[austinl]

I'm curious about the main use-cases for physical notebooks from folks on HN. I love the idea of physical notebooks, but also have years of digital notes that are searchable and that I can access on any device. I feel like I'm in too deep with digital, and like the ability to access it anywhere.

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?

[wonger_]

You can look at some of my notebook pages: https://wonger.dev/notebook-love#:~:text=some%20pages%20from...

  Journal entries, charts, sketches, lists, schedules, goals, code, math, mind maps, outlines, itineraries

Like others have said, it augments digital notes, not replaces them. 3 reasons I stuck with notebooks:

- 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.

[zenexer]

I often go to Barnes & Noble to sit and work on my laptop with a coworker. They have nice seats, no shortage of reference material to settle debates, and happen to be in closer proximity to my office than a library.

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.

[patrickmay]

This is my experience as well. As PG notes in "Hackers and Painters", figuring out the architecture of a program is more like sketching than engineering. Scribbling in a notebook is more freeing than typing or diagramming on a laptop.

Analog and digital are complementary.

[gk1]

For me the benefit is avoiding distractions while writing. I can’t cmd+f to search my notes but I also can’t cmd+tab to switch to my email tab.

[jim-jim-jim]

I have 14 years of personal journals and 7 years of programming/math/music notes. I can usually find old entries right away because it's much easier to remember where I was when I wrote it, and why. Part of it is the muscle memory of moving a pen, and part of it is because I would have to care enough about a topic to sit down and put ink to paper in the first place.

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.

[reaperducer]

I feel like I'm in too deep with digital, and like the ability to access it anywhere.

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.

[JKCalhoun]

I just scan the notebooks when I fill one up. The scans I open and "print" — but really "Save As PDF". Thus I have a digital backup in the cloud.

[human_person]

Will it record anything she writes with the pen? Regardless of what she is writing on? Does she need to replace the ink in the pen ever?

[siquick]

What’s the name of this pen? Sounds incredibly useful

[sevensor]

I started carrying notebook and pen in my breast pocket when my children were small. I would do a lot of thinking about my work while I was caring for them, and I wanted something to catch my thoughts. Something I could put away instantly when someone needed a push on the swings and pull back out half an hour later, and have it be just as I left it. I still do this occasionally, but these days I can just use a full sized notebook for sketching out ideas.

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.”

[latexr]

I use physical notebooks for ephemeral information (i.e. todo lists and ideas). The problem with digital is its convenience: it can grow infinitely without affecting you. There’s nothing to distinguish an old note and a recent one.

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.

[motohagiography]

I have a stack of moleskeine's small flip up art collection sketch pads and take one with me most places. I have one of their music notebooks but that was more aspirational to buy, though I've used it. the use cases include sequence diagrams for processes and code, product ideas, song lyrics, character sketches and story fragments, thoughts I wouldn't put into an electronic device, training diagrams, etc. I write and draw to think and reason things through, and the notebooks are essential to that.

[drums8787]

Been filling notebooks for years while also keeping pretty meticulous digital notes. Physical is mostly personal or ideas (sometimes for work). Digital is mostly work.

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.

[kjkjadksj]

Two reasons. 1: you retain more information writing it down on physical paper. 2: I have never needed to search ancient notes, most last a couple weeks at the longest, and thanks to point #1 you know where things are in that notebook better than you’d guess.

[walterbell]

They are not mutually exclusive, in the era of ubiquitous cameras and handwriting recognition.

Paper and physical notebooks offer motor memory and time delay before data ingestion by cloud analytics.

[d1sxeyes]

Handwriting recognition is still very hit-or-miss. The best results I've had so far are by running the handwriting through the Google Cloud Vision API, and then asking ChatGPT to fix transcription mistakes. The problem with that is that effectively you are asking it to hallucinate.

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.

[neom]

I dare you to bring a device to a meeting with me.