I would love to see a site where people posted stuff they have been doing for over a year and it still works for them.
Seems like all these blog posts are, "I Started doing this yesterday, and I'm going to do it for the rest of my life... or tomorrow when I blog my next big thing I'm going to do forever."
I'm more interested in stuff people have stuck with and actually works for them when the novelty of the medium wears off.
I'm not saying pen and paper isn't great, but I'm more interested in the system that evolves if you actually use something over a long period of time.
The tool doesn't matter. What works, is to actually do the stuff consistently.
One of the most productive people I know, took her lecture notes in the comment panel of PowerPoint in college, simply because _it's there_ when she open a lecture note. UI wise, it's probably worse than any note taking system that has ever showed up on HN. Nevertheless, she was a straight A student juggling 2 majors, 1 minor, and a lot of social life.
This is what I observed in hyper productive people: some of them have a unique, novel system of organizing their knowledge, but many of them don't. So, having such a system is probably not that important.
And even though I'm not a hyper productive person, this applies to what I'm good at doing as well. You can take away my favorite text editors/plugins/command line tools, and I can still competently write programs. I can code in notepad.exe if I have to. It won't be as convenient, but I can absolutely be productive.
It's the same for writing/reading/thinking. If you can already write, it's fine to try to perfect your workflow. If you can't write, it's not because you have the wrong pen.
I have been keeping sketchbooks since 2010, where I decided "this is something I'm going to do forever". I have started another "I'm doing this forever"-project where I started writing daily in 2020, my obsidian vault linked below is the result. Ask me again in 10 years.
I do a lot of digital notetaking currently, along with more analog index card and sketchbook notetaking. I stopped drawing in 2018 due to work burnout, but hope to pick it back up soon!
I’ve been writing stray thoughts in a pocketbook for about 18 months. That also lead me to keep a modified Scanners Daybook (similar to this post). I’m on my second such notebook and have been doing so for nearly a year.
Finally, I keep a third notebook for travel. The idea being that I don’t want to lose my original, but I probably don’t want to lose my travel one anymore either, so…
In summary, I kept reading about people who prefer paper, or why paper is better than digital, but I just can't get into it. I've tried, with nice tools and a daily commitment to using them, but it just doesn't work for me.
The best compromise I've found is a nice size Rocketbook that I can easily OCR into a notes app later.
I'm also really interested in hearing more about processes that people have been maintaining or making subtle improvements on over a long period of time.
I think that there's an issue of people being less likely to talk about their long running projects or processes because over time they forget the what and why behind it and/or their enthusiasm for it fades away. Accordingly, maybe we should pre-register our thoughts about a process or project at the outset and not publish it until later on, when we can retrospectively talk about our success with it.
I've never made a serious attempt to add paper to my life, the only time I did was in the pre-smartphone era.
But I've definitely had no issue sticking with digital notes. I've changed apps but the process is basically the same. But I'm an outlier in tech, with an extreme high tolerance for complex black box systems, and most techies seem to feel uncomfortable without that 1 to 1 feel paper or DIY coded digital gives.
Paper lovers seem to stick with paper for decades, very consistently, they'll pick up a pen multiple times a day for years.
Some don't seem to have any specific process, they have many notebooks and things for different purposes, and they constantly try new things. I almost wonder if people who really value direct experience and experimentation are drawn to paper more than people who value predictability and control.
I see them make quick notes on napkins, make little areas full of random bits of important information, bullet journal in a nice moleskine, etc.
It's kind of amazing to watch, since some of these things could cause multi hour inconvenience if lost, and they don't mind not having sync. They must have a pretty good memory.
It seems like the real "process" and "tool" is a constant state of flow and change that they move with. Paper use looks to me like a totally different lifestyle and way of relating to the world, information, and your own mind, that probably has dozens of subtle effects.
Like, all my notes are in Obsidian, which makes it almost a second brain.
Paper notes are stored in specific places and you can only access them if you physically have them, which means the only always-accessible thing is still your own mind, and your notes are a bit more distant from yourself.
> I would love to see a site where people posted stuff they have been doing for over a year and it still works for them.
Here's the one thing that's stuck with me:
I started carrying earplugs with me in 2002. I was forced into it by the Army, but I've kept it up all these years because of how great it is. They completely disappear into the pocket, and when you want them, you *really* want them.
But they're great, even when most people wouldn't think they "need" them. Here's some examples:
* Using power tools like a blender, mixer, or lawn mower.
* Sleeping during the day, in a strange place, or around other people (e.g. on an airplane).
* Working in a public space like the library, a coffee shop, a bus, or an airplane.
If you like going to shows or dancing, they're great to have in case you need them.
I think the benefit of earplugs has decreased for the average person since noise cancelling earbuds are so widely available, but in my experience earplugs both block more sound and they block different things. Of course the downside is, you can't listen to audio with them in. But the upside is you never have to worry about charging them.
In my experience, the reusable flange style earplugs are fine for light use, but they can sometimes be painful with extended wear (6+ hrs per day for months at a time). I went out and got a bulk pack of foamies, which I assume will last me the rest of my life. The only downside to the foam earplugs is, if you get them wet, you can reuse them.
I suspect they've worked particularly well for me because I think being bored for some amount of time during the day is healthy, and I find I get distracted by listening to music or podcasts.
The benefit:weight, volume, and price is absolutely amazing.
The only thing that worked for me throughout the life is nested unordered list.
It forces you to process the information on the fly and come up with a structure, that you may be urged to revisit if you feel unsatisfied with its hierarchy.
Learned about it 25 years ago from history professor of all people
Well, a personal anecdote: I have been using pen and paper in a similar fashion as the author for over 20 years. In fact, the last few years I’ve been using literally the same notebook and pen they mention (albeit with different ink).
It works because I much prefer to think with pen and paper. I have a tendency to rush through things and this forces me to slow down. I can always take the results and make them digital, which I often do. Lately this has served as a useful way to re-acquaint myself with previous thoughts and connect them with newer thoughts. And I use Bear for that along with a good keyboard.
I have roughly ten years of notebooks in a box under my desk. They are all some kind of “bullet journal” method: date at the top of the page, items below, index in the back.
I've went through just about every app and I'm back to pencil and journals.
I do use apple notes for just about everything when I have my phone and no pencil/journal nearby.
I think most note taking systems being pushed by "productivity gurus" is compelling at first but then comes a realization that's not how we actually think.
There's merit to things like "building a second brain", but I think it has to start with analog notes.
For me pen and paper being beneficial is a strong signal of an interesting project.
A large part of day-job work doesn't deserve the pen and paper - We just need to track TODOs, links and some other bullet points for them. Digital tools are very good at these because it's optimized for them.
On the other hand, if a problem demands the flexibility and the visual capacity of the pen and paper, it's a good sign of the sufficiently large intellectual problem space it contains.
I can remember rolling my eyes at a writer using a mechanical typewriter decades after word processors had taken over. Did they thaw out of a glacier?
