery and not as tools.
Plain old notebook available in any nearby store works for me. And yeah any pen works too.
While the Field Notes limited editions are blatantly collectibles, most are similar enough to the standard items to just use. Get one of the fancy leather covers if you worry about damaging them, then stick it in your pocket when you need to take a note. (Given most are the same price as their standard notebooks, it's really more of a fun little decoration for the everyday tool.)
And a Fisher AG7 is just handy to clip to the notebook in your pocket, so you always have a normal-feeling ballpoint pen that will always work. It's the only pen I've managed to hold onto long enough to get refills.
The choice of notebook impacts your productivity. As you yourself admit.
The notebook that works best for someone depends on the person. Your reaction to Moleskine notebooks is particular to you.
"Better" is what is better for the individual.
This exactly! I think with pen and notebook. I also think without pen and notebook, such as during my driving and running. Without notebooks, I often find myself think in circles and having hard time to recall what I just realized a short moment ago. With pen and notebook, it is more relaxed. Often I don't revisit my notebooks. So the notebooks are mainly serving as a thinking aids than to serve as a database. Replacing them with digital sounds nice, but in reality it is just a distraction. Having the record to go back to is a short term benefit; the few pages of notes that I do end up revisit often quickly become part of paper or presentations, or tweets and moments, or more often, prototype code. I have accumulated a drawer of used notebooks. They only have sentimental values. And they have more sentimental values in paper forms than in digital forms.
PS: my current favorite notebook is this one https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Sugarcane-Notebook-College-... A hard cover and thick ring has become a necessity for me.
If anything, computer notes distracted me from the lecture. But writing out summaries from slides after the lecture was invaluable, even if I never looked at those summaries again.
I looked at the OP article and it seems too fetishistic for my tastes. What happened to ordinary yellow legal pads, or spiral bound school notebooks? For daily casual jottings, I used to use paperbound pocket notebooks, but they kept falling apart with use. Now I just carry a folded up piece of 8.5"x11" printer paper and transcribe any content needing preservation to a computer when I get around to it. The rest is ephemeral and I can throw away the paper when it gets full. Lately I read on Stephen Wolfram's blog that he does the same thing I do. I don't know if that's a good sign or a bad one.
https://www.jetpens.com/Ohto-Minimo-Ballpoint-Pen-with-Holde...
Heh.
a) take lecture notes in class
b) as soon as possible after the class, refine those lecture notes by combining it with references from the textbook and other readings or handouts.
c) visit your instructor during office hours to clear up things you weren't able to during (b)
Unfortunately the advice didn't come with any time management tips so I was almost never able to follow it. The worst of it was revisiting my unrefined notes 3-4 days after I took them. They often seemed to read like gibberish, especially if I had not been studying the reading material in the meantime.
Entries are numbered sequentially. Some are a single sentence, others are a code snippet; still others a paragraph.
"Log pages" go between chunks of consecutive pages. After getting full, these are taped at the edge with shipping tape, to flip to them more easily. The log page gets its own number and a luxurious two pages.
As entries are added, I flip back to the nearest log page and add <number> plus a single title sentence.
I rarely title entries themselves.
As pages start to separate from the binding, duct tape keeps them stuck to the cover.
There's so many pages; you can try all kinds of customization. I've been trying to combine Zettelkasten with GTD, but just going crazy with "how to start" versus "just do the thing."
Sharpies bleed through. Pages are graph style as blue squares, but I'm used to it.
My fidget tool is flipping through with my thumb--but only the older pages. Keep the new pages pristine, because skin oil will mess with the ink!
I aim to use a wax sheet, like what stickers use, on the proceeding page where my hand would rest, to mitigate the issue.
In all, I've reached the limit of notebooks, and from here it's automating awk or something, and really making a computer archive of this stuff.
I always promise myself to keep a good index, but I never go back to the notes. Maybe occasional entries, which will be rewritten into a new notebook--but I'm glad to have written something for my future, sentimental self.
A slip box is still possible--but instead of references to other works, they are your longer-form notes in the notebook. Then it's third-order storage, in a sense. A compromise to needing more space than an index card, but the desire for discoverable brevity.
However I don't understand, can you explain what the log page does?
As a result, my favorite notebook is now a pad of A4 paper with a good weight, ruled, and perforated so I can easily detach pages and feed them through the scanner.
Content warning for the following paragraph.
I then destroy the originals.
For example when taking meeting notes that will become minutes, I’d much rather type. My notes from a meeting for distribution aren’t my own individual thoughts so this is primarily transcription. Writing is far too slow to keep up with discussion and it needs to be digitized or typed up later. There would be benefit to learning shorthand but I’d still have the digitization hurdle.
