I work in habitat restoration. I spend a lot of time outdoors, but most of my notes are just from my normal meetings. If I’m on my phone taking notes, I have to stare down at my phone and it takes me out of the meeting. I have ADHD and find my phone very distracting. But I can write quick notes on paper without having my head down.
I also just prefer physical notes. I have tried everything under the sun with digital note-taking, but nothing beats the flexibility and reliability of pen and paper. I have a great binder-based note-organization system.
I am honestly shocked that so many people NEVER use pen and paper notes? It is very normal in my field.
Speaking for myself, my handwriting is far from elegant. In university (40+ years ago) I developed a sort of mashup of cursive and printing, since speed of transcription was fairly typical.
I adore the look of top tier handwriting. I even got into calligraphy when I was in HS.
Since my career has taken me deep into the world of tech, I’ve become twitchy at the possibility of a single point of failure, ie, one copy of something is equivalent to no copies of something, 2 copies of something is equivalent to 1 copy, etc.
As such, I’ll take casual note (eg, my to do list for my ADHD) using Google Keep, so that I can access it and update it from my phone or one of my laptops. For the grocery list, it’s Alexa. For professional notes, it’s a combination of Obsidian and Syncthing.
Speaking of Obsidian, I first learned of it while watching a video of anPhD student describing her massive manual note taking system, following a particular system manually, and then discovering Obsidian.
In your case, yeah, I see no reason to change. It works for you.
Yeah, paper note-taking does mean scanning right away when you’re back in the office. But the reality of field work is that you might lose the data if you took them on a tablet, too. I’ve worked jobs where there was no service until we get into the office, so the data just lives on the device until it is uploaded.
I am using Obsidian for a particular project, I’m using it to organize a history research project I’m working on! I think it’s a cool tool, I would just go crazy if I had everything organized on my computer. I end up hyperfocusing more on the organizing system itself, or get distracted on the computer/phone… and the physical notes I can make cute and aesthetic much more easily which makes me feel warmly about my to-dos. I tried to do a digital PDF notebook with hyperlinks and everything, but I just felt like I was spending too much time fiddling around with on my note-taking and organization.
Paper stationary is a lot more popular in Germany and Japan, oddly enough. A lot of jetpens products come from those countries … the most sought after notebooks are Japanese and Germans have great pens.
I’m not sure I would use a nation’s strong preference/popularity for a particular tech to be the gold standard. Fax machines are, or at least used to be, in high usage over there. Also, they have a quirky preference for doing everything in spreadsheets; deviating from that to use a more appropriate tool is frowned upon. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is someone drawing up an office floor plan, very detailed, including the cubicles. It was a gorgeous piece, but I had to wonder about the baffling inefficiency of that approach.
That said, I don’t disagree with the notion of avoiding any tool that creates huge overhead of just using the tool itself. Screw that. I love tech, but screw that.
Even where I work now, we try to reduce duplication. And in spite of that, I find myself using a hodgepodge of GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. Jira and Confluence are slow and bloated, but that’s where we’re meant to put a lot of our effort. Even so, a table in either of those is slower and more limited than just using Sheets.
I’ve tried various ways of taking notes over the years. So many times I’ve had that “finally, this is the one” moments, only to eventually move on to something else. For a short while there, I was simply editing Markdown in Visual Studio Code (with Preview mode) and committing to GitHub, which was both lightweight and made for quick backups. Then I discovered Obsidian, and around the time worked out how to get SyncThing working.
I’m not a fan of my handwriting. And I’ve been burnt too many times in university courses, writing something down, only to realise I needed to add another paragraph up where there was barely any room to add a few words. And drawing arrows here and there only works for so long. So yeah, call me embittered =)
Handwriting in university was really the only option at the time, as it would be decades more before the first smartphone would come along. Plus, taking courses in linguistics, Chinese, and Japanese, you needed to be able to capture things that a conventional keyboard just couldn’t manage.
Use the right tool for the job. Which it sounds like you’re doing. Likewise for myself, I think.
