I work in habitat restoration. I spend a lot of time outdoors, but most of my notes are just from my normal meetings. If I’m on my phone taking notes, I have to stare down at my phone and it takes me out of the meeting. I have ADHD and find my phone very distracting. But I can write quick notes on paper without having my head down.
I also just prefer physical notes. I have tried everything under the sun with digital note-taking, but nothing beats the flexibility and reliability of pen and paper. I have a great binder-based note-organization system.
I am honestly shocked that so many people NEVER use pen and paper notes? It is very normal in my field.
Speaking for myself, my handwriting is far from elegant. In university (40+ years ago) I developed a sort of mashup of cursive and printing, since speed of transcription was fairly typical.
I adore the look of top tier handwriting. I even got into calligraphy when I was in HS.
Since my career has taken me deep into the world of tech, I’ve become twitchy at the possibility of a single point of failure, ie, one copy of something is equivalent to no copies of something, 2 copies of something is equivalent to 1 copy, etc.
As such, I’ll take casual note (eg, my to do list for my ADHD) using Google Keep, so that I can access it and update it from my phone or one of my laptops. For the grocery list, it’s Alexa. For professional notes, it’s a combination of Obsidian and Syncthing.
Speaking of Obsidian, I first learned of it while watching a video of anPhD student describing her massive manual note taking system, following a particular system manually, and then discovering Obsidian.
In your case, yeah, I see no reason to change. It works for you.
Yeah, paper note-taking does mean scanning right away when you’re back in the office. But the reality of field work is that you might lose the data if you took them on a tablet, too. I’ve worked jobs where there was no service until we get into the office, so the data just lives on the device until it is uploaded.
I am using Obsidian for a particular project, I’m using it to organize a history research project I’m working on! I think it’s a cool tool, I would just go crazy if I had everything organized on my computer. I end up hyperfocusing more on the organizing system itself, or get distracted on the computer/phone… and the physical notes I can make cute and aesthetic much more easily which makes me feel warmly about my to-dos. I tried to do a digital PDF notebook with hyperlinks and everything, but I just felt like I was spending too much time fiddling around with on my note-taking and organization.
Paper stationary is a lot more popular in Germany and Japan, oddly enough. A lot of jetpens products come from those countries … the most sought after notebooks are Japanese and Germans have great pens.
I’m not sure I would use a nation’s strong preference/popularity for a particular tech to be the gold standard. Fax machines are, or at least used to be, in high usage over there. Also, they have a quirky preference for doing everything in spreadsheets; deviating from that to use a more appropriate tool is frowned upon. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is someone drawing up an office floor plan, very detailed, including the cubicles. It was a gorgeous piece, but I had to wonder about the baffling inefficiency of that approach.
That said, I don’t disagree with the notion of avoiding any tool that creates huge overhead of just using the tool itself. Screw that. I love tech, but screw that.
Even where I work now, we try to reduce duplication. And in spite of that, I find myself using a hodgepodge of GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. Jira and Confluence are slow and bloated, but that’s where we’re meant to put a lot of our effort. Even so, a table in either of those is slower and more limited than just using Sheets.
I’ve tried various ways of taking notes over the years. So many times I’ve had that “finally, this is the one” moments, only to eventually move on to something else. For a short while there, I was simply editing Markdown in Visual Studio Code (with Preview mode) and committing to GitHub, which was both lightweight and made for quick backups. Then I discovered Obsidian, and around the time worked out how to get SyncThing working.
I’m not a fan of my handwriting. And I’ve been burnt too many times in university courses, writing something down, only to realise I needed to add another paragraph up where there was barely any room to add a few words. And drawing arrows here and there only works for so long. So yeah, call me embittered =)
Handwriting in university was really the only option at the time, as it would be decades more before the first smartphone would come along. Plus, taking courses in linguistics, Chinese, and Japanese, you needed to be able to capture things that a conventional keyboard just couldn’t manage.
Use the right tool for the job. Which it sounds like you’re doing. Likewise for myself, I think.