If it’s an online call another more modern option is recording the meeting and adding automatic transcription, but I haven’t seen this done often.
For scanning notes with the iPhone I saw a kickstarter for a notebook that is the same aspect ratio as the iPhone screen and has a black border. I thought about making my own throwaway version of this by just cutting down A4 paper and putting a couple paper clips through card stock.
Exactly so. I love the idea of scribbling in a leather-bound gilt edge notebook, like a modern Thucydides. I can't find anything later without flipping through, and I hear people keep index in the notebook! Ain't nobody got time for that. I throw all my notes into a text file, check them into git and grep away! For impromptu notes I still use my National Brand Computational Notebook with grid ruled green sheets, roommy real estate, thick paper, page number, $12 each.
- Don't worry too much about having a perfect written system, I always was worrying too much about having the perfect system and this meant that I ended up not writing anything down because I hadn't found the perfect place to put it. Don't be afraid of re-writing things, think of re-writing as re-thinking, rather than as having made a mistake that you are correcting. Your system is an organism that evolves with as you keep thinking through the things.
- Nested lists are a nightmare to look at, and add too much context that you don't want. Nested lists are ok for project planning, brainstorming, and thinking. But keep nested lists away from any page that you want to look at often. Better to have 10 separated pages with 10 lists than 1 page with 10 sub-sections. In general try to keep the system as dumbed down as possible, because the point of having a written system is that you can look at it when you don't feel like thinking and the system provides very basic steps for your head to do (like pick one thing to do from here, or remind me of all the people I am waiting for to come back to me with answers, ...)
Overall I keep wishing for the notebook to fix my productivity problems and I'm slowly admitting that it is actually something in my internal orientation that needs to shift.
Everything else about your "active" projects goes a bit out of scope of what is defined by GTD and should go to "project reference material", like project planning, TODO lists, project structure, notes from meetings, sketches, ... those are kept in a much messier form by me, but I feel like as long as the big picture and hard commitments are clear on the GTD part, it's ok if sometimes I have to "dive down" into a specific project mess to clarify some things. It's just not ok if those 2 are mixed and make looking at your day-to-day GTD sections a nightmare.
I keep my paper GTD system on an A5 ring binder, something like a Filofax but a cheaper brand, with 1 plastic divider for each 4 (projects, next actions, waiting for, someday/maybe) of the 5 GTD hard-categories [1], with each section having about 1-5 pages. The calendar goes to Google Calendar just because it's convenient how it auto-adds meeting invitations.
For project reference material I keep an alphabetic index [2] on the same A5 binder for small projects, some dedicated folders or notebooks if the projects are huge, or a directory with files if the projects have some digital material, images, or links, that can't be easily tracked on paper. Those will look very different for each different project so don't really have much of a "system" for it, aside from keeping the hard-landscape tracked on GTD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done#/media/Fil...
[2] https://appelboom.com/filofax-refill-personal-cream-alphabet...
I wrap my latest notebook in a Coal Creek leather cover to look all fancy (and hold my phone and pen). https://www.coalcreekleather.com/collections/a5
I like to have mine around for jotting ideas down and drawing diagrams. I don’t have a system or anything. I think I used to be far more prescriptive about what I put in it but now it’s just a playground for my ideas and that suits me really. I carry around everywhere so it’s ready to be used.
My favorite notebook is the National Brand "Engineering and Science Notebook" - which has become my go-to. [0]
I like to diagram, so having the reverse page be graph paper makes it easier for me. I also prefer spiral bound since they tend to hold up better in travel, but that's purely subjective.
Notebooks should be about utility first. I have a Staples brand of 3.5 x 5.5" notepads that come in 3-packs. They are almost exactly passport-sized in terms of height, width and thickness, so they fit perfectly in a pocket, to the point where it's almost invisible. Once I'm done with them, I can store them in an index card box.
THAT for me has been the key to taking paper notes consistently. Create a situation where the friction to start writing on a pad in my pocket is lower than pulling out your phone and getting distracted by a lock screen notification before you can even open the notepad app.
"Beauty, Art, Aesthetics, Appeal, Pleasing, Sexy" serve purpose which are beyond utilitarian but human.
If lot of people are praising something, probably because they liked it and wanted to share about it. If you can afford it, you can choose to give it a try and make an opinion and decision for yourself.
