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Comment by tentacleuno

9 hours ago

Reintroducing pen and paper to your note-taking repertoire might not be such a bad idea, anyway -- it's a much more creative medium than most digital, textual forms.

8 comments

tentacleuno

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somat  1 hour ago

A similar life hack is the next time you have to give a presentation, you know, what is normally a brain numbing powerpoint slide deck sort of thing, rehearse and do the slides live on a chalkboard. The novelty of the spectacle means people will actually pay attention. Whiteboards are ok but really lack that visceral staccato punctuation that a chalkboard brings to the table.

gonzalohm  8 hours ago

It's extremely complicated to organize it, though

  • tentacleuno  8 hours ago

    I suppose it's harder to cross-reference and find things, though I suspect you could utilize some sort of organizational system to mostly overcome that.

    I really do think pen and paper will slowly regain prominence; I personally find that it can be much more liberating than digital media.

    It's great to be able to use the page as a canvas, writing wherever you want, without having to meet the constraints of a text editor or the likes. Doodles help to visualize and understand problems, too.

    Tangent for macOS is my current go-to for note-taking, and it works quite well: it's mostly just a Markdown editor, a tree structure of folders (which is really just a normal folder), and the ability to cross-reference and embed images.

    I suppose the primary problem of note-taking apps is that they sort of have to be opinionated in some way to be useful (that's been my experience, anyway.) Markdown files are also guilty of this: they constrain you to a certain layout, which can either be a negative or a positive. Anything too complicated can be off-putting, whilst anything too simplistic can also be limiting.

    It's a surprisingly complex field, and it could explain why there's so many different apps for it.