I was just saying there are a lot of Japanese/German-made stationary options because they use stationary. It’s kind of a bummer because you have to pay extra for them to be imported, and they might not be in English or show important American dates. I wish there were more high quality English-language options available. Even the paper itself is usually shit 😩
Totally understandable that as a tech worker you would prefer digital note-taking tools!
And just as an aside, sometimes I think engineers focus too much on “efficiency”. There are a ton of things that can be optimized for! Maybe having a beautiful office layout diagram makes the experience of looking at and working with the diagram more enjoyable, more memorable, maybe it instills pride in the office workers.
Your tone is condescending as fuck, so I don’t know why I’m bothering to reply because you’ll undoubtedly just shoot insults at me too, but… I live in 2024. I work in tech, too. I almost exclusively use paper as a note taking, problem solving, and brainstorming tool. Digital tools simply don’t compare in my eye. There is an inherent freedom of immediate expression and a special mental retention value that comes with pen on paper that I have tried and failed to sufficiently replicate on a computer despite attempts of great effort. I’d definitely prefer if I could instantly backup and organize and search and sync without a scan+tag process, but it’s all inferior to me. The most capable people I work with also have a shockingly common tendency (>65%) to share this preference, too. I envy the others’ ability to work purely digitally, but do notice how they spend substantially more time and effort in “administrative overhead” with their digital knowledgebases in comparison to my analog squishy world, to just end up producing similar overall output.
You just prefer it, a notebook won’t survive a 50ft fall into water, an iPad with an OtterBox might, even if it didn’t my notes will, I just grab another iPad.
I have a colleague that insists on using pen and paper. He has draws and draws full of random scraps of paper which apparently have important things on them.
He’s even gone out and got expensive paper which is apparently made from stones? and is there for waterproof, It does appear to be waterproof but I’m not convinced it’s made out of stone. He has a phone and a Laptop, and an iPad Pro with a stylus, and he refuses to use any of them.
Yeah because he can never find anything. He knows he wrote it down, but he doesn’t know where it is or what it said, and because it’s not on a computer you can’t just search for it. He’s a pain.
Even if he just scanned in the results of his spider scroll at least we’d have something. Although it still wouldn’t be searchable because it would just be a picture but I bet OCR could probably do something about that.
You can totally be disorganized on a computer too. My paper notes are organized in a binder by context.
Idk sounds like the guy just has untreated ADHD or something. Life’s too short to be mad at someone for being kinda bad at their job. You’re all just workers together.
I know like, four or five people who use them! Depends on your circle. They’re an affordable and eco-friendly alternative to disposable pens, although admittedly inconvenient if you haven’t got a good setup.
I don’t think I’ve ever owned a fountain pen that hasn’t eventually leaked on everything. It’s not broken either, it just leaks during the process of normal operations, so no matter how careful you are with it it will still leak.
Modern foundation pens with universal ink cartridges/refillable ones are pretty reliable. The only time one has leaked on me was when I dropped it and broke the pen in half. I had topen body fixed and it still works well.
I’m 37 and can barely read cursive, I hate it. I learned it in primary school, never used it, and here I am.
I play DnD and one of our campaigns got so confusing so our DM made a huuuuge flow chart explaining the story, consequences of our actions, where we can go next, etc. It’s all in fucking cursive and I couldn’t read any of it so I continue to be confused :)
It’s definitely not neater for lefties like me who smear our script as we write.
However, OCR input tech on phones and tablets are better at reading cursive than block print. Curiously, my grandson’s curriculum in the Solano County School District dropped cursive writing and then picked it up again.
I never recovered, and I don’t really know how to write print. So i either write cursive at the speed of around one letter per second, produce unreadable chicken scratching, or write very ugly all caps print because that’s simple enough and actually readable and faster than trying to produce legible cursive.
I also don’t think I handwrite more than 100 words a year though so it’s ok
You may want to look into dyspraxia. (Especially so if you have ((or suspect you have)) ADHD or autism, etc.) I think it’s way more common than it’s diagnosed. I’m the same way, and it helped explain a lot for me, so I thought I’d throw it out there just in case! 'Cause I’m getting those vibes haha!
