Comment by toxik

1 year ago

It is a well-established fact that the mechanical act of handwriting notes is good for memorization. Perhaps it is meditative, perhaps we're just physical beings -- whatever it is, typewriting on a computer is not as good.

A famous man whose name I forget once said "Plans are useless, planning is indispensable," and I would like to paraphrase it as "notes are useless, note-taking is indispensable."

> "notes are useless, note-taking is indispensable."

This is very, very true for me. I read, optimistically, 5% of my notes.

As a corollary, I’m unable to take notes if the notepad is too fancy. I get analysis paralysis from something like a moleskine, like something this nice deserves nicely formatted notes. Only cheapo gas station notpads work for me.

  • Are you good at planning tho?

    Given we are at software engineering forum where most of us likely use ticket tracking system which are basically fancy notes... I feel your statement is disingenuous.

This is not at all a well-established fact. There's one questionable study on this topic that used to go viral occassionally, and that's it.

  • I'd add that, as someone who does articles about events and the like, it's much more efficient for me to be able to cut/paste/edit from typed material than to transcribe from my abbreviated and hard to read scrawls.

This is entirely false for me.

Writing takes up all of my concentration, and I literally do not hear what the person is saying next while I'm writing down what they just said.