At the same time I love physical media. As a math professor I defend a widespread preference for blackboards over soul-sucking whiteboards, imagining that musicians will still play grand pianos in a century, and they'll still snicker over Ryan Gosling playing a toy piano under the spotlight in that classic movie "La La Land".
I've hoarded Hagoromo chalk; I'm the one with the chalk attaché case in [1]. I've always carried multiple grades of drawing paper, and I've worked through many hundreds of artist grade felt tip pens, scanning all my math notes for thirty years.
Then, pandemic. Just as World War 2 accelerated women in the workplace, the pandemic has accelerated the uptake of digital tools for visual presentation. To teach over Zoom, we needed to embrace drawing on a tablet. I understand that the pandemic radically accelerated similar trends in architecture.
The algorithmic possibilities of drawing on a tablet are truly addictive; returning to paper feels like returning to a mechanical typewriter. For my purposes, Concepts offers the most involving algorithmic experience; I wrote [2] to support my note taking and diagrams for papers. However, Notability offers the least friction. I can have the same psychological relationship to taking notes on my tablet as I had with phyical paper, with the benefits of algorithmic reuse. (Pushing the envelope exposes how inconsistently Notability handles implicit layers, but one learns to draw around this.)
In a few decades, after all living mathematicians have drawn on tablets since birth, math will be far more visual, conveying ideas with far more immediacy. Math communication is now still largely constrained by its resemblance to typeset prose. Ever leave a startup because reading your coworkers' code put you in "Just kill me now!" territory? I did. Mathematicians write the equivalent of bad code, rarely actually machine-checked, to formalize their ideas. Other mathematicians try to decipher this code, to reverse-engineer the ideas. We declare people who can actually do this as having a gift for mathematics. As I learn to teach combinatorics more visually, my classes swell with students who share my frustration.
I've come to realize this summer that I pretty much despise mathematics. I can't wait for the visual revolution. This revolution didn't take hold on physical paper; one needs a digital accelerant.
I've wondered why I hear so much about chalk but not about mechanical pencil leads. I'm so picky about mine that whenever I find some I really like, I lay up a hoard in case it gets discontinued.
Articles like this worship the act of writing on paper, not the process of iteratively putting down thoughts and shaping them.
I use Notion. I also use paper.
I tried using "fancy writing equipment" that ended up too nice for me to scribble on. Because any momentary idea is garbage and not worthy of this nice acid-free, leather bound notebook.
So no I have a stack of very cheap legal notepads that I just put whatever I want on. Sometimes I'll rip the pages out. Sometimes I'll trash them. Eventually the good ideas take shape, and I'll move them to Notion
I started bullet journaling with pen and paper and it has changed my life. Intentionality -- that's exactly right. When I write I feel intentional.
I've also dove into the world of nice paper and fountain pens. I've always had hand cramps when writing, whether using a cheap Bic or a Pilot G7. With fountain pens, that's all gone, and writing is effortless. You can get started with this cheaply by getting a platinum preppy fine or extra-fine pen ($4), and a bottle of ink ($10). You want a fine or extra-fine nib, because anything else will feather and bleed on cheap paper, but fine or extra-fine works just fine on cheap paper.
Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll rarely need to refill it.
Gel pens can arguably be as enjoyable to use as fountain pens, with easier refills and less to no need for maintenance. Gel pens also work on all types of paper, with no concerns about smudging due to drying.
Pentel Energel refills are very smooth, much more so than Pilot G7 cartridges (but not water-resistant). Zebra Sarasa refills are almost as smooth (and are water-resistant, which can be useful if you get caught in the rain).
I use both gel pens and fountain pens, with gel pens for quick notes and writing while on transit. I could comfortably get by with only gel pens—many people have, as I've seen forum posts by former mathematics and physics students who posted photographs of dozens of refills used up over their degrees. I still prefer fountain pens when I'm at a desk, though it's a pleasant luxury for the smoothness—any significant strain when handwriting for many pages went away when upgrading to higher-end gel pens.
I am trying to use my tablet for writing down notes while thinking, it kind of works, but I really miss the sound and feeling of writing with a fountain pen. Somehow writing with a fountain pen in a quiet room makes me feel patient, and less stressed by problems.
> You want a fine or extra-fine nib, because anything else will feather and bleed on cheap paper, but fine or extra-fine works just fine on cheap paper.
It does depend on the ink, too. I have a Parker XF nib that will absolutely bleed through my notebook, which wasn't exactly cheap either. Not sure if it's supposed to be actually "good paper", though (Leichtturm), but I'm quite disappointed.
Diamine ink will take forever to dry on that paper and will be seen from the other side. And it's not even a particularly dark shade of blue. Regular supermarket-bought Parker ink (Quink washable blue) works much better.
> Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll rarely need to refill it.
Please expand on this. I’m utterly confused as to what you mean and why you’d need it.
Uniball vision rollerball pens basically glide on the page, and they're portable unlike fountain pens. They're also significantly cheaper than buying a fountain pen + ink(s). As much as I love writing with my Sailor ProGear Slim F/EF nib fountain pens, inks + traveling = a nice mess waiting to happen.
I had a pelikan souveran r800 that was refillable, but sadly I lost it on one of my return trips. Now I just travel with 3 leuchtturm notebooks (A6-grid, A5-grid, B5-lines-softcover) and a bunch of uniball pens.
Initial notes are almost always on paper, in a good notebook, written with a fountain pen. I also almost always have a small notebook and pen on my person.
BUT once something becomes a real project I need to track, or if the notes are important enough that I want them searchable later, I transcribe and summarize into the appropriate Orgmode buffer.
I retain things written longhand better, but this act of review & summarization is like a turbocharger for that recollection. (Not for nothing, but one old-school study hack I read about back in the 80s was "type up your class notes". It dated from an era before computers, so it wasn't about search or indexing. It was about the act of review inherent in the transcription.)
People thinking pen and paper is simple have intentionally made it simple. Have you considered how many different kinds of paper/notebooks/slides/cards, kinds of pen/pencil/brush? Soon you'll start fiddling with your pens and papers, as some comments here have already started suggesting their personal favorite, including making your custom "eye dropper" pen.
Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt,
ed note.txt
,
my previous notes
more notes
...
my last notes
a
now just write you new notes down
don't worry about anything
don't even worry about editing previous lines
just write
and done
.
w
q
> People thinking pen and paper is simple have intentionally made it simple.
> Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt, <ed session snipped> And that's it.
Surely that's also intentionally making a digital interface simple? I mean, both kinds—all kinds—of interfaces can be made simpler or made more complex depending on the user's tastes. That fact itself doesn't, I think, speak to any virtue or lack thereof on the part of any interface paradigm.
Last year i went in the other direction: analog to digital.
Onenote is my tool of choice - it's basically a really awesome piece of paper:
you can write per hand on your tablet, you can type to text, you can create lists, tables, convert handwriting to text, insert audio, photos, shapes, screenshots, first text, copy text to and from other apps, tag information, hyperlink other pages and notebooks and even pieces of text; you can host in in cloud or locally, the page is unlimited and you can cluster notebooks into sections and notebooks, move and copy pages around and even collaborate with other people in real time. It's on all devices you use, synced.