I was just saying there are a lot of Japanese/German-made stationary options because they use stationary. It’s kind of a bummer because you have to pay extra for them to be imported, and they might not be in English or show important American dates. I wish there were more high quality English-language options available. Even the paper itself is usually shit 😩
Totally understandable that as a tech worker you would prefer digital note-taking tools!
And just as an aside, sometimes I think engineers focus too much on “efficiency”. There are a ton of things that can be optimized for! Maybe having a beautiful office layout diagram makes the experience of looking at and working with the diagram more enjoyable, more memorable, maybe it instills pride in the office workers.
You just prefer it, a notebook won’t survive a 50ft fall into water, an iPad with an OtterBox might, even if it didn’t my notes will, I just grab another iPad.
I’m 37 and can barely read cursive, I hate it. I learned it in primary school, never used it, and here I am.
I play DnD and one of our campaigns got so confusing so our DM made a huuuuge flow chart explaining the story, consequences of our actions, where we can go next, etc. It’s all in fucking cursive and I couldn’t read any of it so I continue to be confused :)
I never recovered, and I don’t really know how to write print. So i either write cursive at the speed of around one letter per second, produce unreadable chicken scratching, or write very ugly all caps print because that’s simple enough and actually readable and faster than trying to produce legible cursive.
I also don’t think I handwrite more than 100 words a year though so it’s ok
It’s definitely not neater for lefties like me who smear our script as we write.
However, OCR input tech on phones and tablets are better at reading cursive than block print. Curiously, my grandson’s curriculum in the Solano County School District dropped cursive writing and then picked itmup again.
I hate that they still teach it in schools. It means that for about 3-4 years per child, you get birthday and Christmas cards and you can’t read them.
It’s not noticeably faster and it’s certainly not neater. Just let it die.
Also writing speed doesn’t really matter anymore. Most situations where writing speed used to matter now needs typing speed instead.
I don’t buy this. I take notes on paper all the time, what am I going to have my laptop or phone in my face during every conversation?
What are you doing that having a pen and paper is normal but your phone or laptop isn’t?
I work in habitat restoration. I spend a lot of time outdoors, but most of my notes are just from my normal meetings. If I’m on my phone taking notes, I have to stare down at my phone and it takes me out of the meeting. I have ADHD and find my phone very distracting. But I can write quick notes on paper without having my head down.
I also just prefer physical notes. I have tried everything under the sun with digital note-taking, but nothing beats the flexibility and reliability of pen and paper. I have a great binder-based note-organization system.
I am honestly shocked that so many people NEVER use pen and paper notes? It is very normal in my field.
I find this fascinating. Props to you, of course.
Speaking for myself, my handwriting is far from elegant. In university (40+ years ago) I developed a sort of mashup of cursive and printing, since speed of transcription was fairly typical.
I adore the look of top tier handwriting. I even got into calligraphy when I was in HS.
Since my career has taken me deep into the world of tech, I’ve become twitchy at the possibility of a single point of failure, ie, one copy of something is equivalent to no copies of something, 2 copies of something is equivalent to 1 copy, etc.
As such, I’ll take casual note (eg, my to do list for my ADHD) using Google Keep, so that I can access it and update it from my phone or one of my laptops. For the grocery list, it’s Alexa. For professional notes, it’s a combination of Obsidian and Syncthing.
Speaking of Obsidian, I first learned of it while watching a video of anPhD student describing her massive manual note taking system, following a particular system manually, and then discovering Obsidian.
In your case, yeah, I see no reason to change. It works for you.
Yeah, paper note-taking does mean scanning right away when you’re back in the office. But the reality of field work is that you might lose the data if you took them on a tablet, too. I’ve worked jobs where there was no service until we get into the office, so the data just lives on the device until it is uploaded.
I am using Obsidian for a particular project, I’m using it to organize a history research project I’m working on! I think it’s a cool tool, I would just go crazy if I had everything organized on my computer. I end up hyperfocusing more on the organizing system itself, or get distracted on the computer/phone… and the physical notes I can make cute and aesthetic much more easily which makes me feel warmly about my to-dos. I tried to do a digital PDF notebook with hyperlinks and everything, but I just felt like I was spending too much time fiddling around with on my note-taking and organization.
