I would love to see a site where people posted stuff they have been doing for over a year and it still works for them.

Seems like all these blog posts are, "I Started doing this yesterday, and I'm going to do it for the rest of my life... or tomorrow when I blog my next big thing I'm going to do forever."

I'm more interested in stuff people have stuck with and actually works for them when the novelty of the medium wears off.

I'm not saying pen and paper isn't great, but I'm more interested in the system that evolves if you actually use something over a long period of time.

For me pen and paper being beneficial is a strong signal of an interesting project.

A large part of day-job work doesn't deserve the pen and paper - We just need to track TODOs, links and some other bullet points for them. Digital tools are very good at these because it's optimized for them.

On the other hand, if a problem demands the flexibility and the visual capacity of the pen and paper, it's a good sign of the sufficiently large intellectual problem space it contains.

I can remember rolling my eyes at a writer using a mechanical typewriter decades after word processors had taken over. Did they thaw out of a glacier?

At the same time I love physical media. As a math professor I defend a widespread preference for blackboards over soul-sucking whiteboards, imagining that musicians will still play grand pianos in a century, and they'll still snicker over Ryan Gosling playing a toy piano under the spotlight in that classic movie "La La Land".

I've hoarded Hagoromo chalk; I'm the one with the chalk attaché case in [1]. I've always carried multiple grades of drawing paper, and I've worked through many hundreds of artist grade felt tip pens, scanning all my math notes for thirty years.

Then, pandemic. Just as World War 2 accelerated women in the workplace, the pandemic has accelerated the uptake of digital tools for visual presentation. To teach over Zoom, we needed to embrace drawing on a tablet. I understand that the pandemic radically accelerated similar trends in architecture.

The algorithmic possibilities of drawing on a tablet are truly addictive; returning to paper feels like returning to a mechanical typewriter. For my purposes, Concepts offers the most involving algorithmic experience; I wrote [2] to support my note taking and diagrams for papers. However, Notability offers the least friction. I can have the same psychological relationship to taking notes on my tablet as I had with phyical paper, with the benefits of algorithmic reuse. (Pushing the envelope exposes how inconsistently Notability handles implicit layers, but one learns to draw around this.)

In a few decades, after all living mathematicians have drawn on tablets since birth, math will be far more visual, conveying ideas with far more immediacy. Math communication is now still largely constrained by its resemblance to typeset prose. Ever leave a startup because reading your coworkers' code put you in "Just kill me now!" territory? I did. Mathematicians write the equivalent of bad code, rarely actually machine-checked, to formalize their ideas. Other mathematicians try to decipher this code, to reverse-engineer the ideas. We declare people who can actually do this as having a gift for mathematics. As I learn to teach combinatorics more visually, my classes swell with students who share my frustration.

I've come to realize this summer that I pretty much despise mathematics. I can't wait for the visual revolution. This revolution didn't take hold on physical paper; one needs a digital accelerant.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8 [2] https://github.com/Syzygies/concepts-artboards

Articles like this worship the act of writing on paper, not the process of iteratively putting down thoughts and shaping them.

I use Notion. I also use paper.

I tried using "fancy writing equipment" that ended up too nice for me to scribble on. Because any momentary idea is garbage and not worthy of this nice acid-free, leather bound notebook.

So no I have a stack of very cheap legal notepads that I just put whatever I want on. Sometimes I'll rip the pages out. Sometimes I'll trash them. Eventually the good ideas take shape, and I'll move them to Notion

I started bullet journaling with pen and paper and it has changed my life. Intentionality -- that's exactly right. When I write I feel intentional.

I've also dove into the world of nice paper and fountain pens. I've always had hand cramps when writing, whether using a cheap Bic or a Pilot G7. With fountain pens, that's all gone, and writing is effortless. You can get started with this cheaply by getting a platinum preppy fine or extra-fine pen ($4), and a bottle of ink ($10). You want a fine or extra-fine nib, because anything else will feather and bleed on cheap paper, but fine or extra-fine works just fine on cheap paper.

Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll rarely need to refill it.

I do the same thing -- TO START.

Initial notes are almost always on paper, in a good notebook, written with a fountain pen. I also almost always have a small notebook and pen on my person.

BUT once something becomes a real project I need to track, or if the notes are important enough that I want them searchable later, I transcribe and summarize into the appropriate Orgmode buffer.

I retain things written longhand better, but this act of review & summarization is like a turbocharger for that recollection. (Not for nothing, but one old-school study hack I read about back in the 80s was "type up your class notes". It dated from an era before computers, so it wasn't about search or indexing. It was about the act of review inherent in the transcription.)