It's everything your notebook is plus so much more. Hands down best room I've ever used.
"I remember in my college chemistry classes, we were instructed never to tear off or hide any error we made in our lab notebooks. Instead, we should mark it with a strikethrough. "
+1 OMG Chemistry notebooks FTW. I was always a pencil person and when the professor literally made us cross out our mistakes it felt gross to see the wasted space for 'nonsense', so inefficient. Only later I come to realize that all creation is not for naught. Observations made and recorded for the record are invaluable when seen from a different time perspective. If DNA can have built in redundancy, then evolution is revealing a good lesson to replicate for note taking as well.
People's time horizons are too short when thinking about so called 'ultimate' note taking/brainstorming/productivity solutions. What system did Grace Hopper use? Feynmann?
I can take a trip to Mom's and fetch that chemistry notebook to retrieve that 1980s information. No retro hardware, searching for encryption keys, old floppy disk/zip drive media players, no defunct internet companies to contact about 'my' data, proprietary formats to parse, etc. Open that 40 year old notebook and read it.
To be sure, I own the iPads/android tablets, note apps, desktop apps, wikis, cloud services and other digital debris that in the end is/was wasted friction, $$$ and energy. Too many dependencies.
I stick with a low-end laptop with plain text on vim and emacs -nox and (mobile) self-made paper notebooks and enjoyable wonderful fountain pens [1] I'm really trying to look back toward memory like the ancients but that is the ultimate practice.[2]
Life is too short to conform to digital tools. Enjoy both! There is much forgotten freedom to be rediscovered with the analog hand.
In chemistry etc the properly-kept lab notebook is also an almost chain of evidence thing, both for scientific (integrity) and commercial (patents and such) reasons. I.e. never erase, only strike-through so previous error is still readable, numbered pages, each section dated and signed, properly kept index, ... all make it a lot harder to falsify things after the fact. (Nowadays there are also digital record-keeping tools that do timestamped signatures and such instead)
If you have a notebook / sketchbook / journal and it needs to be held open with an object look for another notebook [1]. It seems trivial but that is a poorly designed notebook.
Sigh. I really sympathize with this, and I totally think that analog is not dead and will never die. And vinyl records!
Despite that, I find that in own writing, I always think I'm going to initiate it on paper, but then I start writing fragments on the computer, thinking about them, revising, etc. etc. I lay it aside & think about it, and then revise some more. In the end, I think it's about as creative as pen-and-paper.
I hope. I should try the pen again just to make sure.
I've had similar experiences where I didn't need any paper to plan out and write shorter articles. However, screenwriter Thomas Schnauz provided a great example of how handwriting was useful when writing scripts for Better Call Saul. He posted a photo of a cork board with dozens of pinned index cards with handwritten ideas for scenes. It looks like the cards can then be rearranged or substituted out without losing the past drafts: https://twitter.com/TomSchnauz/status/1296912710601306113/ph...
Handwriting has also been useful for taking notes where diagrams and imagery was important, such as when researching what a good user interface could look like, for a web application. You could give it a try if you decide to write an article that analyzes or incorporates a significant amount of imagery, or has a lot of parts, like a lengthy script, fictional story, or in-depth report.
For me, what feels like quicksand, is writing on paper. I type very fast on my keyboard 120+ WPM. I want to get my thoughts out of my head as soon as possible, and shape them fast with immediate feedback. My notes are very random and they're all over the place, yet all easily interconnected and searchable because of backlinks and some minimal organization. If I were taking physical notes, I would not have as many notes as I have now, and would be less motivated. The computer is an extension of myself at this point, and it feels more natural than writing on paper.
I think the author might have chosen the traditional way of note-taking, because he just doesn't have the patience or the particular obsession to tailor the note-taking system. Which is fair, but it might do him a disservice if he ends up impatient with the system he is building now. There is a reason, after all, that so many people switched to digital. Even if the author prefers the romanticized way of old note-taking, it is undoubtedly inefficient. It's an experience akin to using ${Editor} over Vim.
> I want to get my thoughts out of my head as soon as possible
Why, is there something wrong with them?
> I think the author might have chosen the traditional way of note-taking, because he just doesn't have the patience or the particular obsession to tailor the note-taking system.
Because nothing says "This is naturally the best way for humans to do something" as clearly as it requiring patience or a "particular obsession", right?
It depends what you're optimizing for. I'm not sure I'd consider volume of notes to be a positive metric. I'm not convinced motivation is either.
When I handwrite I absolutely write less. It's harder and slower. But for the types of things I use handwriting for I think that's a plus. I tend to put more thought into what I'm recording. In my personal experience the outcomes are better.
I type notes as well, very frequently, but for archival content. Things I want to be able to reference in the future.
Interesting how the tool integrates with the mind.
I used to strictly be a pencil and notebook person... to be mentally engaged fully (whether that is thinking, problem solving, planning, recalling, etc.) I had to use pencil and paper.
But improvements in text editors, and their convenience, lead to me using them more and more to capture ideas, lists, etc., and one day I realized I had switched.
Now I need to use sublime text to be mentally fully engaged.
If I could find something better I'd try switching again. Needs top-notch text editing integrated well with something like Apple Pencil. (Apple notes app is subpar when it comes to text, doesn't integrate text and pencil drawing/writing very well, and although I just want basic drawing/writing tools, it doesn't do that very well either.)
On my iPad I use GoodNotes and it's pretty good. I've also tried Notability and it's quite good as well but GoodNotes is what I started with and it's what I'm most efficient in.
One of my kids uses OneNote from Microsoft. Their notebook / section / page metaphor seems too fiddly for me although I know some people like it.
I was recently reading Steal Like an Artist and one of the sections referenced having an analog desk and a digital desk, the former for ideation and creativity modes, the latter for editing and revising modes, and I found that salient.
I love my fountain pens and paper, but for permanence and immediacy reasons. It's really hard to put a file attachment for safe-keeping on your hardcover journal.
I love OneNote, but for ease of dumping screenshots, digital ink annotations, file attachments, and generally building up context around a bit of specific information reasons. It's really hard to put your sticker from your family-member's letter on your OneNote notebook.
And those are two different tasks, just like the desks example above.
Even a simple to-do list. Crossing an item off with pen on paper provides a much more satisfying feeling of accomplishment than deleting the task or striking through the text in an app.
I started buying custom printed notebooks from the scientific journal companies. For $10 a journal you can get a very niche hard cover journal, with page numbers (if you like), plain, ruled or grid paper, and embossed with your name (or whatever). It's so satisfying. Combine that with a nice fountain pen and ink and it's quite the experience.
It's my proffered way to take notes, think through problems.
I wrote code on paper occasionally. Anyone else? Don't see an existing comment about it.