Paper stationary is a lot more popular in Germany and Japan, oddly enough. A lot of jetpens products come from those countries … the most sought after notebooks are Japanese and Germans have great pens.
I’m not sure I would use a nation’s strong preference/popularity for a particular tech to be the gold standard. Fax machines are, or at least used to be, in high usage over there. Also, they have a quirky preference for doing everything in spreadsheets; deviating from that to use a more appropriate tool is frowned upon. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is someone drawing up an office floor plan, very detailed, including the cubicles. It was a gorgeous piece, but I had to wonder about the baffling inefficiency of that approach.
That said, I don’t disagree with the notion of avoiding any tool that creates huge overhead of just using the tool itself. Screw that. I love tech, but screw that.
Even where I work now, we try to reduce duplication. And in spite of that, I find myself using a hodgepodge of GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. Jira and Confluence are slow and bloated, but that’s where we’re meant to put a lot of our effort. Even so, a table in either of those is slower and more limited than just using Sheets.
I’ve tried various ways of taking notes over the years. So many times I’ve had that “finally, this is the one” moments, only to eventually move on to something else. For a short while there, I was simply editing Markdown in Visual Studio Code (with Preview mode) and committing to GitHub, which was both lightweight and made for quick backups. Then I discovered Obsidian, and around the time worked out how to get SyncThing working.
I’m not a fan of my handwriting. And I’ve been burnt too many times in university courses, writing something down, only to realise I needed to add another paragraph up where there was barely any room to add a few words. And drawing arrows here and there only works for so long. So yeah, call me embittered =)
Handwriting in university was really the only option at the time, as it would be decades more before the first smartphone would come along. Plus, taking courses in linguistics, Chinese, and Japanese, you needed to be able to capture things that a conventional keyboard just couldn’t manage.
Use the right tool for the job. Which it sounds like you’re doing. Likewise for myself, I think.
I was just saying there are a lot of Japanese/German-made stationary options because they use stationary. It’s kind of a bummer because you have to pay extra for them to be imported, and they might not be in English or show important American dates. I wish there were more high quality English-language options available. Even the paper itself is usually shit 😩
Totally understandable that as a tech worker you would prefer digital note-taking tools!
And just as an aside, sometimes I think engineers focus too much on “efficiency”. There are a ton of things that can be optimized for! Maybe having a beautiful office layout diagram makes the experience of looking at and working with the diagram more enjoyable, more memorable, maybe it instills pride in the office workers.
You just prefer it, a notebook won’t survive a 50ft fall into water, an iPad with an OtterBox might, even if it didn’t my notes will, I just grab another iPad.
No, you’re just wrong. A notebook does fine in the rain and water, there are specially designed notebooks for this.
He’s not wrong though you just disagree.
He is wrong bc he’s saying a tablet would survive the elements better
I’m not taking notes on any of the idiot conversations I get roped into every day
If you are- have fun, enjoy your pen and paper
Different lines of work. I have to remember a lot of things people tell me 🤷🏻
I’m 37 and can barely read cursive, I hate it. I learned it in primary school, never used it, and here I am.
I play DnD and one of our campaigns got so confusing so our DM made a huuuuge flow chart explaining the story, consequences of our actions, where we can go next, etc. It’s all in fucking cursive and I couldn’t read any of it so I continue to be confused :)
My kids got just enough cursive in school to learn how to sign their names. Definitely not 3-4 years of it. Maybe 3-4 weeks at the most.
It is noticabley faster if you write with a fountain pen, or any pen with flowy ink.
Possibly, but I know exactly one person who writes with a fountain pen.
I remember wanting one in school, but the value was mostly in being able to flick ink at the other kids.
I never recovered, and I don’t really know how to write print. So i either write cursive at the speed of around one letter per second, produce unreadable chicken scratching, or write very ugly all caps print because that’s simple enough and actually readable and faster than trying to produce legible cursive.
I also don’t think I handwrite more than 100 words a year though so it’s ok
It’s definitely not neater for lefties like me who smear our script as we write.
However, OCR input tech on phones and tablets are better at reading cursive than block print. Curiously, my grandson’s curriculum in the Solano County School District dropped cursive writing and then picked itmup again.