I keep hearing this from time to time, and hey, if taking notes by hand helps you, go for it. More power to you.
But I'm not you. What works for you may not be a panacea. I work best with notes in a text editor, in markdown. I like to be able to move thoughts around, rearrange them, refine them. That also makes me remember them better. Handwritten notes are not conducive to that.
I have a dedicated couple of pages in a notebook, where I write down the note-taking conventions I use. When transitioning to a new notebook, I would copy those pages, possibly making a few improvements based on past usage. A most unhurried release cycle, if I can say so myself.
Regarding the space management, there are many solutions straight out of the programming world, of course: utilize both sides of the notebook, reserve a minimum number of pages per topic, keep an index with free pages, etc. But there are some hardware ones as well, I'm trying Atoma notebooks (https://atoma.be) these days.
I love taking notes by hand for better retention, but (my) longhand is just too slow. It's also an inconvenient format for representing a hierachy or graph of connections.
Anyone else into what my high school biology teacher loved referring to as "pseudo-arachnomorphic diagrams" (Mind Maps[1] / Spider Diagrams)?
They're still my primary paper-based realtime note taking method. They seemed to get a lot of attention a couple of decades ago, but I don't hear them mentioned much recently.
Lots of online/local Mind Map tools available, but I've never really gelled with them (though you do get self-organisation of the nodes!). Once in the digital realm I'm more likely to make notes in Markdown.
The slowness is a feature, not a bug. It gives your brain time to chew on it a little bit, digesting the information and storing it away instead of just copy-pasting.
Speed-hacks like shorthand and stenographers' machines are for copying exactly what was said, not consuming and understanding it. I would be very surprised if there were not very old studies moldering in a paper journal somewhere investigating the information retention of secretaries / stenographers compared to "naive" note-takers.
I recently started journaling by hand and was somewhat frustrated with the excruciatingly slow speed versus typing. Eventually, I realized that the slowness was, as you said, a feature. It forces you to think. You have no choice but to take time with your words. Sometimes brevity is a gift (one I usually don't have).
I migrated to fountain pens and haven't looked back. Partially, it's because I enjoy the experience itself as much as writing, but partially it's because they've forced me to become even more deliberate.
Same principle applies to, e.g., Leica cameras. Yes, they're pricey (absurdly so), but the lack of features, the slow speed, and the lack of configuration contributes to me improving my photography. It doesn't make me a better photographer, but it gives me the time and space to focus on being one, rather than just firehosing my camera at whatever is in front of me. It makes my photography intentional rather than reactive.
+1 Deciding what to write is the critical step. You can get it with careful typing, but it's harder because you can type fast enough to skip that step.
> Anyone else into what my high school biology teacher loved referring to as "pseudo-arachnomorphic diagrams" (Mind Maps[1] / Spider Diagrams)?
Yes! Nearly all my notes are mind-map-ish. I’m a visual thinker/planner with ADHD and mind-map style “spatial notes” are the only ones that make sense to me when writing and reviewing later. I’ve tried a few methods of moving this process to digital over the years but nothing sticks like pen & paper.
The learning curve is very gentle, you could learn it in a day. Honestly the hardest part is getting used to reading it fluently.
You can also look into various systems of abbreviations developed for telegraph (Evans basic English code), or you could look into using Yublin, which is basically taking all 2-letter combinations and assigning the most common 676 English words to them. Personally I like the idea of Yublin, with the addition of suffixes to modify common words so the word "add" might be "ad" in Yublin, but to make it "addition" you might turn it into "adn" and to further modify it to "additionally" you could write "adnly". This way you get more words out of your limited number of bigrams instead of polluting it with a word plus all it's commonly used variations. Write that shit in Orthic and you'll be flying.
Thanks, though I think part of longhard feeling labourious these days is RSI sadly. I did try to correct my scrawl for effort and legibility a while ago, but it just wouldn't stick!
Paper is just too inconvenient to use for long term storage and revisiting imo. It's better suited as a transitive storage medium, either for short lived stuff like tasks, checklists, or acting as a writing inbox that you later capture into a digital medium.
Even with the capture downside, I don't think that I can do away with paper and pen. There's something invigorating about using paper that no keyboard or screen could replicate. More in touch with your brain and with your own words, that your feelings flow better into the ink. It is something that makes me enjoy writing.
I've considered e-ink devices in the past but I don't see much value from them. They're a fancier way to draft things at best, in my case, and a worse PKMS/Todo list if anything compared to dedicated tools. I'm paying for an extra device that gives me a bunch of things I won't use, anyways.
I use a Boox E-Ink tablet with the built-in handwriting notes app. It exports to PDF and I can copy everything to my Debian machine via ADB. I absolutely love it. E-Ink is close enough to paper for me, and the EMR (Wacom) stylus is close enough to a pen for me.
I retain information better when taking notes by hand. However, being able to attach an image and search is absolutely required for me, hence why I use digital notes at work.
I can keep years of notes in a file which I can take and access anywhere whenever I want.