The reason the comments mention Moleskine is that its the first "fancy" brand of paper that the majority of people have heard of. Its also actually quite terrible in terms of quality to the point of being almost unusable with fountain pens and also with a lot of standard pens you might find in an office supply section of a department store.
https://www.levenger.com/CIRCA-326/ABOUT-CIRCA-1233.aspx
Arc is cheap and available in person at Staples.
It combines the versatility of using your own paper, like a three-hole-bunch binder, but with the reliability and compactness of a wirebound notebook. Choose whatever paper you like, print out your desired grid system, reorder pages, add tabs, etc. and still have the same notebook.
When you need to archive pages, you can remove them from the notebook and throw them in a scanner.
I'd say the initial cost of the notebook and punch is steep, but not if you're comparing to $20 hardbound notebooks like Tomoe River or Moleskine.
https://old.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/comments/bccgt0/discbo...
Apparently, paper has enough "structural stiffness" or whatever (don't know the detailed physics), that it won't pull "away" or "up" from the discs by itself. Forcing a page out can be done for sure, so you need to be aware of this and put the paper in/out of the discs with a special kind of gesture/movement, that bends the paper instead of tearing it. Still, both the static forces and each in/out gesture do put a bit of stress on the paper, so you tend to prefer a slightly thicker kind of paper for this than in typical notebooks. Common xero/printer paper with 80g/m2 is decent enough for me, although if really needed, thinner paper can also work, but it will be much more flimsy and prone to falling out. Still, if some of your pages get tired around the holes, you can do an "emergency repair" by taping them over with e.g. washi tape, and re-punching the holes. I found the repair procedure imperfect for a number of reasons (esp. that I can't seem able to keep the page from warping when I apply the tape), but still better than letting the pages fall out, so I only use it as a last resort.
What I found even more interesting, is that the technology was invented quite long ago - I think I read that it happened even before the 2nd World War, though the earliest concrete date I can find now is "before 1948" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc-binding and https://atoma.be/en/the-atoma-quality/). IIUC it's patented by the company founded by the original creators, https://atoma.be. But apparently it's been since licensed (?) to some other companies, and/or the patent has expired. Notably and fortunately, most of the current producers stay compatible with the original system (the general dimensions, positions, and distances of the holes are the same), so you can exchange the punches, discs, pages, and other accessories. That said, as shown in the link above, there are slight variations in the shape, which results in more/less friction when turning the pages depending on the exact shape of the hole in the page vs. the exact shape of the disc's cross-section. Also, weirdly to me, each of the subsequent companies tries to sound like they're the one and only creators/"innovators" of this technology, while (usually) following the
Anyway, there's some more info you can gather from teh Internets and youtube, and there's some small community on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/Discbound/
I also _love_ good quality notebooks but I feel guilty when using them for everyday scribbles like meeting notes. It feels like sacrilege.
If your fountain pen blots, you may want to consider a different ink. Western pens have larger nibs and feeds than Japanese, so tend to be very wet when filled with thinner Japanese inks. Contrapositively, Western inks tend to flow poorly in Japanese pens, especially those with smaller nib sizes. A shame; I miss my J. Herbin violet.
It could also be due to rough handling, and probably is if you tend often to find ink on the inside of the cap and the outside of the section, and thence of course on your fingers.
You might also write with too heavy a hand, which tends to splay the tines of the nib; this is especially likely if you tend to see lines that don't properly fill with ink, since too wide a space between the tines will fail to sustain the capillary action that draws ink smoothly from the feed to the tip, and will also make dripping more likely since the flow of ink from the feed is no longer properly controlled. Gold nibs are especially vulnerable here; if you're new to fountain pens, consider switching for a while to a steel nib, which will feel somewhat rougher but write just as well and be much more forgiving of mistakes as you learn how correctly to use this type of tool.
If none of these apply, then perhaps the pen just needs to be flushed and cleaned, which is something worth doing with a fountain pen after every few fills at most, or between different inks and especially different brands. This merits concern not just for color mixing reasons, but also because some inks when mixed exhibit chemical behaviors that can lead to clogging. And just generally, a well-maintained pen will write much more neatly and reliably than one that hasn't been looked after in a while.
I'm not being purely metaphorical in this use of "valuable", either. Last year this skill made me about twenty-four thousand dollars.
Could you please elaborate?
I used a few paper notebooks to write down my thoughts during my Master's, and it was always difficult to find where I wrote about a particular experiment, paper, or anything that wasn't write-only. I would figure out when I wrote about that and go through the dates, but it's nowhere as convenient as grepping by an author name. This made me switch to digital notes (in Obsidian) for my current job.
How do you deal with this? I'd love to get back to paper notes again.
