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Comment by toxik | Hacker News Reader

It is a well-established fact that the mechanical act of handwriting notes is good for memorization. Perhaps it is meditative, perhaps we're just physical beings -- whatever it is, typewriting on a computer is not as good.

A famous man whose name I forget once said "Plans are useless, planning is indispensable," and I would like to paraphrase it as "notes are useless, note-taking is indispensable."

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> "notes are useless, note-taking is indispensable."

This is very, very true for me. I read, optimistically, 5% of my notes.

As a corollary, I’m unable to take notes if the notepad is too fancy. I get analysis paralysis from something like a moleskine, like something this nice deserves nicely formatted notes. Only cheapo gas station notpads work for me.

Are you good at planning tho?

Given we are at software engineering forum where most of us likely use ticket tracking system which are basically fancy notes... I feel your statement is disingenuous.

haha college-ruled exam workbooks for me. Basic as can be.

This is not at all a well-established fact. There's one questionable study on this topic that used to go viral occassionally, and that's it.

I'd add that, as someone who does articles about events and the like, it's much more efficient for me to be able to cut/paste/edit from typed material than to transcribe from my abbreviated and hard to read scrawls.

This is entirely false for me.

Writing takes up all of my concentration, and I literally do not hear what the person is saying next while I'm writing down what they just said.

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