Notebook, multicoloured pen, usually C or lisp syntax. Tends to be thinking through data structures. Kills the temptation to check my work by running it which forces me to think harder about the intended execution.
edit: used to use whiteboards for the same purpose but sadly don't have one at present
I still do. Generally data structures and flow more than actual code these days, but sometimes I'll also sketch out an API or something by hand. I find it tremendously helpful for cultivating understanding, designing systems, and solving problems!
I once commented to use one color for code and another for everything else (when learning a programming language). It got more upvotes than I would have expected, so others must be coding on paper as well.
Idea -> diagram -> pseudocode -> code. All on paper. Prefer loose sheets so I can spread them out. Mentally run through it and "printf" to the margins. Concise languages only.
Is Zettelkasten the new Getting Things Done yet? I feel like I'm seeing essays about How I Zettel with the same frequency I used to see essays about How I GTD back when 43folders was pioneering the genre of "productivity influencer".
(edit: amusingly enough, I find this near the end: "I also mentioned Zettelkasten many times in this post, but I don’t do that anymore–I just did a 1-month dry run and it felt tiring.")
I've come to the limited experience conclusion that Zettelkasten is a great tool if you are doing detailed non-fiction writing, blogging, or research, and plan to for more than a year. Outside of these scenarios its just storing information that you may/ may not ever refer to or recall.
I never went all in on GTD, but some principles stuck with me: key is having a trusted system where I can capture things that will then SHOW me those things when I need to see them.
I used Omnifocus for a while, but eventually migrated to OrgMode as a better fit for my life (even though I'm not really an emacs person overall).
I find it productive, probably because it helps me collect the various ideas and notes from things I've read into a single place, and is a good mindfulness practice.
1. It appears the author hasn’t been doing this long, judging by their Twitter feed. I’m more interested when somebody’s been at something for a year or two. The whole “I’ve switched to $thing and it’s changed everything!” is always fun when it was written soon after the switch. Even funnier when you visit it a few months after and they’re back on the old thing. See also operating system switch posts.
2. “Most” notes systems aren’t using Zettelkasten. Most note takers don’t even know what it is.
3. I take handwritten notes and drawings all the time. Then I scan and OCR them into a PDF with my iPhone that goes into Obsidian via Shortcuts automations. This way it’s searchable and I always have them. I don’t have to remember to carry a handcrafted Midori/Moleskine around everywhere.
I think these are fair gripes. Would love to add my perspective:
1. I've been handwriting notes for about 2 years now, after typing all my notes before that. I generally agree with the author's points. My take on it, which I think they sort of had their own spin on, is that "notes" is an unhelpfully broad category. You record different things for different reasons. A todo is very different from jotting down a novel idea. So I have an Obsidian vault and a notebook.
The notebook is for my ephemeral notes. That includes any information whose lifespan is less than ~1 week, so usually quick thoughts about imminent meetings or todos for the next day or so. It also includes any time I'm taking notes strictly for my sake when the information can be referenced later. For example, my own personal thoughts during a meeting that has shared notes. In my opinion handwriting is better for that sort of stuff: I think it focuses you, it slows down your thinking a little, and it makes you more likely to remember what you wrote.
Obsidian is for archival notes. Things I may need to reference in the future. That's where I keep any longer running todos/projects, as well as any more detailed/complex info that I might not remember but want to reference in the future. Not infrequently I'll take something I jotted down in my notebook and add it to Obsidian if it seems like it might be useful in the future.
I find this split to be very effective for me personally. YMMV!
2. Totally agree. I doubt most people need or benefit from actually getting into Zettelkasten.
3. That seems very reasonable. I think for me personally it would be a bit of a hassle given how rarely I have a need to go back through my written notes.
So yeah tl;dr would be: I think handwritten notes are the ideal way to record information that you're not going to need for more than a few days tops, but I'd hate to have to dig through my old notebooks looking for something.
I've noticed I write for longer and with greater focus when writing by hand on the reMarkable 2 tablet.
Writing in the reMarkable feels as analog as writing on paper does. I can convert my handwriting into digital text and email it to myself for editing and digital archiving right from the tablet.
I've also tried handwriting with ink in Moleskine notebooks and transcribing pages with the Google Translate API, which works surprisingly well.
I love the analog method. Yet I want to document my writing digitally for easy retrieval when editing and looking for content to publish.
What other methods are people using to digitize, transcribe, and archive "analog" handwriting?
I feel people (myself included) are drawn to notetaking/PKM topics because there's a fear that others have unlocked a secret to learning the layperson hasn't yet discovered.
In my experience observing my peers, aside from intellectual horsepower, thinking about topics from first principles is the best way to learn. This has nothing to do with Logseq, Obsidian, Zettels, paper, workflows, Literature notes, or any other fad.
Don't understand something? Go back a step and understand that. Even better if you have to explain it to someone else. Then see how you structure it into a latticework of knowledge, as Charlie Munger would say.
Does anyone have a good video for hand position with fountain pens?
My handwriting is bad, because my hand doesn't "hover", it's firmly planted on the table, and I need to lift it and reposition it every few words.
All the videos I've seen make it seem so easy, but when I try to emulate those hand positions, my pen's nib doesn't even reach the paper. They glide effortlessly with the smallest two fingers lightly touching the table. I need to lower my hand so three fingers and the wrist are again very much on the table.
Here is a trick for learning how to make your hand “hover” that I was taught by the old pros when I joined the animation industry.
Take a pencil. A wooden one, not a mechanical one. Sharpen it. Then hold it so that the entire side of the exposed cone of graphite touches the paper, rather than the tip. Your thumb will be on one side of the pencil, with all four fingers in a row on the opposite side, rather than sort of clustered around the front of the pencil.
Now try to draw some lines. You will get very broad lines and probably have little control, because this grip forces you to keep your wrist still, and gives you very little room for your fingers to move the pencil either. It will feel very weird and awkward at first! You’ll have to make a bunch of big, broad motions because you’ve probably never tried to make fine motions like this with your arm in your entire life. It’s okay, you’ll get better!
A great way to get better: take a piece of paper, and draw a circle in the upper left corner, just barely touching the edges of the paper. Don’t worry about making a nice circle, don’t go over it multiple times, just make one simple sorta-circular gesture. Now move to the right and draw another circle, just touching the first one and the tip of the paper. Repeat for a whole row, then do another row that just touches the bottom of the previous row, until you’ve filled the whole page.
Your circles will probably look better by the end of the page. I did this every morning as a warm-up for one of my first animation jobs, and the circles got a lot better, and tighter, over the course of not much time.
Once you have learnt this, you can easily transfer this new control of your arm motions to tools held in other grips. I mostly work digitally, and have to address the tablet with the stylus’ tip for it to register, but I still move my arm with the fluidity learnt from this exercise.
As a bonus this is also a lot better for your arm. Keeping the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Fairy away is very much a thing grizzled old animators wanted to teach the new kids coming in, they’d seen great careers cut short by injuries.