People thinking pen and paper is simple have intentionally made it simple. Have you considered how many different kinds of paper/notebooks/slides/cards, kinds of pen/pencil/brush? Soon you'll start fiddling with your pens and papers, as some comments here have already started suggesting their personal favorite, including making your custom "eye dropper" pen.

Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt,

  ed note.txt
  ,
  my previous notes
  more notes
  ...
  my last notes
  a
  now just write you new notes down
  don't worry about anything
  don't even worry about editing previous lines
  just write
  and done
  .
  w
  q

And that's it.

   cat > note.txt <<EOF

Last year i went in the other direction: analog to digital. Onenote is my tool of choice - it's basically a really awesome piece of paper: you can write per hand on your tablet, you can type to text, you can create lists, tables, convert handwriting to text, insert audio, photos, shapes, screenshots, first text, copy text to and from other apps, tag information, hyperlink other pages and notebooks and even pieces of text; you can host in in cloud or locally, the page is unlimited and you can cluster notebooks into sections and notebooks, move and copy pages around and even collaborate with other people in real time. It's on all devices you use, synced. It's everything your notebook is plus so much more. Hands down best room I've ever used.

"I remember in my college chemistry classes, we were instructed never to tear off or hide any error we made in our lab notebooks. Instead, we should mark it with a strikethrough. "

+1 OMG Chemistry notebooks FTW. I was always a pencil person and when the professor literally made us cross out our mistakes it felt gross to see the wasted space for 'nonsense', so inefficient. Only later I come to realize that all creation is not for naught. Observations made and recorded for the record are invaluable when seen from a different time perspective. If DNA can have built in redundancy, then evolution is revealing a good lesson to replicate for note taking as well.

People's time horizons are too short when thinking about so called 'ultimate' note taking/brainstorming/productivity solutions. What system did Grace Hopper use? Feynmann?

I can take a trip to Mom's and fetch that chemistry notebook to retrieve that 1980s information. No retro hardware, searching for encryption keys, old floppy disk/zip drive media players, no defunct internet companies to contact about 'my' data, proprietary formats to parse, etc. Open that 40 year old notebook and read it.

To be sure, I own the iPads/android tablets, note apps, desktop apps, wikis, cloud services and other digital debris that in the end is/was wasted friction, $$$ and energy. Too many dependencies.

I stick with a low-end laptop with plain text on vim and emacs -nox and (mobile) self-made paper notebooks and enjoyable wonderful fountain pens [1] I'm really trying to look back toward memory like the ancients but that is the ultimate practice.[2]

Life is too short to conform to digital tools. Enjoy both! There is much forgotten freedom to be rediscovered with the analog hand.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

If you have a notebook / sketchbook / journal and it needs to be held open with an object look for another notebook [1]. It seems trivial but that is a poorly designed notebook.

1. https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/assets/png/pen-and-paper/bla...

Sigh. I really sympathize with this, and I totally think that analog is not dead and will never die. And vinyl records!

Despite that, I find that in own writing, I always think I'm going to initiate it on paper, but then I start writing fragments on the computer, thinking about them, revising, etc. etc. I lay it aside & think about it, and then revise some more. In the end, I think it's about as creative as pen-and-paper.

I hope. I should try the pen again just to make sure.

For me, what feels like quicksand, is writing on paper. I type very fast on my keyboard 120+ WPM. I want to get my thoughts out of my head as soon as possible, and shape them fast with immediate feedback. My notes are very random and they're all over the place, yet all easily interconnected and searchable because of backlinks and some minimal organization. If I were taking physical notes, I would not have as many notes as I have now, and would be less motivated. The computer is an extension of myself at this point, and it feels more natural than writing on paper.

I think the author might have chosen the traditional way of note-taking, because he just doesn't have the patience or the particular obsession to tailor the note-taking system. Which is fair, but it might do him a disservice if he ends up impatient with the system he is building now. There is a reason, after all, that so many people switched to digital. Even if the author prefers the romanticized way of old note-taking, it is undoubtedly inefficient. It's an experience akin to using ${Editor} over Vim.

Interesting how the tool integrates with the mind.

I used to strictly be a pencil and notebook person... to be mentally engaged fully (whether that is thinking, problem solving, planning, recalling, etc.) I had to use pencil and paper.

But improvements in text editors, and their convenience, lead to me using them more and more to capture ideas, lists, etc., and one day I realized I had switched.

Now I need to use sublime text to be mentally fully engaged.