Plus 1, Goodnotes is such a well developed product. I also have an iPad screen guard which gives a paper like feel when writing which makes my brain think I am writing on a book.
I haven't used pen and paper for note taking for years and years now. I used to keep a lot of notes in markdown organized into folders (used obsidian for a bit but was just easier to do in Vim). These days I don't take that many notes, usually only to capture key points/decisions in discussions but usually are pretty short lived. I find things get captured in other forms such that notes aren't really needed that much anymore.
I am 43, and for my entire life I have hated writing by hand. I am sure a lot of it has to do with how I hold my pen/pencil but I have never been able to change my grip. My hand hurts and my writing is barely legible. I just hate it.
I have tried over the years to get into hand writing and note taking. It never works. I am so grateful for typing, it has saved my life for decades. I can type ridiculously fast, and it doesn't wear me out.
I have finally stopped apologizing for this, or thinking something is wrong with me. It just isn't for me
I keep notes in Obsidian...but when I'm genuinely studying a text I write out a precis as an outline in my bullet journal, and later transcribe it. That means that I engage with the material at least twice: once when I first read it, and once when I transcribe it. And yes, writing it by hand genuinely does help. And then, when I want to look at it later, my original notes are in my journal, and my transcription is available digitally.
My coworker got the reMarkable 2 about four years ago now, and was really into it when he got it. I had sort of forgotten about it until the other day when I was reconsidering whether I wanted to get one. When I asked him about it, he was just as enthusiastic as when I asked him years ago. It was sitting right next to him ready to go, with notes from that same day on the screen. Just an anecdote to consider.
It feels like one of those things where if you think you want it and you can imagine how you'll actually use it, you'll use it a ton. I had been on the fence about getting an e-paper device for a long time. When I heard the details on the Daylight Computer, I knew it was exactly what I wanted. I pre-ordered it within hours and I have probably used it more than any other devices I own since it arrived a year ago :P
I have a Supernote which I like primarily because it's repairable and the developers are very responsive. It's the A5 version. It's very nice to write on and if you haven't tried eink in a while, it's pretty impressive. The soft surface is also a replaceable film. It has a Lamy colab pen which is very nice.
Downside is no backlight which many users tout as an improvement, or praise it as a minimalist perk. I don't really agree, but it does mean that the ink surface is closer to the pen so there's less parallax error. It makes it less usable as an ebook reader though, for example on a flight you'd have to use the blinding overhead lights.
Sure the price is comparable to 20+ notebooks. I think if you actually use notebooks, they're good. If you don't, it's questionable whether it'll change your habit. It also doesn't replace the satisfaction of a nice ink pen on nice paper. I have a collection of fountain pen ink that I've used since university (for years of daily lecture notes which is more writing than I'm ever likely to do again - we're talking up to 20 A4 sides a day) and the bottles are still practically full. So good writing equipment can be very economical. There are other issues like no colour (on mine) and PDF support is still ropey.
I am currently typing from a Daylight Computer that I've been using as my primary mobile device (over a laptop or smartphone) for a bit over a year now. I've used it so much the edges have started to peel off a bit where I hold it. Easily worth the money for me. Days of battery life, buttery smooth animations, reflective e-paper display, full android with an unlockable bootloader, it's great.
Yeah my remarkable2 was the only way for me finally to break free from paper bullet journals. And using a custom hyperpaper.me navigable pdf template was a game-changer.
A few months ago I sold the rm2 and got an rm3 "paper pro" and despite the $$ it has ROI as a daily driver (alongside Obsidian running on my M4 macbook air).
I tried various ones out over the course of a few years, but in the end found they weren't for me and I went back to using paper notebooks.
I won't say they're bad solutions at all, but just that they brought no actual benefits for my use cases so there wasn't a reason to put up with their downsides. The downsides are relatively minor, though. For me, they are cost, the need to charge yet another device, and the inconvenience of the form factor (you can't tear pages out to hand to someone else, they rigid tablets instead of flexible paper, writing on them isn't the most pleasant thing, etc.)
I love it as a reader when travelling, and books too long to print. I do take notes when i bring it to conferences, but most of all just to keep engaged, though to keep all notes at one place is practical.
Though when at home/office nothing beats paper and the possibility to visually have multiple pages side by side. Any research article I want to work through I print out, and I buy more paper books now than before I bought the remarkable. Paradoxically, the remarkable helped me realize the incredible value of paper.
I just commented on another post, so this is a copy-paste of my of other comment:
I use a Boox E-Ink tablet with the built-in handwriting notes app. It exports to PDF and I can copy everything to my Debian machine via ADB. I absolutely love it. E-Ink is close enough to paper for me, and the EMR (Wacom) stylus is close enough to a pen for me.
The device was worth every penny, even before considering the other uses for it.
There is also the question of real estate. I can have several paper notes side by side (when taking notes on loose sheets) but with iPads or ReMarkables that'll be rather decadent.
