Posted by sonicrocketman 3 hours ago
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.
Everything is related.
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 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.
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.
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 can keep years of notes in a file which I can take and access anywhere whenever I want.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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