Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

I'm now 54 and I've had my way of doing things for quite a long time. For me, I write down, on paper, TODOs and other notes. It's my primary means of recording information. I also have my own personal Confluence cloud instance, for which I pay like $12 a month, on which I record things I've learned which I know I'll forget and which I'll want to remember in the future.

For example, on my "C and C++ page", I actually used my note regarding "nm --demangle" which I used to help figure out a linker issue in some C++ code that I have to build in my current job. I haven't done much with C/C++ in years, so this was helpful to trigger long forgotten skills.

I do find that writing on paper is important, and helpful to not lose certain tasks. It is also helpful when I'm learning, even if those notes never make it to more long term storage. I find comfort writing things down, especially TODOs, since they won't be forgotten. It also helped me when I was learning Go, or Kubernetes.

The other thing I've learned in my career is that everyone is different. I've stopped trying to convince anyone that 'my way' is better. It's only worked for me, that much is certain. Can I learn new tricks as an old dog? Sure, for example, I recently learned to use 'ripgrep' and it's my new go-to tool.

Be open to new things, but also try and optimize what is best for you. Peace and happy thanksgiving for those that celebrate!

Not an eink tablet, but Samsung Notes app on Samsung tablets do exactly this. It lets you search your handwriting without converting the handwriting into text first.

Something that also helped me was reading aloud. The level of concentration required to do it is similar to hand writing.

> For me, all of that is a bunch of irrelevant noise.

I share that exact same experience you describe.

For me, learning is all about making connections between the new material and material I already know.

If I kept notes I would have to do three things at once: (1) Follow the material, (2) try to question the material and search my brain for material I already know to make connections with, and (3) take notes, and there's just not enough cognitive capacity to do all three.

Taking notes means turning off the making-connections piece, and that's the most valuable piece to me, and I believe that this is not just a subjective experience, but something that would affect other people too: Focussing on note-taking instead of connections, creates a qualitatively different learning outcome, namely one that leans more towards superficial rote reproduction and less towards real understanding.

In school, when the teacher said something that was unclear or that flat out made no sense, I'd frequently be the one to ask for clarification. Then 20 other heads would pop up from their note-taking and notice that they didn't understand it either, but somehow they didn't notice, and I did. ...they would have happily reproduced the material that made no sense given the right prompt in an exam situation, but that didn't change anything about the fact that they didn't understand it.

What's more: I couldn't engage in that style of learning even if I wanted to. Like: If I tried to turn off the part of my brain that searches for meaning, e.g. when something simply has no meaning, like an exact date of an event in history that I need to know for an exam, then I still wouldn't remember the damned date, plus I wouldn't remember any of the broad themes either. The only thing that would happen would be that my brain would be bored and would wander off thinking about something else that's more interesting.

Not to mention full-text search, which feels more natural than manually organizing and upkeeping folders.