I had a ReMarkable2 for awhile and don't really recommend it. It's not the same as writing on pen & paper and I like the aspects of finding different papers, pencil lead, pens, etc. anyways.
To be more specific, the ReMarkable 2 had a wildly inaccurate pen tip, but only on like the bottom 1/2 to maybe 1/3 of the screen, which was enough to completely destroy my desire to use it at all. On top of that the software is pretty meh. It wasn't bad so much as it was minimal to the point of being harder to work with than real paper. The UI was clunky and slow. Any real advantage to digital nature (built-in OCR, sorta search) was so poorly implemented that it wasn't worth it.
I hated writing by hand, but I got into fountain pens and that really helped change my note taking habits. I mostly write letters, but recently I’ve taken up writing notes during meetings. I loathe doing so, but my FP addiction really helps.
Amazing seeing this here. I hung out with him a few times back then, and I was just thinking about this again just a few days ago. It was really great spending some time with such a smart person. He showed me how he would write little notes and mind maps in the margins of books, and the peg system of mnemonics. One of the times I was there, he was teaching python lessons to someone. I tried to make sense of his notebook system, and to this day I still use color coding, and things like a triangle for pieces of data in my notes. Somewhere, I have or had a copy of this with a lot of writing in the margins trying to make some linear sense of it.
Lately, I've been keeping an "engineering" notebook, using similar technique to the original poster's technique: dated entries and a place for a table of contents (that I need to update).
I love writing things down when I brainstorm; it helps me think.
But taking notes by hand is not feasible for me. My handwriting is atrocious (always has been); if I want to write a nice-looking text, I have to slow down significantly, and then it becomes too slow.
Also, searching, indexing, and everything - it works better with digital.
For memorizing stuff, I use pen and lighting markers. This works quite well, and they are easy; I can quickly memorize things that way.
However had, for anything else I use the computer, and I style everything the way I need via HTML+CSS for the most part. I don't use HTML directly but a simpler and easier to use template, which is programmable (via ruby). There I also make use of javascript and have a multitude of effects to use. I can use the browser to research past content I stored and it is visually pleasing. And it takes not as long as handwriting either. So while I do use pen and paper still and probably will for the rest of my life, I am mostly in the digital era myself. I don't understand why I'd want to use pen and paper. Granted, I have to archive a lot of things, but I use various USB sticks and USB-connectable harddiscs; these don't take that much space away, compared to pen and paper written stuff or other hardcopy books. I don't think I will go back to the only-pen and only-paper, ever. I am not saying digital-only has only benefits, but if I compare all advantages and disadvantages then the digital lifestyle has more benefits. For instance, I don't need to store hardcopy books anymore (I still have them, I still use them, I still like them, but whenever I am about to purchase anything anew, I ask myself whether I want to have physical space be occupied by a book. Often the answer is no, if I can just use a .pdf instead.)
This is all good advice but one thing it doesn't touch on is: which pen and notebook?
I like the pilot precision v5 pens because they come in a lot of different colors and the point is very fine.
For notebooks, I prefer the Leuchtturm 1917 series. They come with page numbers, a space for TOC, a pocket in the back for stuff, two book marks, and lots of different sizes and colors and page layouts.
That's important because the other important thing about hand notes for me is one book per topic, and keep them different colors because they will pile up and it helps with differentiating them.
> This is all good advice but one thing it doesn't touch on is: which pen and notebook?
In what way could it possibly be relevant? Do you actually believe that the author could suggest a universally suitable pen and paper type? What if he'd had his best results with toilet paper, a sugar thermometer and a soot/diarrhea/lemon juice blend for the ink? Would his advice be any more complete?
The moment you lose sight of the habit and instead pay homage to paper and pens, its a fetish instead of a practical discipline.
You can't separate the tools from the craft. Practical disciplines aren't just about doing things but also doing them well. The title of the piece was "take better notes, by hand" so you know, the tools I think are relevent. And come to mention it, the "by hand" part needs some attention too, because one complaint I often hear is that typing is less fatiguing than writing longhand. Ergonomics plays a big role here -- you're not going to write anything at all if you get cramped up. So yeah, I think that the tools are wholly relevent to the idea of taking better notes.
Generally people don't write with diarrhea for a good reason. I think anyone suggesting positive results would be suspect.
My favorite writing implement these days is a black Milwaukee Inkzall ultra fine pen, bought in 4 packs at Home Depot.
I have three primary things I write on, mostly todos for home yard or office, groceries and hardware or tools to buy, and bands and songs to listen to, and the occasional song lyric.
The first is a mini clipboard made from a 3" x 4" piece of cedar shingle and a mini binder clip holding a 4x6 craft paper card folded in half, giving me four sides to write on. On the back side I keep a one-year calendar printed on standard letter paper and folded down to fit where I keep track of my band gigs.
The next one is a standard wire-bound 4x6 note book, mostly for work todos using sort of a bullet-journaling type of progress system.
The third at this point is a regular letter sized clipboard holding scrap one-side-blank printer paper, mostly for meetings.