(You could also probably keep holding the pen in a more vertical fashion and use a wrist brace to keep your wrist from moving, if this is all too damn weird for you.)
I think OP touches on it but even with a graphics tablet, there is no way I can create simple drawings and sketches on the computer compared to pen and paper. Even a simple box in powerpoint is:
1) Check if you are on the correct ribbon
2) Click the box icon (unless you have millions of shortcuts setup)
3) Drag and drop it
4) Maybe change the defaults which you don't like (colour, thickness etc)
5) If you are typing text in it, that rarely works out well without clicking other buttons
in general, I use my computer for taking notes. But I recently started using pencil and paper for designing quick low-fidelity mockups for things that my team is going to implement and it's wildly better than working on the computer for several reasons:
- pencil/paper is just so much quicker
- if you think it, you can draw it... quickly. It's more flexible.
- key advantage: when non-engineers (or even engineers) see higher fidelity mockups, it's very easy to get caught up on some of the details like where a button goes or how big the font is. With pencil/paper, everyone realizes that it's a rough sketch and that the final product isn't going to look this way.
After I write things up, I scan them with an app to a PDF file and then email that out (or attach to a ticket). Of course, pen/pencil isn't great for final designs... there's no substitute for a high-fidelity mockup of what somethings is supposed to look like. But I find it very useful to start with the UX and then work on things like CSS last.
Some key tools I use:
notepad: $5
pencil: $7 (I really splurged here for the pentel Orenz, my favorite mechanical pencil, but a $1-2 pencil will be 95% as good)
6" ruler: $1.76
1/2" binder (I like to keep my drawings): $4
I've thought about investing in a ReMarkable tablet, but I find it hard to justify the cost since pen/pencil work so well.
Tangentially related question, maybe someone can explain why graph/quad/grid ruled notepads are harder to find and way more expensive. I can easily get college ruled notepad for $.50-$1 almost in any department store, but graph ruled are significantly more expensive ($4-$5) and less common.
iPad Pro (12.9 inch) + iPencil + GoodNotes (with zip-file backup) gives me best of two worlds. I scribble my notes with iPencil in GoodNotes. GoodNotes does OCR and its search functionality is good. It allows for backups in a form of zip archives (cloud backup option also available). Unlike Notability (subscription), GoodNotes app is one-time-fee.
How about a browser extension that runs a timer until you're done reading all those links that got opened up from a productivity article ? Elapsed time: "Yikes!"
You mean paper with a grid of squares on it, right? Because all the DIN A-series paper formats are rectangular, not square (as I first misread your meaning).
I recommend a separate clip-on book light (or clip-on LED light) that is bright, lightweight, and USB-rechargable.
If the LED is attached to the pen, the weight (of both the battery and light) will be significant and can tire you out for long writing periods. You would also have a better experience for the light to not move too much while writing, which will happen as you move the pen along the paper.
user00012-ab|3 years ago
Seems like all these blog posts are, "I Started doing this yesterday, and I'm going to do it for the rest of my life... or tomorrow when I blog my next big thing I'm going to do forever."
I'm more interested in stuff people have stuck with and actually works for them when the novelty of the medium wears off.
I'm not saying pen and paper isn't great, but I'm more interested in the system that evolves if you actually use something over a long period of time.
powersnail|3 years ago
One of the most productive people I know, took her lecture notes in the comment panel of PowerPoint in college, simply because _it's there_ when she open a lecture note. UI wise, it's probably worse than any note taking system that has ever showed up on HN. Nevertheless, she was a straight A student juggling 2 majors, 1 minor, and a lot of social life.
This is what I observed in hyper productive people: some of them have a unique, novel system of organizing their knowledge, but many of them don't. So, having such a system is probably not that important.
And even though I'm not a hyper productive person, this applies to what I'm good at doing as well. You can take away my favorite text editors/plugins/command line tools, and I can still competently write programs. I can code in notepad.exe if I have to. It won't be as convenient, but I can absolutely be productive.
It's the same for writing/reading/thinking. If you can already write, it's fine to try to perfect your workflow. If you can't write, it's not because you have the wrong pen.
ljvmiranda|3 years ago
larve|3 years ago
I do a lot of digital notetaking currently, along with more analog index card and sketchbook notetaking. I stopped drawing in 2018 due to work burnout, but hope to pick it back up soon!
https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/ZK/Sketchbooks
https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/Public/My+Obsidian+workfl...
s0rce|3 years ago
codazoda|3 years ago
Finally, I keep a third notebook for travel. The idea being that I don’t want to lose my original, but I probably don’t want to lose my travel one anymore either, so…
Anyway, this can be a successful long term thing.
kstrauser|3 years ago
In summary, I kept reading about people who prefer paper, or why paper is better than digital, but I just can't get into it. I've tried, with nice tools and a daily commitment to using them, but it just doesn't work for me.
The best compromise I've found is a nice size Rocketbook that I can easily OCR into a notes app later.
bthallplz|3 years ago
I think that there's an issue of people being less likely to talk about their long running projects or processes because over time they forget the what and why behind it and/or their enthusiasm for it fades away. Accordingly, maybe we should pre-register our thoughts about a process or project at the outset and not publish it until later on, when we can retrospectively talk about our success with it.
eternityforest|3 years ago
But I've definitely had no issue sticking with digital notes. I've changed apps but the process is basically the same. But I'm an outlier in tech, with an extreme high tolerance for complex black box systems, and most techies seem to feel uncomfortable without that 1 to 1 feel paper or DIY coded digital gives.
Paper lovers seem to stick with paper for decades, very consistently, they'll pick up a pen multiple times a day for years.
Some don't seem to have any specific process, they have many notebooks and things for different purposes, and they constantly try new things. I almost wonder if people who really value direct experience and experimentation are drawn to paper more than people who value predictability and control.
I see them make quick notes on napkins, make little areas full of random bits of important information, bullet journal in a nice moleskine, etc.
It's kind of amazing to watch, since some of these things could cause multi hour inconvenience if lost, and they don't mind not having sync. They must have a pretty good memory.
It seems like the real "process" and "tool" is a constant state of flow and change that they move with. Paper use looks to me like a totally different lifestyle and way of relating to the world, information, and your own mind, that probably has dozens of subtle effects.
Like, all my notes are in Obsidian, which makes it almost a second brain.
Paper notes are stored in specific places and you can only access them if you physically have them, which means the only always-accessible thing is still your own mind, and your notes are a bit more distant from yourself.
nordsieck|3 years ago
Here's the one thing that's stuck with me:
I started carrying earplugs with me in 2002. I was forced into it by the Army, but I've kept it up all these years because of how great it is. They completely disappear into the pocket, and when you want them, you *really* want them.
But they're great, even when most people wouldn't think they "need" them. Here's some examples:
* Using power tools like a blender, mixer, or lawn mower. * Sleeping during the day, in a strange place, or around other people (e.g. on an airplane). * Working in a public space like the library, a coffee shop, a bus, or an airplane.
