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Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

productivegrowth.substack.com

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

#121

Post by amingilani »

WalterBright wrote: post #118
amingilani wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Points 1,2,3 apply to paper notebooks, too. As for wasting paper, even in my furious note taking days in college, it didn't amount to that much paper. I don't think the stack after graduating reached a foot high. You'll waste orders of magnitude more paper throwing away junk mail, food packages, etc. Besides, paper recycles easily. Plastic rocketbook pages, nope.

They do, but the accompanying app with RocketBook makes it easier. Each page has customizable bubbles which I can tick off to send the notes to the right destination. It just works which is unusual with most technology.

Additionally, when I was in my undergrad I still went through a lot of paper. I have bad habits when I scribble notes or solve math problems. But with this, it's the only notebook I carry.

I don't have separate notebooks for work, subjects, home, etc.

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

#122

Post by ycombinete »

echelon wrote: post #67
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.

Scanning sounds like a pain. eInk tablets are the future and confer all the advantages of pen and paper. Perhaps they need to undergo a few more generations of UI improvement, and the eInk company itself needs to have its patents expire so the tech isn't held up, but the experience is real. It's tactile, vibrant, and smooth. Battery life is never an issue, even with wifi. The advantages of having notes always with yo…

Just imagining trying to “flip” through a notebook of e-ink pages notes puts me off immediately. Doing so in a kindle, or even a PDF on my computer, is unpleasant. Have they a solution to this in the e-ink notebook?

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

#123

Post by robinsoh »

echelon wrote: post #67
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.

Scanning sounds like a pain. eInk tablets are the future and confer all the advantages of pen and paper. Perhaps they need to undergo a few more generations of UI improvement, and the eInk company itself needs to have its patents expire so the tech isn't held up, but the experience is real. It's tactile, vibrant, and smooth. Battery life is never an issue, even with wifi. The advantages of having notes always with yo…

> he eInk company itself needs to have its patents expire so the tech isn't held up,

Citation needed. Really. Please read my past comments. The speed of electrophoresis is held back by physics. Not patents. If you know of even a theoretical way to achieve stable ink particle position with fast moving ink particles then please link to your publication or research work because it would revolutionize numerous industries, not just displays. Thanks.

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

#125

Post by fastball »

abduhl wrote: post #6

I think this post just barely misses the main reason which, in my opinion, makes writing a better medium for remembering. They mention that typing is faster and easier than writing but I think the real reason this impacts memory is because you have to reduce things into their smallest form in order to keep up (with the person speaking or your own thoughts). This act of condensing makes you internalize the words into…

When I was just starting my current startup (a collaborative note-taking platform), I pored over a lot of studies on this subject because I wanted to make sure that if I was going to build a digital knowledge base / note-taking solution I would give our users their best shot at actually remembering what they were storing.

In the end, your theory did seem to be the most frequently validated rationalization when it came to discrepancies between handwritten and typed notes.

As you say, unless you can write in shorthand very few people are capable of writing at the speed of speech / thought, where as many people can easily type that fast. This requires you to be more thoughtful about what and how you record things with pen and paper, meaning you synthesize / summarize / compartmentalize the information as you go.

This was sometimes compounded in environments involving a presentation / lecture slides, as digital note-takers frequently have a copy of the relevant presentation on their device, further reducing the amount of content they feel they need to record in some way and therefore reducing the amount of information synthesis that is happening.

The best idea I could come up with to help encourage handwritten-like behavior when recording info on a computer was to move away from the document/bullet-point format and towards a "digital notecard" format, which encourages you to think about ideas as compartmentalized / discrete ideas rather than a thoughtless information dump. So that's what I built.

But if you or anyone else has any good ideas about how to emulate the benefits of pen-and-paper on digital, I'm all ears!

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

#126

Post by gnicholas »

tombert wrote: post #54

Bit of a life-hack I picked up awhile ago is to "write the notes by hand, then type them out later". This has a few advantages. First, you basically get all the benefits listed in this article. Second, you get the advantage of repetition, and possibly correcting errors in your handwritten notes. Last, you have pretty notes to read off of later if you need to study for something, which is useful.

Funny, I did the opposite for bar exam prep. I took notes on the computer like a machine so I didn't miss anything, then I reformatted them afterward. After that, I hand-wrote them. By the end, they were pretty much memorized.

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

#127

Post by SirGiggles »

mikestew wrote: post #43
krrrh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was also the transitionary period where teachers and profs would print slides onto transparencies and project those onto a screen. The overhead projectors sometimes had a roll of plastic that they could write on with a felt marker either over the slides or as a blank canvas. A bit of googling reveals that many primary schools still use these, and not all have transitioned to “smart boards”. It was a good trade…

It's been over 15 years since I was scribbling on PowerPoint slides while my Tablet PC was hooked to the projector. I'll ask my spouse if her MS Surface supports such functionality, because I found it pretty darned handy at the time. I have little need for such a feature anymore, so I don't know if an iPad Pro w/stylus can do that with Keynote (not without looking it up).

Apple Pencil is able to markup on Keynote slides [0] as well as Powerpoint (should be like OneNote based on a App Store article) [1]

[0]: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/keynote-ipad/tance6afa...

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1458378181

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

#128

Post by SirGiggles »

WalterBright wrote: post #65
SiVal wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you recommend a quick, easy method for scanning all the pages? I like paper notebooks, too. Someday, I'd like to have an app that would let me turn any ordinary stack of scratch paper or notebook into a searchable PDF in under 5 minutes. I would finish a notebook and just put my phone on a gooseneck stand and turn the pages one at a time (not riffle) at one page per second or two, and it would know when to take t…

> Can you recommend a quick, easy method for scanning all the pages? The trick is to use a hopper fed scanner that scans both sides at the same time. Not a flat bed scanner. I use an old Fujitsu fi-5120C scanner. I haven't found an OCR yet that will decipher handwriting. I would think that with all the advances in AI this would be an easy problem.

I think the technology has already been around for a while, but probably not big enough of a market for desktop usage. On my iPad as an example, Notability, GoodNotes, and OneNote (and possibly on desktop versions as well) are able to perform handwriting recognition and text conversion

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

#129

Post by misterkrabs »

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…

Not to mention paper has a recycling rate of ~68%! [1] I'm just not sure if more energy is consumed by (1) a computer/tablet using a word processor or (2) manufacturing and recycling the equivalent amount of paper. Then there's also the matter of what type of electricity is used to power the computer or manufacture/recycle the paper (eg. hydroelectric, natural gas, etc). Wish there was a way to track all of this...

[1] https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

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