Then I frequently take pictures of any of these pages so I have a dated copy on my phone.
They also all get added to with typical 3x3 sticky notes in mostly neon colors.
Finally I also do lots of writing in Obsidian, notes in source files with Sublime Text, and sometimes even the StickyNotes Windows app.
My philosophy about this over the last few years is that its better to write something down anywhere on whatever system, even on multiple systems, rather than to try to adhere to one format all the time.
I love the Leuchtterm 1917s. They've got everything you say, and they hold up under daily use without falling apart.
As for pens, I use the Uniball Jetstream 0.38 ballpoint--fine point, doesn't skip, and I prefer ballpoints. I used a Coleto Hitec C multi-pen for a while, but the refills are skinny and run out of ink quickly, and I like the feel of the Jetstream ballpoint better. (The refills for the regular Coleto Hitec are much thicker and last a lot longer...but skip horribly. Life is too short.)
I think pens and pencils are mostly just preference and habit. I have some draftmatic mechanical pencils, nothing special really, but I’ve been using them for decades.
I suspect the real advantage of handwritten notes (for those who benefit from them) is that writing them fulfills a learned ritual for putting the brain in learning-mode. So, might as well match the environment as closely as possible, and prioritize familiarity over some quality.
Anyway, I can write obnoxiously small with my draftmatics, so I don’t see how the process could be optimized by a fancier pencil or pen anyway.
A good 0.5mm gel pen, and a pad with blank 8.5x11 pages, no lines no nothing. About once a week, I consolidate whatever is still relevant onto a few sheets.
For other left-handers out there, Pigma Micron pens from Sakura are outstanding. They aren't fountain pens, but their archival quick-dry ink doesn't smudge at all when writing with the left hand. They come in varying weights, and I tend to prefer the 05s or 08s. Lots of arts and crafts stores stock them.
I'll def be looking around. I have some bottled ink already, but this is a huge concern. Hopefully the fine tip has decent portion control. That helps a lot.
You may be unpleasantly surprised. I have TWSBI Eco-T pens in both <M> and <F>, which write similarly to some Japanese <B> and <M> nibs respectively. I would recommend, if you want something with true portion control, to get a Pilot Prera in <F> or a Kakuno in <EF> (or any pen with a Japanese nib), just to check it out. Both are fairly affordable.
Also, given you’re a lefty, you may want to avoid “good paper” for fountain pens. Coatings on the paper that allow inks to “sit on top” of the page while they dry, preventing feathering and allowing the ink’s properties to develop, understandably slow the drying process. In addition, avoid Noodler’s inks. They look beautiful but dry at an absolutely glacial pace—in my experience, up to several days’ time to fully dry (unassisted, in a dry environment) on Midori MD notebook paper.
I’ve used an ECO and while it’s not my favorite pen, I have nothing bad to say about the nib (I believe mine was a fine as well). The way FP’s write can vary dramatically between different inks though. I’d recommend first trying out the ink you have and seeing what about it you don’t like before researching other inks.
Just asking out of precaution, but are you sure this bottled ink of yours can be used with fountain pens? Even if it is, it’s best to be careful with a fine nib (I’ve learned the hard way).
Good to know. TBH I haven't checked. I have some cartridges too (for a different, cheaper fountain pen) but if none of those work, I'll scout for options.
I’m in a long distance relationship at the moment, so one of the things I try to bridge the distance is sending letters! That’s how I got started, but now I’ll send letters to any of my friends (or anyone really) that sends me a mailing address.
One thing I strongly advise when it comes to writing letters with FP ink is to use waterproof/permanent inks. I had to learn that hard way that typical ink doesn’t handle rain well… Diamine just came out with a new lineup of permanent inks which I quite like, but the Platinum stuff (my favorite being Carbon Black) is quite good as well.
That's lovely! I do the same now with a few friends. Postcards, letters, etc.. It's a blast. Just got some Strathmore letter paper too. So much nicer than what I was using.
I keep hearing this from time to time, and hey, if taking notes by hand helps you, go for it. More power to you.
But I'm not you. What works for you may not be a panacea. I work best with notes in a text editor, in markdown. I like to be able to move thoughts around, rearrange them, refine them. That also makes me remember them better. Handwritten notes are not conducive to that.
I have a dedicated couple of pages in a notebook, where I write down the note-taking conventions I use. When transitioning to a new notebook, I would copy those pages, possibly making a few improvements based on past usage. A most unhurried release cycle, if I can say so myself.
Regarding the space management, there are many solutions straight out of the programming world, of course: utilize both sides of the notebook, reserve a minimum number of pages per topic, keep an index with free pages, etc. But there are some hardware ones as well, I'm trying Atoma notebooks (https://atoma.be) these days.
Would you share your notetaking schemata?
Sure. Though to each his own, I'd imagine. Mine is quite basic.
- 4 pages at the back are reserved for index.
- Daily journal starts at the back.
- There is no obligation to have regular entries in the daily journal.
- ◦ denotes a past event; ◦ hh:mm denotes an upcoming or past event.