I ended up buying a Remarkable 2 which is an e-paper writing tablet. Sort of an expensive impulse purchase, bought off an Instagram ad of all things. I love it and carry it with me all the time.
The software is fine, not great but it works. The writing experience is excellent though, it’s as close to the UX of actually writing in a notebook as I can imagine and I definitely am happy with the purchase.
I'd definitely recommend it.
While we're at it, what pen did you get? If you got the black one, how useful is the eraser? These comments about it piqued my interest.
[1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000266143...
I did get the black pen, but I don't actually use the eraser that's at the back. Just based on the time it takes to flip the pen, it's not really worth it.
Instead, I often leave my non-dominant hand by the side bar where I can quickly tap on the back arrow to erase the last stroke(s), or switch to the lasso eraser with one tap. In that mode, you can draw a shape around the area that you want to remove, and you do this using the more precise pen tip, not the wide eraser at the back. There's a dotted line that appear as you draw this shape, so you can see it in real time instead of wondering where exactly the eraser is being applied.
I can see it being useful in a few cases, but it's far from essential and I'd be just as satisfied without it.
As for the OCR mode, it would be better if it was done by default and kept in the document's metadata as searchable text. Instead, the feature you linked to is for a way to OCR the page and send it by email. If you were writing to someone or sharing notes you might want to do that, but this is not quite the same as having the software be able to search through your notes.
My flavor of bullet journal makes it reasonably easy to find stuff thanks to numbered pages, a structure that includes dedicated pages separate from daily notes, and a comprehensive index.
Be aware that the software on those is so limited as to make indexing of any kind entirely impossible.
I’m personally still a bit on the fence for my RM2, but leaning that direction. Having multiple logical notebooks to keep meeting separate is pretty handy.
Perhaps, but there is an inflection point. Without any support for indexing, the device is less functional for me than a paper notebook, despite the admittedly excellent writing experience it provides - not as good as paper, but I think as close as e-ink and a stylus can come.
Are there searching and indexing features on the device? When I tried it out a few months ago, there were not, but perhaps I missed a firmware update.
(One might argue also that a paper notebook never needs charging, and that is true, but a pen does need to be charged with ink. I made a couple of small carry tubes sized to fit Namiki cartridges, each with a soft spring in the base to raise the cartridge for easy retrieval when the tube is uncapped.)
But I've also found a good fountain pen to be faster and more comfortable to use than any pencil, and over the past few years pens have much improved my hand besides. I started with a Pilot Metropolitan, and will happily recommend it to anyone as an easy, inexpensive starter pen that works well, looks good, and requires an absolute minimum of fuss.
(You also don't need to replace cartridges in a pen all that often - at least not in a Pilot pen, whose cartridges hold a milliliter. I just like to have a spare so I don't find myself having to grab the loaner rollerball from my satchel, and a spare for the spare in case I use the first spare and forget to replace it. I grant I may slightly overthink this, but I've been being me for long enough now to have a pretty good grasp of most failure modes, too...)
Do you have a writeup of your methods anywhere? The reMarkable let me down too badly for me to remain very interested in giving it another chance as a wholesale replacement, but I'd be a fool to assume that means there's nothing worth learning from someone who's found success with it. If nothing else, maybe there's some way it could be useful to me after all!
Even across multiple volumes, that index will serve the same purpose for your notes as it does for a database, this after all being whence RDBMS designers borrowed the term: an index allows you to perform lookups in sublinear time.
I don't know what a reverse index is in the sense you mean here, but I would like to find out. Would you mind giving a brief description? I tried some searches, but found no useful result.
For example, in the index you'd have chapters:
3. Data structures 25
[...]
7. Graphs 154
trees: 25, 154
edit: Commenting before coffee, I mixed up "anglophile" and "anglophone," intending the latter.
Of all the note taking apps I've used though, obsidian is easily the best. The graph they have for connecting notes together is just great. And, I like that their storage system is just plain text files, so long after obsidian is gone, I'll still be able to look at them if I need to.
This means for me, physical notes are not the solution they clearly are for many others. I've made peace with that, though for many years my "folder of markdown" did leave me with a feeling of not doing it right when so many people raved about how physical notes improved their experience. I always found the practical difficulties outweighed the benefit of the forced mode switch for me. I guess my point is to not stress about it - while paper notes are the right tool for many people, the right tool for you might be digital notes.