Yep, I think i even got diagnosed with something similar (tho all i have is a memory of my mom mentioning “fine motor skill development disorder” once, which my brain couldve just made up), I do have autism and probably adhd which I’m still trying to get diagnosed. I looked into dyspraxia a while ago and a lot of it fit pretty well, I still tie my shoe laces in a very scuffed way for example and it took me until I was 12 or so to learn it. And there’s nothing I hate more than fiddly stuff with my hands, so I’ve pretty much assumed I have some form of dyspraxia ever since. Though I had little issues learning to type and can do that pretty fast, and never had any general learning disability, which made me a bit doubtful. If it has high comorbidity with autism/adhd I probably do have it after all.
In any case I am glad I don’t have to handwrite a lot anymore lol
omg is dyspraxia the reason there’s such an internet boner for hating cursive??? I never thought about that. It always seemed weird to me because it was such a short and forgettable part of my educational experience, but I could understand being upset about it if it was painful or difficult to learn and other people seemed to learn more easily.
What helped me get back to block print after six years of being required to write cursive is a shop/engineering drawing class that required us to use block print for our plates.
Our teacher in that subject taught us how to do block print, paying attention to each and every stroke and in what order we write them. I remember one of our first handful of plates just being the alphabet and some of the often used symbols. That helped us with our penmanship, without shaming anyone who might have had developed bad habits from previous years. Everyone is required to do it, so there’s no shame in sucking at it.
It is neater and faster but people cannot read it nor reciprocate. It used to be more or less universal. I like it and use it, but won’t if what’s being written is for the public.
When I was young my teacher said “If you want to be taken seriously you must use cursive!” She also said I’d never have a calculator in my pocket when I needed it, so there’s that.
I hate that they still teach it in schools. It means that for about 3-4 years per child, you get birthday and Christmas cards and you can’t read them.
It’s not noticeably faster and it’s certainly not neater. Just let it die.
Also writing speed doesn’t really matter anymore. Most situations where writing speed used to matter now needs typing speed instead.
I don’t buy this. I take notes on paper all the time, what am I going to have my laptop or phone in my face during every conversation?
What are you doing that having a pen and paper is normal but your phone or laptop isn’t?
I work in habitat restoration. I spend a lot of time outdoors, but most of my notes are just from my normal meetings. If I’m on my phone taking notes, I have to stare down at my phone and it takes me out of the meeting. I have ADHD and find my phone very distracting. But I can write quick notes on paper without having my head down.
I also just prefer physical notes. I have tried everything under the sun with digital note-taking, but nothing beats the flexibility and reliability of pen and paper. I have a great binder-based note-organization system.
I am honestly shocked that so many people NEVER use pen and paper notes? It is very normal in my field.
I find this fascinating. Props to you, of course.
Speaking for myself, my handwriting is far from elegant. In university (40+ years ago) I developed a sort of mashup of cursive and printing, since speed of transcription was fairly typical.
I adore the look of top tier handwriting. I even got into calligraphy when I was in HS.
Since my career has taken me deep into the world of tech, I’ve become twitchy at the possibility of a single point of failure, ie, one copy of something is equivalent to no copies of something, 2 copies of something is equivalent to 1 copy, etc.
As such, I’ll take casual note (eg, my to do list for my ADHD) using Google Keep, so that I can access it and update it from my phone or one of my laptops. For the grocery list, it’s Alexa. For professional notes, it’s a combination of Obsidian and Syncthing.
Speaking of Obsidian, I first learned of it while watching a video of anPhD student describing her massive manual note taking system, following a particular system manually, and then discovering Obsidian.
In your case, yeah, I see no reason to change. It works for you.
Yeah, paper note-taking does mean scanning right away when you’re back in the office. But the reality of field work is that you might lose the data if you took them on a tablet, too. I’ve worked jobs where there was no service until we get into the office, so the data just lives on the device until it is uploaded.
I am using Obsidian for a particular project, I’m using it to organize a history research project I’m working on! I think it’s a cool tool, I would just go crazy if I had everything organized on my computer. I end up hyperfocusing more on the organizing system itself, or get distracted on the computer/phone… and the physical notes I can make cute and aesthetic much more easily which makes me feel warmly about my to-dos. I tried to do a digital PDF notebook with hyperlinks and everything, but I just felt like I was spending too much time fiddling around with on my note-taking and organization.