- → denotes a task.
- "circled" → denotes a completed task.
- strikeghrough denotes a cancelled or refiled task.
- ¿ optional task, not sure about something ?
- "-" is for all types of second-level bullets.
(As a side note, I mostly do task organization on the computer, but sometimes in a journal as well.)
- Topics start at the front.
- Topics are free-form.
- A new year starts a new journal. (I don't care for the new year resolutions though. At best, a list of side quests I'd like to do.)
It's basically just designing a dictionary data type. I recall the Python devs talking about a lot of this stuff from the early days.
Everything is related.
I love taking notes by hand for better retention, but (my) longhand is just too slow. It's also an inconvenient format for representing a hierachy or graph of connections.
Anyone else into what my high school biology teacher loved referring to as "pseudo-arachnomorphic diagrams" (Mind Maps[1] / Spider Diagrams)?
They're still my primary paper-based realtime note taking method. They seemed to get a lot of attention a couple of decades ago, but I don't hear them mentioned much recently.
Lots of online/local Mind Map tools available, but I've never really gelled with them (though you do get self-organisation of the nodes!). Once in the digital realm I'm more likely to make notes in Markdown.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map
The slowness is a feature, not a bug. It gives your brain time to chew on it a little bit, digesting the information and storing it away instead of just copy-pasting.
Speed-hacks like shorthand and stenographers' machines are for copying exactly what was said, not consuming and understanding it. I would be very surprised if there were not very old studies moldering in a paper journal somewhere investigating the information retention of secretaries / stenographers compared to "naive" note-takers.
I recently started journaling by hand and was somewhat frustrated with the excruciatingly slow speed versus typing. Eventually, I realized that the slowness was, as you said, a feature. It forces you to think. You have no choice but to take time with your words. Sometimes brevity is a gift (one I usually don't have).
I migrated to fountain pens and haven't looked back. Partially, it's because I enjoy the experience itself as much as writing, but partially it's because they've forced me to become even more deliberate.
I'd highly recommend it!
Same principle applies to, e.g., Leica cameras. Yes, they're pricey (absurdly so), but the lack of features, the slow speed, and the lack of configuration contributes to me improving my photography. It doesn't make me a better photographer, but it gives me the time and space to focus on being one, rather than just firehosing my camera at whatever is in front of me. It makes my photography intentional rather than reactive.
+1 Deciding what to write is the critical step. You can get it with careful typing, but it's harder because you can type fast enough to skip that step.
> Anyone else into what my high school biology teacher loved referring to as "pseudo-arachnomorphic diagrams" (Mind Maps[1] / Spider Diagrams)?
Yes! Nearly all my notes are mind-map-ish. I’m a visual thinker/planner with ADHD and mind-map style “spatial notes” are the only ones that make sense to me when writing and reviewing later. I’ve tried a few methods of moving this process to digital over the years but nothing sticks like pen & paper.
You could look at an alphabetic shorthand such as Orthic:
https://orthic.shorthand.fun/
The learning curve is very gentle, you could learn it in a day. Honestly the hardest part is getting used to reading it fluently.
You can also look into various systems of abbreviations developed for telegraph (Evans basic English code), or you could look into using Yublin, which is basically taking all 2-letter combinations and assigning the most common 676 English words to them. Personally I like the idea of Yublin, with the addition of suffixes to modify common words so the word "add" might be "ad" in Yublin, but to make it "addition" you might turn it into "adn" and to further modify it to "additionally" you could write "adnly". This way you get more words out of your limited number of bigrams instead of polluting it with a word plus all it's commonly used variations. Write that shit in Orthic and you'll be flying.
Food for thought.
There are ways to write that are faster and more legible. I recommend looking into the Getty-Dubay style.
Thanks, though I think part of longhard feeling labourious these days is RSI sadly. I did try to correct my scrawl for effort and legibility a while ago, but it just wouldn't stick!
Paper is just too inconvenient to use for long term storage and revisiting imo. It's better suited as a transitive storage medium, either for short lived stuff like tasks, checklists, or acting as a writing inbox that you later capture into a digital medium.
Even with the capture downside, I don't think that I can do away with paper and pen. There's something invigorating about using paper that no keyboard or screen could replicate. More in touch with your brain and with your own words, that your feelings flow better into the ink. It is something that makes me enjoy writing.
I've considered e-ink devices in the past but I don't see much value from them. They're a fancier way to draft things at best, in my case, and a worse PKMS/Todo list if anything compared to dedicated tools. I'm paying for an extra device that gives me a bunch of things I won't use, anyways.
I use a Boox E-Ink tablet with the built-in handwriting notes app. It exports to PDF and I can copy everything to my Debian machine via ADB. I absolutely love it. E-Ink is close enough to paper for me, and the EMR (Wacom) stylus is close enough to a pen for me.
Yeah but do you trust those guys?
I retain information better when taking notes by hand. However, being able to attach an image and search is absolutely required for me, hence why I use digital notes at work.