(I've also settled on obsidian these days, and the growth of obsidian and notion is also kind of vindicating for my folder of markdown approach when others were using Evernote/onenote)
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30395238 | My Notebook System (ratfactor.com)
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30344237 | Notes apps are where ideas go to die, and that’s good (reproof.app)
- https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345959 | the process of physically writing the notes, internalizing the information, and building new connections in your head is quite important
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30303211 | Analog: A simple productivity system (ugmonk.com)
- https://ugmonk.com/blogs/journal/analog-the-simplest-product...
https://www.muji.com/jp/ja/store/cmdty/detail/4550182110340
Also available on Amazon (at a bit of a premium):
https://www.amazon.com/MUJI-Passport-Notebook-24Sheets-Green... ($10 but appears to include 3 notebooks so about $3.33 per notebook)
As for dating, I like to do something a little different; it's still ISO8601 but with a slight twist. Each page top has the date in basic form (eg, 20220430) and each note on that page has a timestamp to describe that note and a title for the first line (eg: "T1234 Groceries"), followed by the note body below, a little like a git commit message. This allows me to link between notes by enclosing the date and time stamp in pointy brackets. To save some ink when linking, I use the date at the top of the page for context. If my page top is dated 20220430, and I want to link to a note from the 23rd at T0631, I write it like <23T0631>. Since the year and month are the same as the context I'm in, I don't bother writing those. I don't use page numbers at all.
Some other notebook habits I have: I like to use the first page for my contact info if anyone finds my notebook (and maybe offer a reward). The next page is for goals I'd like to work toward during the anticipated lifespan of that book. I also like to create a weekly index. When I've filled the notebook, I create an index of index pages on the very last page. If I wait to index the entire thing when the book is filled, I usually don't. Also, I use the last few pages to create monthly calendars. I fill in dates on them with letters (A, B, C...) for an event, which I reference on the back side of the page, either with a short description or a link to the timestamp I wrote down event information on. Finally, after filling a book, I write the range of timestamps that book covers in the spine so I can quickly find notes in the future.
My only complaint about RITR is that the feel of the paper seems a bit odd.
I prefer the dots to either grids or lines, because they provide enough guidance without getting in the way.
The spiral binding is convenient, and the back cover is stiff enough to use on a lap.
The pages are not numbered, but I do that myself, with yyyy-mm-dd and a title at the top-right of any new set of notes, and circled numbers 1, 2, ..., on successive pages of that topic.
Not that anybody asked... what is it about note-taking that makes people yammer so?
* tactile turn pen (bullet slim w/Pilot G2 0.7mm refill)
* rotring 600 mechanical pencil 0.5mm
* staedtler pigment liner 0.4mm
You miss out on pockets and multiple bookmarks but you can pair it with a Kokuyo systemic notebook cover to cover all the bases.
Their list seems like all the notebooks they found when searching "notebook" on amazon lol.
responding to your comment specifically because Midori is the best :)
Yeah, a great pen, sadly AFAIK out-of-production - and the successor (GS01) doesn't have the side release button, which was really nice to fidget with :(
click clack
My header format for work notebooks is an ISO8601 date followed by title and then, when applicable, start and end times - these come last, rather than adjacent to the date, because that way it's easier to leave space for the end time if it's uncertain up front. When the header line is complete, I highlight it with a 6mm Pilot Parallel filled with liquid ink extracted by needle from yellow Sharpie Accent highlighters - that nib size spans the full space between lines in a Mnemosyne N195, and using it in a Parallel rather than the original felt tip also keeps it from smearing the Iroshizuku Murasaki-shikibu or Juro-jin with which I ink my Decimo.
I was surprised to see no mention of indexing in the original article. In work notebooks I do this religiously, because while hand-writing does help consolidate memory, an index of notes makes them a much more durable reference tool and makes memory consolidation much less of an issue in the first place.
In my personal diary, I only head entries by date and time, and don't bother highlighting. I don't always know up front what those will be about, so a title doesn't fit, although I suppose I could perhaps usefully backfill one on a finished entry - I haven't reconsidered my diary scheme since shortly after I started the first volume in 2018, so perhaps now's the time. (That said, I'm somewhat put off by the level of effort involved in indexing four-plus years' worth of diary, even if it is also a marvelous opportunity for a reread.)
At work and at home, writing makes a wonderful tool for thought. It's much easier to wrestle with a large and thorny idea when I don't have to keep the whole thing in my head all at once.
Usually, I make some notes while thinking things through and return to the PC to implement them afterward (Code as well as PowerPoint).
So I can't emphasize this enough:
> They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process.
Paper notes are most effective if you go through them 1x a week and upload the important parts to a digital store. This process helps clarify my thinking as I get to reflect on my recent thoughts and prioritize the most important ones.
