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.
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.
It's extremely complicated to organize it, though
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.
What is complicated about organizing written notes?
No search, no making space in an existing page, no moving text around, cumbersome to take it with you everywhere, unlike a phone.
2 replies →
Not complicated, but many people have never learned how to do it or developed a system.
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.