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Comment by sixtyj | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure it's very personal :) Because everyone has their own reality, workflow and reading a piece either resonates or dissonates with you (personally).

I personally find paper&pen both comforting and unsettling at the same time. Soothing because writing really helps sort out thoughts etc. Mindflow is different from flow "on the computer/phone/tablet".

On the other hand, it's distracting because without an index system (I start each notebook with two blank pages trying to index the contents; every other page has a number) it's easy to get lost.

But today's kids, being digital natives, may take a different approach. Paper&pen may present anxiety for them. So it very much depends on the family we grew up in.

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Don’t try to transform a paper notebook into a database. All those organizational tools are elaborate forms of procrastination.

What I do is write notes in the best format for paper: an append-only log with a date on top. Whether digitally or on paper, I rarely if at all need to consult notes from a long time ago, so the log is good enough for most use cases. In fact, as I mentioned elsewhere, writing by hand is not to store data, it’s a way to effectively digest information and incorporate it into your brain. You’ll get a lot of benefit of writing something and immediately throwing it away, so who cares about indexing it for later.

On the other hand, it's distracting because without an index system (I start each notebook with two blank pages trying to index the contents; every other page has a number) it's easy to get lost.

I use a smart pen that writes in a notebook, but also stores everything I write in memory. Every month or so I export the content of the pen to my computer via Bluetooth as OCRed PDFs. This is because my boss often asks me to account for time I spend doing different things, and I can quickly search the PDFs.

That sounds very intriguing, do you mind sharing the smart pen model?

Not the GP, but I got a Rocketbook from my most recent workplace when I joined. Not quite a smart pen, more like smart paper - each page is grid paper with a QR code at the bottom that you scan with their app to digitise.

how reliable are those smart pens actually? I've always been concerned that you'll end up losing out on crucial or really finely drawn stuff.

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