As I write code, I’ll clearly write down the next step I am trying to make work e.g. “Call the graphql endpoint and get the id of the employee” and then if any blockers come up, I add those as bullet points below the mini task. This helps me regularly remember what I am supposed to be doing each time I get distracted.
The end result of this is that I write around eight letter-sized pages per day. This kind of sucks with ballpoint pens as you need to use a lot of force to write with those. I switched to a fountain pen that fits my large hands and now mostly write in something akin to cursive (this is why cursive is a thing - it only makes sense when using a fountain pen).
Fountain pens with good ink really need high quality paper designed for them or they smear and bleed through.
You’d think that lines would cost extra but I had to pay more for a notebook without them. ;)
I like the utilitarian look of the classic Rhodia. And I love writing on them, of course.
I find nerding about with notebooks and fountain pens a nice change compared to work days, when I have to nerding about HPC and text editors.
I find notebooks to be too scattered when I try flip through them after the fact. Half a page of something here, another half page three pages after, it’s not conducive to actually rereading notes. With the pad I can at least pull the pages out and then sort them in some sort of order before filing away.
[0] https://pukkastationery.com/pukka-pads-a5-metallic-jotta-squ...
Though it's more expensive.
The most satisfying notebooks I've found from a paper quality to value perspective are these 'age-bag' notebooks from Clairefontaine (90gsm A5 graph): https://wonderpens.ca/collections/paper/products/center-clai...
The ones I drool over though are the 'bonus' notebooks from The Folio Society: https://mirabiledictudotorg1.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/img...
At home/office I have rocket book. I don't use the app, though. Throughout the workday I jot down notes. At the end of the day/week I will consolidate anything important to the front of the notebook and erase the pages.
I have an ipad, but taking notes with the pen just doesn't feel right for whatever reason. I've yet to find a solution I like for longer term notes (i.e. when reading a book).
The benefits of this method over notebooks/commonplace books centers in infinite internal branch and evolution of ideas.
I currently in the battle of using OneNote and a notebook because of that. I often want to quickly just note things down as writing really helps me with retention but I find it really difficult to find it when I need it so I end up transferring important notes every few weeks in my OneNote notebooks with the system based on Zettelkasten.
The digital solution oblivion notes looks interesting but I feel currently OneNote provides the same freedom to organize in any chaotic method you want.
Just like the video, my notebook is like the staging card for me. I jot down stuff in all orientations of the page if required and eventually transfer it to OneNote as my Knowledge card. I do not add information like numbers or page numbers or links or timestamps, the only thing I use is date and topic name.
Furthermore, I will look into that channel more as this video still did not help me much as this also has the same issue as I always had with zettelkasten, it is highly resourceful for research and only research who are zoned into one major topic because I read in various topics and categorizing the cards numerically based on how they link each other is very difficult to be done in analog form as I am not sure if I find the link easily for a topic that I have 50 pages of notes, which I have read few months ago to which I just want to add this new note to. I have to re-read some of it again to file this new note properly. Which is why it gets easy to do it in OneNote for me.
Or maybe this is the point of an analog system which I up until now failed to understand, to help retain/refresh notes far too often and retain information better, is that it?
I have read about Ryan Holiday's system and I think mine is very close to his, but just very digital. Which is quite unfortunate because just like most people, I can easily recollect which page which note is on in a book which I have read or written.
Thanks again for the video, and feel free to enlighten me with the shortcomings you see in my thought or process, even your opinions about this topic or how you see it differently than me.
Yes that's one of the benefits. Analog forces maintenance rehearsal in human memory. It also does this when you're in a state of associating an idea you have in your head with the most similar and related idea. This excercises the neuro-associative recall muscle in the mind and creates what Luhmann calls surprises and accidents which are very useful during the process of creating.
You end up reviewing notes using analog systems that you may not have otherwise reviewed. These events reignite reverberation of ideas that you can then carry with you for days (or at least during the process of writing and creating).
There's also an Italian mill that produces outstanding and relatively cheap paper and notebooks, Fabriano.
Clairefontaine: Same question. I know it has a great reputation for fountain pen ink, but I had bad experiences with it. In a sense, it's too good. Line strokes tend to be thinner than most other papers. I can't write on them with my F or EF nib - I get a lot of skipping. Others have had the same experience - the paper is just not at all absorbent (hence absolutely no feathering).
I had a similar experience with Maruman Mnemosyne.
(Just my opinion - I know there are folks who love it).
I often use Figurare - it's similarly priced, although some of them feather more than others. I just tried Denik, and it's decent. Not as smooth as Clairefontaine (nothing is!), but handles the ink well enough.