If I could find something better I'd try switching again. Needs top-notch text editing integrated well with something like Apple Pencil. (Apple notes app is subpar when it comes to text, doesn't integrate text and pencil drawing/writing very well, and although I just want basic drawing/writing tools, it doesn't do that very well either.)

I was recently reading Steal Like an Artist and one of the sections referenced having an analog desk and a digital desk, the former for ideation and creativity modes, the latter for editing and revising modes, and I found that salient.

I love my fountain pens and paper, but for permanence and immediacy reasons. It's really hard to put a file attachment for safe-keeping on your hardcover journal.

I love OneNote, but for ease of dumping screenshots, digital ink annotations, file attachments, and generally building up context around a bit of specific information reasons. It's really hard to put your sticker from your family-member's letter on your OneNote notebook.

And those are two different tasks, just like the desks example above.

I prefer thinking on paper. But I like the compact storage and backup, organizability and most importantly searchability of digital notes.

What I really need is a great open source OCR and hand diagram to SVG tool.

I hunted to no avail. Anyone got good recs?

Even a simple to-do list. Crossing an item off with pen on paper provides a much more satisfying feeling of accomplishment than deleting the task or striking through the text in an app.

I started buying custom printed notebooks from the scientific journal companies. For $10 a journal you can get a very niche hard cover journal, with page numbers (if you like), plain, ruled or grid paper, and embossed with your name (or whatever). It's so satisfying. Combine that with a nice fountain pen and ink and it's quite the experience.

It's my proffered way to take notes, think through problems.

I wrote code on paper occasionally. Anyone else? Don't see an existing comment about it.

Notebook, multicoloured pen, usually C or lisp syntax. Tends to be thinking through data structures. Kills the temptation to check my work by running it which forces me to think harder about the intended execution.

edit: used to use whiteboards for the same purpose but sadly don't have one at present

Is Zettelkasten the new Getting Things Done yet? I feel like I'm seeing essays about How I Zettel with the same frequency I used to see essays about How I GTD back when 43folders was pioneering the genre of "productivity influencer".

(edit: amusingly enough, I find this near the end: "I also mentioned Zettelkasten many times in this post, but I don’t do that anymore–I just did a 1-month dry run and it felt tiring.")

A few gripes about the post:

1. It appears the author hasn’t been doing this long, judging by their Twitter feed. I’m more interested when somebody’s been at something for a year or two. The whole “I’ve switched to $thing and it’s changed everything!” is always fun when it was written soon after the switch. Even funnier when you visit it a few months after and they’re back on the old thing. See also operating system switch posts.

2. “Most” notes systems aren’t using Zettelkasten. Most note takers don’t even know what it is.

3. I take handwritten notes and drawings all the time. Then I scan and OCR them into a PDF with my iPhone that goes into Obsidian via Shortcuts automations. This way it’s searchable and I always have them. I don’t have to remember to carry a handcrafted Midori/Moleskine around everywhere.

I've noticed I write for longer and with greater focus when writing by hand on the reMarkable 2 tablet.

Writing in the reMarkable feels as analog as writing on paper does. I can convert my handwriting into digital text and email it to myself for editing and digital archiving right from the tablet.

I've also tried handwriting with ink in Moleskine notebooks and transcribing pages with the Google Translate API, which works surprisingly well.

I love the analog method. Yet I want to document my writing digitally for easy retrieval when editing and looking for content to publish.

What other methods are people using to digitize, transcribe, and archive "analog" handwriting?

I feel people (myself included) are drawn to notetaking/PKM topics because there's a fear that others have unlocked a secret to learning the layperson hasn't yet discovered.

In my experience observing my peers, aside from intellectual horsepower, thinking about topics from first principles is the best way to learn. This has nothing to do with Logseq, Obsidian, Zettels, paper, workflows, Literature notes, or any other fad.

Don't understand something? Go back a step and understand that. Even better if you have to explain it to someone else. Then see how you structure it into a latticework of knowledge, as Charlie Munger would say.

Does anyone have a good video for hand position with fountain pens?

My handwriting is bad, because my hand doesn't "hover", it's firmly planted on the table, and I need to lift it and reposition it every few words.

All the videos I've seen make it seem so easy, but when I try to emulate those hand positions, my pen's nib doesn't even reach the paper. They glide effortlessly with the smallest two fingers lightly touching the table. I need to lower my hand so three fingers and the wrist are again very much on the table.

I think OP touches on it but even with a graphics tablet, there is no way I can create simple drawings and sketches on the computer compared to pen and paper. Even a simple box in powerpoint is:

1) Check if you are on the correct ribbon 2) Click the box icon (unless you have millions of shortcuts setup) 3) Drag and drop it 4) Maybe change the defaults which you don't like (colour, thickness etc) 5) If you are typing text in it, that rarely works out well without clicking other buttons

On paper: draw box and write text - simples.

