Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

I used to have pretty poor handwriting as well. It didn't help growing up in school when learning to write they would just have me trace letters, and never taught what actually makes handwriting legible. A few years back I started practicing calligraphy for fun and it helped out quite a bit. The basics that translate to everyday handwriting are:

1.Use your big muscles to write.(Move your shoulder/elbow, while keeping your wrist and fingers relatively stable.)

2.Make sure vertical lines are all on the same angle. Vertical parts of "l's","h's","T's" etc...

3.The round parts of letters are the same shape (For example the rounded parts of "o's","e's", and "c's" are all the same)

I've returned to writing by hand increasingly over the last couple of years, after a couple of decades of rarely holding a pen. To start with, my handwriting was barely legible, and my hand painful after a couple of sentences. Now I write comfortably and legibly. My advice would be:

- as several others have written, slow down. This is by far the most important to start with. If you really needed to record something quickly, you wouldn't be handwriting. So accept it's going to be slow.

- consciously relax your writing hand and arm, where by consciously I mean quite literally reminding yourself, and tensing/relaxing the hand and arm to cement the physical sense of what the relaxed limb feels like. This helps with the cramping/pain

- if legibility matters for your purposes, find the letter forms you write most poorly. Read some of your handwriting, find the words you stumble over, and identify the letters causing this. Show someone your writing and ask them if you're not sure (for me it was 'o' and 'e' - in both cases I wasn't keeping the loop open). Now find a new more legible form for these letters, and use the new form as often as you can remember. In my case I reversed the loop direction I had learned for the 'o' (the physical difference concentrated my mind on keeping it open).

You can have both hand written notes and something digital that’s saved in the cloud. Just get a rocket book

Is your spelling also bad? Do you have trouble reading even short strings of digits like 2223232? Do you have trouble reading?

You may have some (mild) form of dyslexia. You triggered me with your remedial classes to improve it, but no improvement.

I came to the same conclusion, however, here’s how I handle that:

I carry around a folder with just a bunch of printer paper, and some index cards in it. I write my todo lists on an index card because it’s intentionally small so I can’t overload it, and it feels good to cross out the last thing and just throw it away.

I take notes through the day on the printer paper, and then I review them frequently and type up what I want to preserve in Notion (recently switched from WorkFlowy, as much as I love outlines, I need free form writing options too).

Anything I don’t type up, I just throw away.

Benefits:

Super cheap

Intentionally not opinionated, just pen and paper.

If I need to think about a hard problem, I can lay out all of my notes on a flat surface. I think spatially, this is so valuable and not possible with notebooks or even software (miro kinda)

I started this about a month ago and it’s going great so far. And this is coming from w notebook and note taking software snob.