I like leuchtterm’s dot but wish they had grid and reporter style so they would flip up. I almost liked the rhodia as the paper was nicer but it wouldn’t open and stay flat so you had to hold it open while writing.
For me, an iPad/Apple Pencil was the solution to writing more regularly. I wonder if OP has tried the digital route?
All my notes are in Obsidian at the moment, and I sometimes go weeks or months without writing anything on paper. I pretty much only use it for things like greeting cards, or for roleplaying games since electronics totally break immersion in a fantasy setting.
Now I just make them for note taking and writing. They are by no means as nice as moleskins and co, but I enjoy Making them.
As a bonus, their collections of notebooks range from 75-99% recycled.
It has a sewn binding, lies flat more easily than the larger Confidant II, and is more "disposable" (which the OP mentions being a good thing, though I keep all my notebooks for later reference). It also comes in a variety of sizes, though the "Flagship" size is my go-to. I love the feeling of finishing a notebook, and ones with fewer pages help me get there often. I also find the soft-cover notebooks a bit easier to store than the hardcover ones.
However, when it comes to learning a language or writing fiction, I really find physically writing on paper much better, especially for retaining new vocabulary in memory and mastering a new alphabet.
There is something to be said about the feel of paper, too. If I only have a little notepad in my pocket it helps but if I want to keep something, like a journal, it is nice to search and find the paper that is suitable to the task, which works well with certain inks/pens. Never ocurred to me to keep a log of which notebooks I've used, that's a nice way to compare the experience of different types of binding/papers.
- Spiral Bound - A5+ - Polypropylene cover - Lovely paper
While not available on Amazon.com, they are available at Amazon.co.uk and can be shipped to the US. [2]
[1] - https://www.my-oxford.com/int-en/oxford-international/oxford... [2] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000KJM824/ref=ppx_yo_dt...
[1] https://www.cultpens.com/c/q/brands/clairefontaine/europa-by...
If you want to be a bit more upscale you can get pocket-sized notebooks with a loop to hold a small pen.
[1] https://fieldnotesbrand.com/products/original-kraft [2] https://www.jetpens.com/Pilot-FriXion-Ball-Slim-Gel-Pen-0.38...
However, I don't view those notes as a permanent record. Anything really important gets transcribed to LaTeX (math) or text files (TO-DOs, etc.)
The transcribing takes extra effort. I'm not sure it's worth it, but it's a good opportunity to distill things to their essence and double-check logic. My future self doesn't need to wade through as many dead ends when looking back later.
The 5.5×8.5 format is portable enough, each notebook is 100 pages, the paper isn't too lightweight, and they're serrated so tearing out a page neatly is possible
It doesn't quite match the feeling of flipping through a timeline, but it does yield beautiful, useful notes that are easier to amend. With unlimited paper, there's no pressure to conserve paper or only write nice things down.
I appreciate layers, different templates, multiple pens, unlimited undos, infinite scroll and automatic backups. As a leftie, I like not spreading fresh ink on the page.
And yeah, take notes early, take notes often! Even if I have the feeling there should be more digital (single source of truth management of knowledge and action items), that just doesn't seem to stick too much. So keep taking paper notes. Company provided/branded notebooks can be pretty good too, separated from the personal ones, which feels healthier.
https://www.jetpens.com/Maruman-Mnemosyne-N196A-Special-Memo...
And for a small jotpad:
https://www.jetpens.com/Maruman-M.Memo-Mini-Notepad-A7-6-mm-...
I'm not really picky about notebooks, though. The only notebooks that I couldn't use is the really tiny pocket notes. They look neat in theory, but it's very difficult to write anything substantial in them. B6 is the smallest size I can practically use.
The notebook helps because there aren’t 1,000 tabs / apps open. The phone is down so no social media bs. So this is really just a focusing exercise. And of course there is something pleasurable in touching the right pen to paper and feeling the pen move along the paper.
See: https://stationerymanor.com/collections/kokuyo/products/koku...
I like the maruman for the spiral binding (flat, less footprint when folded over) and I find the paper on the Maruman to have less bleed through but I wish it came with more pages. I also like the slightly bigger pages the b5 gives me over the a5. I still like my Leuchturm too but don't use it as much lately.
It was quite a visceral shock to realize that obviously some people do buy them. Again, it was a regular upmarket shop, not some sort of billionaires exclusive hangout.
I'm sure the location of the shop mattered a bit, everything there was on the expensive side of things, somewhat like in airport shops.
