Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

productivegrowth.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 152 posts

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#101

Post by WalterBright »

dnissley wrote: post #94
WalterBright wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take notes in a $.79 spiral paper notebook. When it fills up, I just scan it and get another one.

What about organizing different topics? I like the remarkable because it's like an infinite subject notebook. E.g. I can take notes in a separate notebook for each book I read and can easily refer back to old notes on other books.

I just get another notebook. For example, I have a separate notebook for my Dodge (it's been extensively customized). In college, one notebook per class worked out nicely.

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#102

Post by yardshop »

I had a task at work today where I had to go to pen and paper first in order to get myself moving forward on it. Not exactly the point of the OP, but it was a different kind of enabling factor.

I had a web site update to do that involved a handful of different pages, with related forms and emails and so on. I had an email chain of modifications from the requestors. I was putting it off for a couple days because there were too many places to start and I needed to straighten things out in my head.

So I printed the email chain, and then with my favorite pen (Sharpie Pen) split the emails into parts and drew little blocks for each page and added bullet lists of steps to be done. Once I scribbled things out like this, I was then able to get into the editor and make the changes (Divi Builder on WordPress). And most importantly, check things off as I went along! Endorphin hits!

As I was making the content and layout adjustments, I got frustrated with the builder and clicking and dragging to change each little bit and wished for a text-mode way of making these adjustments, something above the level of HTML and CSS but below the GUI approach. So at this stage I wanted to go back to typing.

To finish up I would get into OneNote and write up the steps I did, including screen clips and links and file paths, then I will have something to search for next time I do this. So for me several forms of note taking are useful at different stages of the process. Often I will do this all in OneNote, but today I needed the physical stuff to get going!

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#103

Post by throwanem »

dnissley wrote: post #94
WalterBright wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take notes in a $.79 spiral paper notebook. When it fills up, I just scan it and get another one.

What about organizing different topics? I like the remarkable because it's like an infinite subject notebook. E.g. I can take notes in a separate notebook for each book I read and can easily refer back to old notes on other books.

For work notes, I index by topic - not too difficult, those don't grow all that fast and finding a few minutes here and there to update the index is not hard. Page numbers increase monotonically across volumes, so cross-volume references by page number work okay; each volume's index covers only its own topics, but that hasn't been a problem so far since needing to refer across volumes is rare except around when one ends and another starts.

For personal notes, I keep those in the same series of volumes as my diary, which I have not yet indexed. I have a very general system of colored tape flags for stuff like "essay ideas", "story ideas", etc., but nothing more specific than that.

I began this diary in 2018; it's now around 1150 pages and about to enter volume 7, and the lack of detailed indexing is beginning to be a problem. For longer-running works, it is not rare to have substantive notes across three or four volumes.

I've started looking for a workable method of maintaining an index by hand across so large a body of content, but haven't found anything that looks good so far - in particular, I don't yet know how to overcome the issue that a handwritten index can't feasibly be reordered to alphabetize or for any other reason. I'd dearly love to hear whatever experience-based suggestions anyone might care to make here!

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#105

Post by throwanem »

analog31 wrote: post #98

Something I've learned is that if you're a disorganized person, you're going to have a disorganized computer, and disorganized notes. But with physical notes, I can put them in a physical pile, and they'll pretty much stay there until I need them, sometimes for years. Once in a while I can go through them and throw away the ones that I really don't care about, and I can transfer really vital stuff to the computer. Sc…

Hey, don't let the fountain pen hipsters [1] get you down. The point is what you're writing, not what you're writing it with.

[1] To whom it may: If reading the phrase "fountain pen hipster" has upset you, you may be interested to know that I EDC a Pilot Decimo in lavender with a lightly custom-ground F nib, which right now is inked with Iroshizuku Murasaki-shikibu from a cartridge I filled myself. We're the same, it's whatever, chill, you don't have to take the existence of fountain pen hipsters or a mention of same as a personal attack, it isn't one. Unless you're out there being a jerk to people who use different kinds of writing tools, in which case we aren't the same and you should stop.

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#106

Post by roughly »

> It’s not eco-friendly

I'm actually curious about this point. I wonder about the actual environmental comparison between, say, going through 3-4 notebooks a year vs. a tablet with a 3-5 year span. A notebook "costs" trees, and in theory is use-once and disposeable, but it's biodegradable, the ingredients are relatively easily accessible, and the manufacturing process is pretty refined by now. A tablet, on the other hand, has a whole world of exotic and toxic materials and manufacturing, doesn't break down nearly as cleanly in the end, and costs energy along the way...

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#107

Post by amingilani »

zokier wrote: post #96
amingilani wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did a search for Rocketbook and found this. Just wanted to plug it in here, not paid or anything. I'm taking a college cryptography class, and I started by maintaining notes with LaTeX in Markdown. It didn't help much. The moment I started using a Rocketbook was when I would get things. I've reused my book about 5 times now in conjunction with work and other classes. I'm on my sixth cycle and love it!

I'm confused about rocketbook, why would you want to reuse notebooks? Paper notebooks are cheap enough to be disposable

Some reasons off the top of my head:

* I can scribble group meeting notes and share them in Slack by just scanning from my phone and they come out great—including drawings

* I can scan my notes quickly as PDFs and keep them for years to come

* Some classes allow me to upload and refer to my notes during exams

* I don't waste any paper

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#108

Post by dan-robertson »

roughly wrote: post #106

> It’s not eco-friendly I'm actually curious about this point. I wonder about the actual environmental comparison between, say, going through 3-4 notebooks a year vs. a tablet with a 3-5 year span. A notebook "costs" trees, and in theory is use-once and disposeable, but it's biodegradable, the ingredients are relatively easily accessible, and the manufacturing process is pretty refined by now. A tablet, on the other…

Some concerns with paper might be related to water usage in manufacturing or to the bleaching process.

One other thing is that putting paper into landfill can be a form of medium-term carbon sequestration.

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#109

Post by raspo »

I personally really enjoy the world of GTD (Getting Things Done). I like reading about the best techniques, latest to-do apps and I tried a lot of them over the years.

But in practice, for whatever reason, the only to-do lists that I complete are the ones I quickly write down on a random piece of paper sitting on my desk.

Even though digital notes have many more advantages and I would like to use them, they just never work for me. I forget to periodically check them and if they send me notifications I simply ignore them.

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#110

Post by nanomonkey »

Anyone interested in writing faster and with less hand strain should look into fountain pens. With a quality nib, that doesn't scratch/catch the paper one can continuously write for hours at decent speed. I usually do the first draft of anything I need to write by hand with a fountain pen as it allows me to get out my thoughts without the distractions of editing. You can cross out your work, but it is still there to go back to, or incorporate in later edits (done at the computer). Plus you can draw out ideas that you can't immediately put into words, when words fail you.

Some gel point pens are equally comfortable.

Post reply on HN