If you like going to shows or dancing, they're great to have in case you need them.
I think the benefit of earplugs has decreased for the average person since noise cancelling earbuds are so widely available, but in my experience earplugs both block more sound and they block different things. Of course the downside is, you can't listen to audio with them in. But the upside is you never have to worry about charging them.
In my experience, the reusable flange style earplugs are fine for light use, but they can sometimes be painful with extended wear (6+ hrs per day for months at a time). I went out and got a bulk pack of foamies, which I assume will last me the rest of my life. The only downside to the foam earplugs is, if you get them wet, you can reuse them.
I suspect they've worked particularly well for me because I think being bored for some amount of time during the day is healthy, and I find I get distracted by listening to music or podcasts.
The benefit:weight, volume, and price is absolutely amazing.
wellthisisgreat|3 years ago
Learned about it 25 years ago from history professor of all people
justajot|3 years ago
It works because I much prefer to think with pen and paper. I have a tendency to rush through things and this forces me to slow down. I can always take the results and make them digital, which I often do. Lately this has served as a useful way to re-acquaint myself with previous thoughts and connect them with newer thoughts. And I use Bear for that along with a good keyboard.
bsima|3 years ago
thenerdhead|3 years ago
I do use apple notes for just about everything when I have my phone and no pencil/journal nearby.
I think most note taking systems being pushed by "productivity gurus" is compelling at first but then comes a realization that's not how we actually think.
There's merit to things like "building a second brain", but I think it has to start with analog notes.
flakiness|3 years ago
A large part of day-job work doesn't deserve the pen and paper - We just need to track TODOs, links and some other bullet points for them. Digital tools are very good at these because it's optimized for them.
On the other hand, if a problem demands the flexibility and the visual capacity of the pen and paper, it's a good sign of the sufficiently large intellectual problem space it contains.
d4rkp4ttern|3 years ago
Syzygies|3 years ago
At the same time I love physical media. As a math professor I defend a widespread preference for blackboards over soul-sucking whiteboards, imagining that musicians will still play grand pianos in a century, and they'll still snicker over Ryan Gosling playing a toy piano under the spotlight in that classic movie "La La Land".
I've hoarded Hagoromo chalk; I'm the one with the chalk attaché case in [1]. I've always carried multiple grades of drawing paper, and I've worked through many hundreds of artist grade felt tip pens, scanning all my math notes for thirty years.
Then, pandemic. Just as World War 2 accelerated women in the workplace, the pandemic has accelerated the uptake of digital tools for visual presentation. To teach over Zoom, we needed to embrace drawing on a tablet. I understand that the pandemic radically accelerated similar trends in architecture.
The algorithmic possibilities of drawing on a tablet are truly addictive; returning to paper feels like returning to a mechanical typewriter. For my purposes, Concepts offers the most involving algorithmic experience; I wrote [2] to support my note taking and diagrams for papers. However, Notability offers the least friction. I can have the same psychological relationship to taking notes on my tablet as I had with phyical paper, with the benefits of algorithmic reuse. (Pushing the envelope exposes how inconsistently Notability handles implicit layers, but one learns to draw around this.)
In a few decades, after all living mathematicians have drawn on tablets since birth, math will be far more visual, conveying ideas with far more immediacy. Math communication is now still largely constrained by its resemblance to typeset prose. Ever leave a startup because reading your coworkers' code put you in "Just kill me now!" territory? I did. Mathematicians write the equivalent of bad code, rarely actually machine-checked, to formalize their ideas. Other mathematicians try to decipher this code, to reverse-engineer the ideas. We declare people who can actually do this as having a gift for mathematics. As I learn to teach combinatorics more visually, my classes swell with students who share my frustration.
I've come to realize this summer that I pretty much despise mathematics. I can't wait for the visual revolution. This revolution didn't take hold on physical paper; one needs a digital accelerant.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8 [2] https://github.com/Syzygies/concepts-artboards
Archelaos|3 years ago
To this day it is a real mystery to me why people would prefer whiteboards over blackboards.
wrp|3 years ago
yawnxyz|3 years ago
I use Notion. I also use paper.
I tried using "fancy writing equipment" that ended up too nice for me to scribble on. Because any momentary idea is garbage and not worthy of this nice acid-free, leather bound notebook.
So no I have a stack of very cheap legal notepads that I just put whatever I want on. Sometimes I'll rip the pages out. Sometimes I'll trash them. Eventually the good ideas take shape, and I'll move them to Notion
noir_lord|3 years ago
For everything else there is markdown.
mikeholler|3 years ago
I've also dove into the world of nice paper and fountain pens. I've always had hand cramps when writing, whether using a cheap Bic or a Pilot G7. With fountain pens, that's all gone, and writing is effortless. You can get started with this cheaply by getting a platinum preppy fine or extra-fine pen ($4), and a bottle of ink ($10). You want a fine or extra-fine nib, because anything else will feather and bleed on cheap paper, but fine or extra-fine works just fine on cheap paper.
Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll rarely need to refill it.
foldedcornice|3 years ago
Pentel Energel refills are very smooth, much more so than Pilot G7 cartridges (but not water-resistant). Zebra Sarasa refills are almost as smooth (and are water-resistant, which can be useful if you get caught in the rain).
I use both gel pens and fountain pens, with gel pens for quick notes and writing while on transit. I could comfortably get by with only gel pens—many people have, as I've seen forum posts by former mathematics and physics students who posted photographs of dozens of refills used up over their degrees. I still prefer fountain pens when I'm at a desk, though it's a pleasant luxury for the smoothness—any significant strain when handwriting for many pages went away when upgrading to higher-end gel pens.
pca006132|3 years ago
vladvasiliu|3 years ago
It does depend on the ink, too. I have a Parker XF nib that will absolutely bleed through my notebook, which wasn't exactly cheap either. Not sure if it's supposed to be actually "good paper", though (Leichtturm), but I'm quite disappointed.
Diamine ink will take forever to dry on that paper and will be seen from the other side. And it's not even a particularly dark shade of blue. Regular supermarket-bought Parker ink (Quink washable blue) works much better.
tartoran|3 years ago
Please expand on this. I’m utterly confused as to what you mean and why you’d need it.
huimang|3 years ago
I had a pelikan souveran r800 that was refillable, but sadly I lost it on one of my return trips. Now I just travel with 3 leuchtturm notebooks (A6-grid, A5-grid, B5-lines-softcover) and a bunch of uniball pens.
ubermonkey|3 years ago
Initial notes are almost always on paper, in a good notebook, written with a fountain pen. I also almost always have a small notebook and pen on my person.
BUT once something becomes a real project I need to track, or if the notes are important enough that I want them searchable later, I transcribe and summarize into the appropriate Orgmode buffer.
I retain things written longhand better, but this act of review & summarization is like a turbocharger for that recollection. (Not for nothing, but one old-school study hack I read about back in the 80s was "type up your class notes". It dated from an era before computers, so it wasn't about search or indexing. It was about the act of review inherent in the transcription.)
jxy|3 years ago
Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt,
And that's it.JadeNB|3 years ago
> Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt, <ed session snipped> And that's it.