[Lechtturm dot-grid notebooks are fantastic]
Stationery is such a fun and relatively inexpensive rabbit hole to fall into (as long as you steer clear of the bonkers fountain pens).
This sounds a lot like Rocketbook. https://getrocketbook.com/
A blaze orange notebook - they are available from other brands too - is incidentally very easy to find and hard to leave behind.
I share the assessment that Moleskine paper bleeds through far too readily.
Still accessible to this day, and only cost $0.29 at Walgreens.
Where I live, Moleskines are indeed ridiculously expensive, but every other available option has tissue-thin paper and heavy black lines which obscure whatever I'm writing/doodling.
Bar one: Whitelines, which have very light grey pages with white lines. But they're spiral wire bound, and I prefer saddle stiched.
All of the non-Moleskines have square corners which are a design antifeature.
I’m now trying out the Remarkable tablet, which has a lot of the advantages of paper, but it’s not quite there yet. It has the paper feel for writing, and isn’t half bad when it comes to “ink quality”.
But where I think all electronic notebooks fail is data locality. Meaning, when I’m searching for a note, in a physical notebook, I know it’s roughly halfway in, on the left page, etc. As I thumb through the pages, I can tell where I am in time. That experience just isn’t quite there in the electronic versions yet.
They are easy on the pocket.
They indeed _are_ big enablers of my thinking process.
Here's a channel that shows how to create an analog Zettelkasten system: https://youtu.be/YfMNwusO6fk
https://www.whitelinespaper.com/product/wirebound-notebooks-...
I'll keep this link though, and if I ever have a reason to use lined physical paper again I'll buy something from them and give it a try, because I am intrigued by the idea, maybe my impression is wrong.
With years of exploring, I found VS Code to the best for me.
It just sounds like people putting special branding on commodities and writing up shitty blog posts as some cool trick to make quick $$$
But hey, maybe I'm a buzzkill spoiling all the fun the shills are having
Also having a really pretty notebook that looks cool can be a small source of pleasure. I like to use ones with covers styled after elaborately-bound old books, I feel like a wizard taking notes in their grimoire every time I take them out, and that's worth something IMHO.
Surely there is something in your life where you don't buy the cheapest, shittiest version of it possible, but spring for the nice version instead. Why do you make this choice? Probably some combination of the pricier one working better, being more durable, looking cooler, and acting as a status symbol.
https://andregarzia.com/2022/01/got-a-passportsize-traveller...
2013-02-27 is the current standard, but more so as a result of "this is how we've done things" and not "this is the best way to do it". The hyphens make the notation ambiguous with substraction, therefore in programming languages dates are quoted and represented as strings, which in turn get passed to a parsing function.
- to_date('2022-03-27')
- datetime.strptime("2022-03-27", "%Y-%m-%d")
It's one of those many examples where "best practices" really only mean "current common practices".
And some seasonal context from the month, like 06 doesn't bring many associations to my head, June tells me it was probably hot, and the type of atmosphere and activities going on around at the time.
In Lisp they wouldn’t, and in statically typed languages it probably wouldn’t be a problem either, as the compiler would tell you that you can’t use a date as a number.
On the other hand, the need for date literals in program code is rare enough that it likely doesn’t warrant introducing a dedicated syntactic form.
In fairness, they do say it in that order too, so on some level perhaps that really is 'the more relevant' (or natural) to them.
IPv4 addresses in numbers-and-dots notation can contain one, two or three dots.
10.11.12 would mean Nov 12, year 10. Or the IPv4 address you'd perhaps be more tempted to write as 10.11.0.12.
Perhaps we can put the pile of poo emoji to good use?
That may be, but it's also codified as ISO 8601 [1], so that's a strong reason not to use a non-standardized format.
> The hyphens make the notation ambiguous with substraction, therefore in programming languages dates are quoted and represented as strings
If you're hard-coding a date in code, you have other choices. You can use a UNIX timestamp (uint). You can create a Date object directly, eg:
Date Created = new Date(2022, 04, 30);
If you're reading a date from user configuration, you need to parse at some point anyway. Otherwise, store dates as serialized date objects and in your database as date-type columns (or as UNIX timestamps, if date isn't an available type).
https://code.kx.com/q4m3/2_Basic_Data_Types_Atoms/#253-date-...
Float is an imprecise transformation from text to a binary fixed size representation. I don't see how floats would be considered a native type while datetime types not.
Having it non-native while the option exists seems to be like a voluntary torture. But it makes sense considering community bubbles surrounding programming languages and not bridging the gaps between them. What can be a 100 lines of Java can be expressed in 20 of Python can be expressed in 5 lines of a data language.