> I defend a widespread preference for blackboards over soul-sucking whiteboards

To this day it is a real mystery to me why people would prefer whiteboards over blackboards.

I've wondered why I hear so much about chalk but not about mechanical pencil leads. I'm so picky about mine that whenever I find some I really like, I lay up a hoard in case it gets discontinued.

Gel pens can arguably be as enjoyable to use as fountain pens, with easier refills and less to no need for maintenance. Gel pens also work on all types of paper, with no concerns about smudging due to drying.

Pentel Energel refills are very smooth, much more so than Pilot G7 cartridges (but not water-resistant). Zebra Sarasa refills are almost as smooth (and are water-resistant, which can be useful if you get caught in the rain).

I use both gel pens and fountain pens, with gel pens for quick notes and writing while on transit. I could comfortably get by with only gel pens—many people have, as I've seen forum posts by former mathematics and physics students who posted photographs of dozens of refills used up over their degrees. I still prefer fountain pens when I'm at a desk, though it's a pleasant luxury for the smoothness—any significant strain when handwriting for many pages went away when upgrading to higher-end gel pens.

I am trying to use my tablet for writing down notes while thinking, it kind of works, but I really miss the sound and feeling of writing with a fountain pen. Somehow writing with a fountain pen in a quiet room makes me feel patient, and less stressed by problems.

> You want a fine or extra-fine nib, because anything else will feather and bleed on cheap paper, but fine or extra-fine works just fine on cheap paper.

It does depend on the ink, too. I have a Parker XF nib that will absolutely bleed through my notebook, which wasn't exactly cheap either. Not sure if it's supposed to be actually "good paper", though (Leichtturm), but I'm quite disappointed.

Diamine ink will take forever to dry on that paper and will be seen from the other side. And it's not even a particularly dark shade of blue. Regular supermarket-bought Parker ink (Quink washable blue) works much better.

> Your pen can be converted into an "eye dropper" pen with a little bit of silicon grease and a small rubber gasket, and you'll rarely need to refill it.

Please expand on this. I’m utterly confused as to what you mean and why you’d need it.

Uniball vision rollerball pens basically glide on the page, and they're portable unlike fountain pens. They're also significantly cheaper than buying a fountain pen + ink(s). As much as I love writing with my Sailor ProGear Slim F/EF nib fountain pens, inks + traveling = a nice mess waiting to happen.

I had a pelikan souveran r800 that was refillable, but sadly I lost it on one of my return trips. Now I just travel with 3 leuchtturm notebooks (A6-grid, A5-grid, B5-lines-softcover) and a bunch of uniball pens.

Here is a trick for learning how to make your hand “hover” that I was taught by the old pros when I joined the animation industry.

Take a pencil. A wooden one, not a mechanical one. Sharpen it. Then hold it so that the entire side of the exposed cone of graphite touches the paper, rather than the tip. Your thumb will be on one side of the pencil, with all four fingers in a row on the opposite side, rather than sort of clustered around the front of the pencil.

Now try to draw some lines. You will get very broad lines and probably have little control, because this grip forces you to keep your wrist still, and gives you very little room for your fingers to move the pencil either. It will feel very weird and awkward at first! You’ll have to make a bunch of big, broad motions because you’ve probably never tried to make fine motions like this with your arm in your entire life. It’s okay, you’ll get better!

A great way to get better: take a piece of paper, and draw a circle in the upper left corner, just barely touching the edges of the paper. Don’t worry about making a nice circle, don’t go over it multiple times, just make one simple sorta-circular gesture. Now move to the right and draw another circle, just touching the first one and the tip of the paper. Repeat for a whole row, then do another row that just touches the bottom of the previous row, until you’ve filled the whole page.

Your circles will probably look better by the end of the page. I did this every morning as a warm-up for one of my first animation jobs, and the circles got a lot better, and tighter, over the course of not much time.

Once you have learnt this, you can easily transfer this new control of your arm motions to tools held in other grips. I mostly work digitally, and have to address the tablet with the stylus’ tip for it to register, but I still move my arm with the fluidity learnt from this exercise.

As a bonus this is also a lot better for your arm. Keeping the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Fairy away is very much a thing grizzled old animators wanted to teach the new kids coming in, they’d seen great careers cut short by injuries.

(You could also probably keep holding the pen in a more vertical fashion and use a wrist brace to keep your wrist from moving, if this is all too damn weird for you.)