Surely that's also intentionally making a digital interface simple? I mean, both kinds—all kinds—of interfaces can be made simpler or made more complex depending on the user's tastes. That fact itself doesn't, I think, speak to any virtue or lack thereof on the part of any interface paradigm.
wainstead|3 years ago
ontouchstart|3 years ago
…
EOF
iammjm|3 years ago
rasengan0|3 years ago
+1 OMG Chemistry notebooks FTW. I was always a pencil person and when the professor literally made us cross out our mistakes it felt gross to see the wasted space for 'nonsense', so inefficient. Only later I come to realize that all creation is not for naught. Observations made and recorded for the record are invaluable when seen from a different time perspective. If DNA can have built in redundancy, then evolution is revealing a good lesson to replicate for note taking as well.
People's time horizons are too short when thinking about so called 'ultimate' note taking/brainstorming/productivity solutions. What system did Grace Hopper use? Feynmann?
I can take a trip to Mom's and fetch that chemistry notebook to retrieve that 1980s information. No retro hardware, searching for encryption keys, old floppy disk/zip drive media players, no defunct internet companies to contact about 'my' data, proprietary formats to parse, etc. Open that 40 year old notebook and read it.
To be sure, I own the iPads/android tablets, note apps, desktop apps, wikis, cloud services and other digital debris that in the end is/was wasted friction, $$$ and energy. Too many dependencies.
I stick with a low-end laptop with plain text on vim and emacs -nox and (mobile) self-made paper notebooks and enjoyable wonderful fountain pens [1] I'm really trying to look back toward memory like the ancients but that is the ultimate practice.[2]
Life is too short to conform to digital tools. Enjoy both! There is much forgotten freedom to be rediscovered with the analog hand.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
detaro|3 years ago
lancesells|3 years ago
1. https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/assets/png/pen-and-paper/bla...
emadabdulrahim|3 years ago
Cupertino95014|3 years ago
Despite that, I find that in own writing, I always think I'm going to initiate it on paper, but then I start writing fragments on the computer, thinking about them, revising, etc. etc. I lay it aside & think about it, and then revise some more. In the end, I think it's about as creative as pen-and-paper.
I hope. I should try the pen again just to make sure.
foldedcornice|3 years ago
Handwriting has also been useful for taking notes where diagrams and imagery was important, such as when researching what a good user interface could look like, for a web application. You could give it a try if you decide to write an article that analyzes or incorporates a significant amount of imagery, or has a lot of parts, like a lengthy script, fictional story, or in-depth report.
coldblues|3 years ago
I think the author might have chosen the traditional way of note-taking, because he just doesn't have the patience or the particular obsession to tailor the note-taking system. Which is fair, but it might do him a disservice if he ends up impatient with the system he is building now. There is a reason, after all, that so many people switched to digital. Even if the author prefers the romanticized way of old note-taking, it is undoubtedly inefficient. It's an experience akin to using ${Editor} over Vim.
CRConrad|3 years ago
Why, is there something wrong with them?
> I think the author might have chosen the traditional way of note-taking, because he just doesn't have the patience or the particular obsession to tailor the note-taking system.
Because nothing says "This is naturally the best way for humans to do something" as clearly as it requiring patience or a "particular obsession", right?
tomtheelder|3 years ago
When I handwrite I absolutely write less. It's harder and slower. But for the types of things I use handwriting for I think that's a plus. I tend to put more thought into what I'm recording. In my personal experience the outcomes are better.
I type notes as well, very frequently, but for archival content. Things I want to be able to reference in the future.
emadabdulrahim|3 years ago
jmull|3 years ago
I used to strictly be a pencil and notebook person... to be mentally engaged fully (whether that is thinking, problem solving, planning, recalling, etc.) I had to use pencil and paper.
But improvements in text editors, and their convenience, lead to me using them more and more to capture ideas, lists, etc., and one day I realized I had switched.
Now I need to use sublime text to be mentally fully engaged.
If I could find something better I'd try switching again. Needs top-notch text editing integrated well with something like Apple Pencil. (Apple notes app is subpar when it comes to text, doesn't integrate text and pencil drawing/writing very well, and although I just want basic drawing/writing tools, it doesn't do that very well either.)
criddell|3 years ago
One of my kids uses OneNote from Microsoft. Their notebook / section / page metaphor seems too fiddly for me although I know some people like it.
Snitch-Thursday|3 years ago
I love my fountain pens and paper, but for permanence and immediacy reasons. It's really hard to put a file attachment for safe-keeping on your hardcover journal.
I love OneNote, but for ease of dumping screenshots, digital ink annotations, file attachments, and generally building up context around a bit of specific information reasons. It's really hard to put your sticker from your family-member's letter on your OneNote notebook.
And those are two different tasks, just like the desks example above.
eevilspock|3 years ago
What I really need is a great open source OCR and hand diagram to SVG tool.
I hunted to no avail. Anyone got good recs?
thenoblesquid|3 years ago
iancmceachern|3 years ago
It's my proffered way to take notes, think through problems.
JonChesterfield|3 years ago
Notebook, multicoloured pen, usually C or lisp syntax. Tends to be thinking through data structures. Kills the temptation to check my work by running it which forces me to think harder about the intended execution.
edit: used to use whiteboards for the same purpose but sadly don't have one at present
Tcepsa|3 years ago
a9h74j|3 years ago
wrp|3 years ago
egypturnash|3 years ago
(edit: amusingly enough, I find this near the end: "I also mentioned Zettelkasten many times in this post, but I don’t do that anymore–I just did a 1-month dry run and it felt tiring.")
vavooom|3 years ago
ubermonkey|3 years ago
I never went all in on GTD, but some principles stuck with me: key is having a trusted system where I can capture things that will then SHOW me those things when I need to see them.
I used Omnifocus for a while, but eventually migrated to OrgMode as a better fit for my life (even though I'm not really an emacs person overall).
BeetleB|3 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32227826
Basically, over 90% of people invoking Zettelkasten do not know what it is. It's definitely not a tool suitable for most folks.
ticviking|3 years ago
I find it productive, probably because it helps me collect the various ideas and notes from things I've read into a single place, and is a good mindfulness practice.
runjake|3 years ago
1. It appears the author hasn’t been doing this long, judging by their Twitter feed. I’m more interested when somebody’s been at something for a year or two. The whole “I’ve switched to $thing and it’s changed everything!” is always fun when it was written soon after the switch. Even funnier when you visit it a few months after and they’re back on the old thing. See also operating system switch posts.
2. “Most” notes systems aren’t using Zettelkasten. Most note takers don’t even know what it is.