I can keep years of notes in a file which I can take and access anywhere whenever I want.
Personally I like Goodnotes since it is pretty good at searching handwriting.
Plus 1, Goodnotes is such a well developed product. I also have an iPad screen guard which gives a paper like feel when writing which makes my brain think I am writing on a book.
I haven't used pen and paper for note taking for years and years now. I used to keep a lot of notes in markdown organized into folders (used obsidian for a bit but was just easier to do in Vim). These days I don't take that many notes, usually only to capture key points/decisions in discussions but usually are pretty short lived. I find things get captured in other forms such that notes aren't really needed that much anymore.
I am 43, and for my entire life I have hated writing by hand. I am sure a lot of it has to do with how I hold my pen/pencil but I have never been able to change my grip. My hand hurts and my writing is barely legible. I just hate it.
I have tried over the years to get into hand writing and note taking. It never works. I am so grateful for typing, it has saved my life for decades. I can type ridiculously fast, and it doesn't wear me out.
I have finally stopped apologizing for this, or thinking something is wrong with me. It just isn't for me
I keep notes in Obsidian...but when I'm genuinely studying a text I write out a precis as an outline in my bullet journal, and later transcribe it. That means that I engage with the material at least twice: once when I first read it, and once when I transcribe it. And yes, writing it by hand genuinely does help. And then, when I want to look at it later, my original notes are in my journal, and my transcription is available digitally.
anyone try e-ink style tablets (like remarkable?) the form factor/ability to backup is attractive to me but the price tag is a bit nuts...
My coworker got the reMarkable 2 about four years ago now, and was really into it when he got it. I had sort of forgotten about it until the other day when I was reconsidering whether I wanted to get one. When I asked him about it, he was just as enthusiastic as when I asked him years ago. It was sitting right next to him ready to go, with notes from that same day on the screen. Just an anecdote to consider.
It feels like one of those things where if you think you want it and you can imagine how you'll actually use it, you'll use it a ton. I had been on the fence about getting an e-paper device for a long time. When I heard the details on the Daylight Computer, I knew it was exactly what I wanted. I pre-ordered it within hours and I have probably used it more than any other devices I own since it arrived a year ago :P
I have a Supernote which I like primarily because it's repairable and the developers are very responsive. It's the A5 version. It's very nice to write on and if you haven't tried eink in a while, it's pretty impressive. The soft surface is also a replaceable film. It has a Lamy colab pen which is very nice.
Downside is no backlight which many users tout as an improvement, or praise it as a minimalist perk. I don't really agree, but it does mean that the ink surface is closer to the pen so there's less parallax error. It makes it less usable as an ebook reader though, for example on a flight you'd have to use the blinding overhead lights.
Sure the price is comparable to 20+ notebooks. I think if you actually use notebooks, they're good. If you don't, it's questionable whether it'll change your habit. It also doesn't replace the satisfaction of a nice ink pen on nice paper. I have a collection of fountain pen ink that I've used since university (for years of daily lecture notes which is more writing than I'm ever likely to do again - we're talking up to 20 A4 sides a day) and the bottles are still practically full. So good writing equipment can be very economical. There are other issues like no colour (on mine) and PDF support is still ropey.
I am currently typing from a Daylight Computer that I've been using as my primary mobile device (over a laptop or smartphone) for a bit over a year now. I've used it so much the edges have started to peel off a bit where I hold it. Easily worth the money for me. Days of battery life, buttery smooth animations, reflective e-paper display, full android with an unlockable bootloader, it's great.
Yeah my remarkable2 was the only way for me finally to break free from paper bullet journals. And using a custom hyperpaper.me navigable pdf template was a game-changer.
A few months ago I sold the rm2 and got an rm3 "paper pro" and despite the $$ it has ROI as a daily driver (alongside Obsidian running on my M4 macbook air).
I tried various ones out over the course of a few years, but in the end found they weren't for me and I went back to using paper notebooks.
I won't say they're bad solutions at all, but just that they brought no actual benefits for my use cases so there wasn't a reason to put up with their downsides. The downsides are relatively minor, though. For me, they are cost, the need to charge yet another device, and the inconvenience of the form factor (you can't tear pages out to hand to someone else, they rigid tablets instead of flexible paper, writing on them isn't the most pleasant thing, etc.)
I love it as a reader when travelling, and books too long to print. I do take notes when i bring it to conferences, but most of all just to keep engaged, though to keep all notes at one place is practical.
Though when at home/office nothing beats paper and the possibility to visually have multiple pages side by side. Any research article I want to work through I print out, and I buy more paper books now than before I bought the remarkable. Paradoxically, the remarkable helped me realize the incredible value of paper.
I just commented on another post, so this is a copy-paste of my of other comment:
I use a Boox E-Ink tablet with the built-in handwriting notes app. It exports to PDF and I can copy everything to my Debian machine via ADB. I absolutely love it. E-Ink is close enough to paper for me, and the EMR (Wacom) stylus is close enough to a pen for me.
The device was worth every penny, even before considering the other uses for it.
