Has anyone made the switch from digital to physical and loved it? What kind of notes are you taking, how did you get it to stick?
Journal entries, charts, sketches, lists, schedules, goals, code, math, mind maps, outlines, itineraries
- I became frustrated with digital sketching. Too clumsy.
- I wanted to be creative and flesh out ideas without being next to a computer.
- I found a comfy brand of notebook I enjoy using. In the past, notetaking never stuck with me because I didn't like the notebooks.
One cold winter day, as I was typing out a rough design for a major project, I decided it was just too tedious to work that way. My hands were cold, typing hurt, and my fingers couldn’t keep up with my head. I was trying to track all sorts of interdependent services in my head.
I got up, grabbed a notebook and pen from the shelves, and walked to the checkout counter. Coincidentally, both were Moleskine-branded, but to this day, I know nothing about the company. All I know is that it was far less frustrating to scribble crude diagrams on paper than it was to type them up.
Once I got everything down on paper, I still had to type it all. The scribbles were barely legible to me, let alone the other people on my team.
Pen and paper didn’t replace digital; rather, they augmented it.
Analog and digital are complementary.
A good deal of my technical notes are write-only anyway. Slowing down and jotting things once gave me all the understanding I've ever needed. This is less likely to happen with copy/paste.
I think paper exercises your brain, while these fancy programs attempt to replace it.
You can have both.
My wife uses a smart pen that tracks her writing in her notebooks and creates searchable PDFs.
Every couple of months she unloads it via Bluetooth into iCloud and the pages are available everywhere she is.
She recently turned off the pen's built-in OCR after she found that macOS does a much better job of automatically OCRing the pages just by dropping the PDFs into the file system.
Checking Amazon just now shows that Moleskin has one of its own. But I don't know if that's hers.
https://us-shop.lamy.com/en_us/ncode-technology
I didn’t even know they were still around until recently. I always had Lamy fountain pens as a school kid, many, many years ago.
Nevertheless, I’ve found it incredibly useful to carry a pocket notebook still. Moleskine for a while, but the paper kind of sucks. These days I pick up anything with a sewn binding and hope I get lucky. But anyway, a big reason is social. People react much better when you grab a notebook and start writing than they do if you pull out your phone. One says, “your words are very important to me,” the other says, “I’m ignoring you.”
A notebook’s pages physically accumulate as they’re written on. It forces me to acknowledge them. If I need to write something new and must skip ten sheets before I find a blank one (I rip out and throw away pages as they’re done), it means there’s a fair amount of unrealised stuff that I haven’t gotten to. Time to reevaluate: read what’s in there and decide what still needs to be in there and what realistically has passed its expiration date of relevance/excitement/importance and should be trimmed.
I like to doodle and draw alongside note-taking and there's no substitute for analog there IMO. Plus, being able to write and not be on a device after a long day at work is a relief.
Lack of search can be an issue. But then I sometimes create indexes to things like book notes or stuff I'm learning and that is a pleasure in itself.
Also pairs well with a fountain pen & ink hobby.
Paper and physical notebooks offer motor memory and time delay before data ingestion by cloud analytics.
It's great at producing something that sounds a lot like what I might have written, but I can't trust anything that it says, because it frequently hallucinates numbers, dates, people's names—the exact kind of thing that I take notes to have a good record of.
So I've given up and only use paper now.