3. I take handwritten notes and drawings all the time. Then I scan and OCR them into a PDF with my iPhone that goes into Obsidian via Shortcuts automations. This way it’s searchable and I always have them. I don’t have to remember to carry a handcrafted Midori/Moleskine around everywhere.
ljvmiranda|3 years ago
Not sure what you meant by the Twitter feed? Doing this since 2017 and it's still fun so far! Hope that helps :)
tomtheelder|3 years ago
1. I've been handwriting notes for about 2 years now, after typing all my notes before that. I generally agree with the author's points. My take on it, which I think they sort of had their own spin on, is that "notes" is an unhelpfully broad category. You record different things for different reasons. A todo is very different from jotting down a novel idea. So I have an Obsidian vault and a notebook.
The notebook is for my ephemeral notes. That includes any information whose lifespan is less than ~1 week, so usually quick thoughts about imminent meetings or todos for the next day or so. It also includes any time I'm taking notes strictly for my sake when the information can be referenced later. For example, my own personal thoughts during a meeting that has shared notes. In my opinion handwriting is better for that sort of stuff: I think it focuses you, it slows down your thinking a little, and it makes you more likely to remember what you wrote.
Obsidian is for archival notes. Things I may need to reference in the future. That's where I keep any longer running todos/projects, as well as any more detailed/complex info that I might not remember but want to reference in the future. Not infrequently I'll take something I jotted down in my notebook and add it to Obsidian if it seems like it might be useful in the future.
I find this split to be very effective for me personally. YMMV!
2. Totally agree. I doubt most people need or benefit from actually getting into Zettelkasten.
3. That seems very reasonable. I think for me personally it would be a bit of a hassle given how rarely I have a need to go back through my written notes.
So yeah tl;dr would be: I think handwritten notes are the ideal way to record information that you're not going to need for more than a few days tops, but I'd hate to have to dig through my old notebooks looking for something.
nonoesp|3 years ago
Writing in the reMarkable feels as analog as writing on paper does. I can convert my handwriting into digital text and email it to myself for editing and digital archiving right from the tablet.
I've also tried handwriting with ink in Moleskine notebooks and transcribing pages with the Google Translate API, which works surprisingly well.
I love the analog method. Yet I want to document my writing digitally for easy retrieval when editing and looking for content to publish.
What other methods are people using to digitize, transcribe, and archive "analog" handwriting?
senegoid|3 years ago
In my experience observing my peers, aside from intellectual horsepower, thinking about topics from first principles is the best way to learn. This has nothing to do with Logseq, Obsidian, Zettels, paper, workflows, Literature notes, or any other fad.
Don't understand something? Go back a step and understand that. Even better if you have to explain it to someone else. Then see how you structure it into a latticework of knowledge, as Charlie Munger would say.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
Tomte|3 years ago
My handwriting is bad, because my hand doesn't "hover", it's firmly planted on the table, and I need to lift it and reposition it every few words.
All the videos I've seen make it seem so easy, but when I try to emulate those hand positions, my pen's nib doesn't even reach the paper. They glide effortlessly with the smallest two fingers lightly touching the table. I need to lower my hand so three fingers and the wrist are again very much on the table.
egypturnash|3 years ago
Take a pencil. A wooden one, not a mechanical one. Sharpen it. Then hold it so that the entire side of the exposed cone of graphite touches the paper, rather than the tip. Your thumb will be on one side of the pencil, with all four fingers in a row on the opposite side, rather than sort of clustered around the front of the pencil.
Now try to draw some lines. You will get very broad lines and probably have little control, because this grip forces you to keep your wrist still, and gives you very little room for your fingers to move the pencil either. It will feel very weird and awkward at first! You’ll have to make a bunch of big, broad motions because you’ve probably never tried to make fine motions like this with your arm in your entire life. It’s okay, you’ll get better!
A great way to get better: take a piece of paper, and draw a circle in the upper left corner, just barely touching the edges of the paper. Don’t worry about making a nice circle, don’t go over it multiple times, just make one simple sorta-circular gesture. Now move to the right and draw another circle, just touching the first one and the tip of the paper. Repeat for a whole row, then do another row that just touches the bottom of the previous row, until you’ve filled the whole page.
Your circles will probably look better by the end of the page. I did this every morning as a warm-up for one of my first animation jobs, and the circles got a lot better, and tighter, over the course of not much time.
Once you have learnt this, you can easily transfer this new control of your arm motions to tools held in other grips. I mostly work digitally, and have to address the tablet with the stylus’ tip for it to register, but I still move my arm with the fluidity learnt from this exercise.
As a bonus this is also a lot better for your arm. Keeping the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Fairy away is very much a thing grizzled old animators wanted to teach the new kids coming in, they’d seen great careers cut short by injuries.
(You could also probably keep holding the pen in a more vertical fashion and use a wrist brace to keep your wrist from moving, if this is all too damn weird for you.)
lbriner|3 years ago
1) Check if you are on the correct ribbon 2) Click the box icon (unless you have millions of shortcuts setup) 3) Drag and drop it 4) Maybe change the defaults which you don't like (colour, thickness etc) 5) If you are typing text in it, that rarely works out well without clicking other buttons
On paper: draw box and write text - simples.
galleywest200|3 years ago
Open paint software -> use stylus to draw square.
chadash|3 years ago
- pencil/paper is just so much quicker
- if you think it, you can draw it... quickly. It's more flexible.
- key advantage: when non-engineers (or even engineers) see higher fidelity mockups, it's very easy to get caught up on some of the details like where a button goes or how big the font is. With pencil/paper, everyone realizes that it's a rough sketch and that the final product isn't going to look this way.
After I write things up, I scan them with an app to a PDF file and then email that out (or attach to a ticket). Of course, pen/pencil isn't great for final designs... there's no substitute for a high-fidelity mockup of what somethings is supposed to look like. But I find it very useful to start with the UX and then work on things like CSS last.
Some key tools I use:
notepad: $5
pencil: $7 (I really splurged here for the pentel Orenz, my favorite mechanical pencil, but a $1-2 pencil will be 95% as good)
6" ruler: $1.76
1/2" binder (I like to keep my drawings): $4
I've thought about investing in a ReMarkable tablet, but I find it hard to justify the cost since pen/pencil work so well.
galleywest200|3 years ago
YeBanKo|3 years ago
drekipus|3 years ago
JustSomeNobody|3 years ago
melling|3 years ago
https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm
Might be a different notation needed depending on the subject.
megamix|3 years ago
lr1970|3 years ago
waspight|3 years ago
goerz|3 years ago
stereoradonc|3 years ago
euroderf|3 years ago
account-5|3 years ago
CRConrad|3 years ago
You mean paper with a grid of squares on it, right? Because all the DIN A-series paper formats are rectangular, not square (as I first misread your meaning).
sleightofmind|3 years ago
Thanks.
tunesmith|3 years ago
foldedcornice|3 years ago
If the LED is attached to the pen, the weight (of both the battery and light) will be significant and can tire you out for long writing periods. You would also have a better experience for the light to not move too much while writing, which will happen as you move the pen along the paper.
nunodonato|3 years ago
douglaswlance|3 years ago
mt_|3 years ago