Notes on paper (2023)

e.g. do you have a special binder with clear sleeves etc?

Addendum: I maintain a loose leaf binder that documents important ideas/decisions I made during the cource of life. So this habit can be extended to broader domains as well.

Setting aside my pen(person?)ship envy, nicely done. I know I should consider scanning my notes too.

I agree with buying heavier paper. I recently bought some 100gsm paper for my notetaking at work, whereas I was previously stealing whatever they had in their printers. It makes a big difference in the enjoyment of writing, and now that I'm printing my own graph pattern on top of it I feel very liberated to use good paper stock. The graph paper I bought throughout school was never my favorite stuff.

My notebooks are generally are 70gsm, but high quality paper which can withstand wet fountain pens. For serious notes I have cellulose reactive or pigment inks which can't be removed from page without destroying it.

I do the same and many people don't seem the understand that.

Practice notes are more like your preferences: 70-pager subject notebooks, pencil or ballpoint, clips and manila folders. Those are better for drawing in, because they are thin enough and transparent enough to trace through, and therefore you can refine a doodle into a more developed illustration without leaving the notebook. To go smaller, index cards are very portable and stay rigid enough to work outdoors on improvised surfaces. Those are what I like when I want to build up quick reference.

The "archival" materials are art projects: if you've really developed an idea, make it beautiful. This can be 80% tracing off the practice notes through a graphite transfer. Or it can go straight to digital/typed.

I don't aim for linked systems of notes at all. What I've found is that either I copy it all into the one place I need, or I don't need it. The copying is the important part. Once that's done, it's been "loaded" in my head as well, and I can move on.

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Can't even look at the fucking product, I guess.

I suffer from terrible memory retention because of ADHD, so I need to rely to external storage more than most people—yet after obsessing about note taking for a while I reached productivity enlightenment: I really do not need to remember and categorise most of my thoughts and notes. I produce millions of ideas every day, and I have, hopefully, other 50 years ahead of me of potentially interesting thoughts I might feel I want to remember, only to collapse under this ever-increasing weight of nonsense, of things that seemed important one day, and really were not in the grand scheme of things.

No, these days I write, seldomly, on a paper notebook. I embrace my terrible memory and use it as a tool, to aggressively cull every extraneous thought du jour. If it's important, it'll come up again. If it's truly important, it'll keep me awake at night. That is the real problem of digital notes: they never fade away.

The only things I keep in Org Mode are memories from decades ago I am sure I will want to reminisce about when I am 80. Like my family tree, the list of video games I loved as a kid, the important dates of my life.

I still take lots of paper notes. One thing that had been very useful is to make (short, simple) indices in my paper notes and to digitize just the indices.

It takes almost no time. The result is that when I want to look at old noted I can look up where in my digital indices, and then walk over to a shelf and pick out my notes. I've used this *a lot* and it's surprisingly helpful.

Caveat: I'm a mathematician, so I have a lot of paper notes and half-baked ideas. So my paper notes often look more like a set of laboratory notebooks and not idle learning notebooks. I essentoally never look back on noted I take while learning some new subject.

I am using hundreds of sheets of paper at any given moment. Those I don't use, I archive in boxes(if they are important) or throw them away(after digitalising).

I travel a lot, so when I need some notes, I just print them again in color whenever I am.

I only process the notes automatically with an AI in order to search. But nothing sophisticated and storage is cheap so they remain a high quality image, I do not bother making it into a proprietary eink format(although I calculate it for searching).

I do not use the iPad for that, because paper and color pens give me way more real state for way less money and eink capabilities.

1. A budget. 2. Writing preferences and handedness. 3. Preferred writing surface/media. 4. Body type

For 2, that would include:

a) tip type - rollerball, ballpoint, fountain, or 'marker'.

b) tip size/diameter (essentially contact surface area) e.g. 0.17mm-1.0+mm

c) 'ink' type - gel etc.

Handedness matters mostly because left handers typically want the fastest drying ink.

Writing surface (paper) is important because it can drastically change how a pen writes (especially for fountain pens).

The body type might include approx. thickness (compared to an average pencil maybe), body material (metal, plastic, wood), contoured grip (yes/no, material?), and retractability.

If you don't know any of those, I would say just try to define what quality would mean to you.

I've been using these for maybe 14 years? And I've got three dozen more in my desk cause you never know when something you like is gonna get discontinued.

1. Pentel Energel needlepoints 0.5 (BLN75 or the BLN105); refills fit a Lamy Tipo. It's a great everyday pen.

2. Zebra Sarasa 0.5 - lots of variations of this pen with lots of pretty ink colors and cute body styles. I would use it more, if it were available in local shops. I don't order stationery.

I tried the often lauded Pilot G2, but wasn't a fan. It often would smear.

We have a scanner at home but it's only got a glass bed, that's why I hadn't gotten around to doing this for so long.