There is also the question of real estate. I can have several paper notes side by side (when taking notes on loose sheets) but with iPads or ReMarkables that'll be rather decadent.
I had a ReMarkable2 for awhile and don't really recommend it. It's not the same as writing on pen & paper and I like the aspects of finding different papers, pencil lead, pens, etc. anyways.
To be more specific, the ReMarkable 2 had a wildly inaccurate pen tip, but only on like the bottom 1/2 to maybe 1/3 of the screen, which was enough to completely destroy my desire to use it at all. On top of that the software is pretty meh. It wasn't bad so much as it was minimal to the point of being harder to work with than real paper. The UI was clunky and slow. Any real advantage to digital nature (built-in OCR, sorta search) was so poorly implemented that it wasn't worth it.
I hated writing by hand, but I got into fountain pens and that really helped change my note taking habits. I mostly write letters, but recently I’ve taken up writing notes during meetings. I loathe doing so, but my FP addiction really helps.
Writing letters is so much fun. I have a blog post in the works about that too. Glad to hear you enjoy it.
Loose leaf, works great [1]
[1] Lion Kimbro. How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think. 2003 https://users.speakeasy.net/~lion/nb/book.pdf
Amazing seeing this here. I hung out with him a few times back then, and I was just thinking about this again just a few days ago. It was really great spending some time with such a smart person. He showed me how he would write little notes and mind maps in the margins of books, and the peg system of mnemonics. One of the times I was there, he was teaching python lessons to someone. I tried to make sense of his notebook system, and to this day I still use color coding, and things like a triangle for pieces of data in my notes. Somewhere, I have or had a copy of this with a lot of writing in the margins trying to make some linear sense of it.
Lately, I've been keeping an "engineering" notebook, using similar technique to the original poster's technique: dated entries and a place for a table of contents (that I need to update).
Read it a while ago, one lasting impact it had on me is I became a devotee of the bic tri-color pen :)
I love writing things down when I brainstorm; it helps me think. But taking notes by hand is not feasible for me. My handwriting is atrocious (always has been); if I want to write a nice-looking text, I have to slow down significantly, and then it becomes too slow. Also, searching, indexing, and everything - it works better with digital.
For memorizing stuff, I use pen and lighting markers. This works quite well, and they are easy; I can quickly memorize things that way.
However had, for anything else I use the computer, and I style everything the way I need via HTML+CSS for the most part. I don't use HTML directly but a simpler and easier to use template, which is programmable (via ruby). There I also make use of javascript and have a multitude of effects to use. I can use the browser to research past content I stored and it is visually pleasing. And it takes not as long as handwriting either. So while I do use pen and paper still and probably will for the rest of my life, I am mostly in the digital era myself. I don't understand why I'd want to use pen and paper. Granted, I have to archive a lot of things, but I use various USB sticks and USB-connectable harddiscs; these don't take that much space away, compared to pen and paper written stuff or other hardcopy books. I don't think I will go back to the only-pen and only-paper, ever. I am not saying digital-only has only benefits, but if I compare all advantages and disadvantages then the digital lifestyle has more benefits. For instance, I don't need to store hardcopy books anymore (I still have them, I still use them, I still like them, but whenever I am about to purchase anything anew, I ask myself whether I want to have physical space be occupied by a book. Often the answer is no, if I can just use a .pdf instead.)
This is all good advice but one thing it doesn't touch on is: which pen and notebook?
I like the pilot precision v5 pens because they come in a lot of different colors and the point is very fine.
For notebooks, I prefer the Leuchtturm 1917 series. They come with page numbers, a space for TOC, a pocket in the back for stuff, two book marks, and lots of different sizes and colors and page layouts.
That's important because the other important thing about hand notes for me is one book per topic, and keep them different colors because they will pile up and it helps with differentiating them.
> This is all good advice but one thing it doesn't touch on is: which pen and notebook?
In what way could it possibly be relevant? Do you actually believe that the author could suggest a universally suitable pen and paper type? What if he'd had his best results with toilet paper, a sugar thermometer and a soot/diarrhea/lemon juice blend for the ink? Would his advice be any more complete?
The moment you lose sight of the habit and instead pay homage to paper and pens, its a fetish instead of a practical discipline.
You can't separate the tools from the craft. Practical disciplines aren't just about doing things but also doing them well. The title of the piece was "take better notes, by hand" so you know, the tools I think are relevent. And come to mention it, the "by hand" part needs some attention too, because one complaint I often hear is that typing is less fatiguing than writing longhand. Ergonomics plays a big role here -- you're not going to write anything at all if you get cramped up. So yeah, I think that the tools are wholly relevent to the idea of taking better notes.
Generally people don't write with diarrhea for a good reason. I think anyone suggesting positive results would be suspect.
My favorite writing implement these days is a black Milwaukee Inkzall ultra fine pen, bought in 4 packs at Home Depot.
I have three primary things I write on, mostly todos for home yard or office, groceries and hardware or tools to buy, and bands and songs to listen to, and the occasional song lyric.