Paper stationary is a lot more popular in Germany and Japan, oddly enough. A lot of jetpens products come from those countries … the most sought after notebooks are Japanese and Germans have great pens.
I’m not sure I would use a nation’s strong preference/popularity for a particular tech to be the gold standard. Fax machines are, or at least used to be, in high usage over there. Also, they have a quirky preference for doing everything in spreadsheets; deviating from that to use a more appropriate tool is frowned upon. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is someone drawing up an office floor plan, very detailed, including the cubicles. It was a gorgeous piece, but I had to wonder about the baffling inefficiency of that approach.
That said, I don’t disagree with the notion of avoiding any tool that creates huge overhead of just using the tool itself. Screw that. I love tech, but screw that.
Even where I work now, we try to reduce duplication. And in spite of that, I find myself using a hodgepodge of GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. Jira and Confluence are slow and bloated, but that’s where we’re meant to put a lot of our effort. Even so, a table in either of those is slower and more limited than just using Sheets.
I’ve tried various ways of taking notes over the years. So many times I’ve had that “finally, this is the one” moments, only to eventually move on to something else. For a short while there, I was simply editing Markdown in Visual Studio Code (with Preview mode) and committing to GitHub, which was both lightweight and made for quick backups. Then I discovered Obsidian, and around the time worked out how to get SyncThing working.
I’m not a fan of my handwriting. And I’ve been burnt too many times in university courses, writing something down, only to realise I needed to add another paragraph up where there was barely any room to add a few words. And drawing arrows here and there only works for so long. So yeah, call me embittered =)
Handwriting in university was really the only option at the time, as it would be decades more before the first smartphone would come along. Plus, taking courses in linguistics, Chinese, and Japanese, you needed to be able to capture things that a conventional keyboard just couldn’t manage.
Use the right tool for the job. Which it sounds like you’re doing. Likewise for myself, I think.
I was just saying there are a lot of Japanese/German-made stationary options because they use stationary. It’s kind of a bummer because you have to pay extra for them to be imported, and they might not be in English or show important American dates. I wish there were more high quality English-language options available. Even the paper itself is usually shit 😩
Totally understandable that as a tech worker you would prefer digital note-taking tools!
And just as an aside, sometimes I think engineers focus too much on “efficiency”. There are a ton of things that can be optimized for! Maybe having a beautiful office layout diagram makes the experience of looking at and working with the diagram more enjoyable, more memorable, maybe it instills pride in the office workers.
Congratulations on finding a single exemption to the rule.
The rest of us are living in 2024
Your tone is condescending as fuck, so I don’t know why I’m bothering to reply because you’ll undoubtedly just shoot insults at me too, but… I live in 2024. I work in tech, too. I almost exclusively use paper as a note taking, problem solving, and brainstorming tool. Digital tools simply don’t compare in my eye. There is an inherent freedom of immediate expression and a special mental retention value that comes with pen on paper that I have tried and failed to sufficiently replicate on a computer despite attempts of great effort. I’d definitely prefer if I could instantly backup and organize and search and sync without a scan+tag process, but it’s all inferior to me. The most capable people I work with also have a shockingly common tendency (>65%) to share this preference, too. I envy the others’ ability to work purely digitally, but do notice how they spend substantially more time and effort in “administrative overhead” with their digital knowledgebases in comparison to my analog squishy world, to just end up producing similar overall output.
Not really, a lot of people work outdoors in some way. It’s not as unusual as you think, you are just in your own bubble lol
You just prefer it, a notebook won’t survive a 50ft fall into water, an iPad with an OtterBox might, even if it didn’t my notes will, I just grab another iPad.
No, you’re just wrong. A notebook does fine in the rain and water, there are specially designed notebooks for this.
He’s not wrong though you just disagree.
He is wrong bc he’s saying a tablet would survive the elements better
I have a colleague that insists on using pen and paper. He has draws and draws full of random scraps of paper which apparently have important things on them.