The first is a mini clipboard made from a 3" x 4" piece of cedar shingle and a mini binder clip holding a 4x6 craft paper card folded in half, giving me four sides to write on. On the back side I keep a one-year calendar printed on standard letter paper and folded down to fit where I keep track of my band gigs.
The next one is a standard wire-bound 4x6 note book, mostly for work todos using sort of a bullet-journaling type of progress system.
The third at this point is a regular letter sized clipboard holding scrap one-side-blank printer paper, mostly for meetings.
Then I frequently take pictures of any of these pages so I have a dated copy on my phone.
They also all get added to with typical 3x3 sticky notes in mostly neon colors.
Finally I also do lots of writing in Obsidian, notes in source files with Sublime Text, and sometimes even the StickyNotes Windows app.
My philosophy about this over the last few years is that its better to write something down anywhere on whatever system, even on multiple systems, rather than to try to adhere to one format all the time.
I love the Leuchtterm 1917s. They've got everything you say, and they hold up under daily use without falling apart.
As for pens, I use the Uniball Jetstream 0.38 ballpoint--fine point, doesn't skip, and I prefer ballpoints. I used a Coleto Hitec C multi-pen for a while, but the refills are skinny and run out of ink quickly, and I like the feel of the Jetstream ballpoint better. (The refills for the regular Coleto Hitec are much thicker and last a lot longer...but skip horribly. Life is too short.)
If you like Leuchtterm, you'll love Quo Vadis Habana notebooks, if you can find them in stock.
I think pens and pencils are mostly just preference and habit. I have some draftmatic mechanical pencils, nothing special really, but I’ve been using them for decades.
I suspect the real advantage of handwritten notes (for those who benefit from them) is that writing them fulfills a learned ritual for putting the brain in learning-mode. So, might as well match the environment as closely as possible, and prioritize familiarity over some quality.
Anyway, I can write obnoxiously small with my draftmatics, so I don’t see how the process could be optimized by a fancier pencil or pen anyway.
A good 0.5mm gel pen, and a pad with blank 8.5x11 pages, no lines no nothing. About once a week, I consolidate whatever is still relevant onto a few sheets.
I've blogged about this before too!
https://brianschrader.com/archive/the-practicals-of-writing-...
But I'm in the process of upgrading my pen. I ordered a TWISB ECO.
What ink are you gonna pair with that? I’m not a lefty, but I’ve heard fast drying FP inks are best for writing with a left hand to prevent smudging.
For other left-handers out there, Pigma Micron pens from Sakura are outstanding. They aren't fountain pens, but their archival quick-dry ink doesn't smudge at all when writing with the left hand. They come in varying weights, and I tend to prefer the 05s or 08s. Lots of arts and crafts stores stock them.
I'll def be looking around. I have some bottled ink already, but this is a huge concern. Hopefully the fine tip has decent portion control. That helps a lot.
You may be unpleasantly surprised. I have TWSBI Eco-T pens in both <M> and <F>, which write similarly to some Japanese <B> and <M> nibs respectively. I would recommend, if you want something with true portion control, to get a Pilot Prera in <F> or a Kakuno in <EF> (or any pen with a Japanese nib), just to check it out. Both are fairly affordable.
Also, given you’re a lefty, you may want to avoid “good paper” for fountain pens. Coatings on the paper that allow inks to “sit on top” of the page while they dry, preventing feathering and allowing the ink’s properties to develop, understandably slow the drying process. In addition, avoid Noodler’s inks. They look beautiful but dry at an absolutely glacial pace—in my experience, up to several days’ time to fully dry (unassisted, in a dry environment) on Midori MD notebook paper.
I’ve used an ECO and while it’s not my favorite pen, I have nothing bad to say about the nib (I believe mine was a fine as well). The way FP’s write can vary dramatically between different inks though. I’d recommend first trying out the ink you have and seeing what about it you don’t like before researching other inks.
Just asking out of precaution, but are you sure this bottled ink of yours can be used with fountain pens? Even if it is, it’s best to be careful with a fine nib (I’ve learned the hard way).
Good to know. TBH I haven't checked. I have some cartridges too (for a different, cheaper fountain pen) but if none of those work, I'll scout for options.
What got you into writing letters?
I’m in a long distance relationship at the moment, so one of the things I try to bridge the distance is sending letters! That’s how I got started, but now I’ll send letters to any of my friends (or anyone really) that sends me a mailing address.
One thing I strongly advise when it comes to writing letters with FP ink is to use waterproof/permanent inks. I had to learn that hard way that typical ink doesn’t handle rain well… Diamine just came out with a new lineup of permanent inks which I quite like, but the Platinum stuff (my favorite being Carbon Black) is quite good as well.
That's lovely! I do the same now with a few friends. Postcards, letters, etc.. It's a blast. Just got some Strathmore letter paper too. So much nicer than what I was using.
Noodler's has some left-hand friendly fountain pen inks.
Ooh will check out! Thanks!