He’s even gone out and got expensive paper which is apparently made from stones? and is there for waterproof, It does appear to be waterproof but I’m not convinced it’s made out of stone. He has a phone and a Laptop, and an iPad Pro with a stylus, and he refuses to use any of them.
You don’t really seem to like him very much haha
Yeah because he can never find anything. He knows he wrote it down, but he doesn’t know where it is or what it said, and because it’s not on a computer you can’t just search for it. He’s a pain.
Even if he just scanned in the results of his spider scroll at least we’d have something. Although it still wouldn’t be searchable because it would just be a picture but I bet OCR could probably do something about that.
You can totally be disorganized on a computer too. My paper notes are organized in a binder by context.
Idk sounds like the guy just has untreated ADHD or something. Life’s too short to be mad at someone for being kinda bad at their job. You’re all just workers together.
Do you mean drawers?
I’m not taking notes on any of the idiot conversations I get roped into every day
If you are- have fun, enjoy your pen and paper
Different lines of work. I have to remember a lot of things people tell me 🤷🏻
It is noticabley faster if you write with a fountain pen, or any pen with flowy ink.
Possibly, but I know exactly one person who writes with a fountain pen.
I remember wanting one in school, but the value was mostly in being able to flick ink at the other kids.
I know like, four or five people who use them! Depends on your circle. They’re an affordable and eco-friendly alternative to disposable pens, although admittedly inconvenient if you haven’t got a good setup.
I don’t think I’ve ever owned a fountain pen that hasn’t eventually leaked on everything. It’s not broken either, it just leaks during the process of normal operations, so no matter how careful you are with it it will still leak.
Modern foundation pens with universal ink cartridges/refillable ones are pretty reliable. The only time one has leaked on me was when I dropped it and broke the pen in half. I had topen body fixed and it still works well.
My kids got just enough cursive in school to learn how to sign their names. Definitely not 3-4 years of it. Maybe 3-4 weeks at the most.
I’m 37 and can barely read cursive, I hate it. I learned it in primary school, never used it, and here I am.
I play DnD and one of our campaigns got so confusing so our DM made a huuuuge flow chart explaining the story, consequences of our actions, where we can go next, etc. It’s all in fucking cursive and I couldn’t read any of it so I continue to be confused :)
It’s definitely not neater for lefties like me who smear our script as we write.
However, OCR input tech on phones and tablets are better at reading cursive than block print. Curiously, my grandson’s curriculum in the Solano County School District dropped cursive writing and then picked it up again.
I heard more than a few US states decided to expend a law on requiring it because taught, your grandson might be a victim of such a policy.
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I never recovered, and I don’t really know how to write print. So i either write cursive at the speed of around one letter per second, produce unreadable chicken scratching, or write very ugly all caps print because that’s simple enough and actually readable and faster than trying to produce legible cursive.
I also don’t think I handwrite more than 100 words a year though so it’s ok
You may want to look into dyspraxia. (Especially so if you have ((or suspect you have)) ADHD or autism, etc.) I think it’s way more common than it’s diagnosed. I’m the same way, and it helped explain a lot for me, so I thought I’d throw it out there just in case! 'Cause I’m getting those vibes haha!
Yep, I think i even got diagnosed with something similar (tho all i have is a memory of my mom mentioning “fine motor skill development disorder” once, which my brain couldve just made up), I do have autism and probably adhd which I’m still trying to get diagnosed. I looked into dyspraxia a while ago and a lot of it fit pretty well, I still tie my shoe laces in a very scuffed way for example and it took me until I was 12 or so to learn it. And there’s nothing I hate more than fiddly stuff with my hands, so I’ve pretty much assumed I have some form of dyspraxia ever since. Though I had little issues learning to type and can do that pretty fast, and never had any general learning disability, which made me a bit doubtful. If it has high comorbidity with autism/adhd I probably do have it after all.
In any case I am glad I don’t have to handwrite a lot anymore lol
omg is dyspraxia the reason there’s such an internet boner for hating cursive??? I never thought about that. It always seemed weird to me because it was such a short and forgettable part of my educational experience, but I could understand being upset about it if it was painful or difficult to learn and other people seemed to learn more easily.
What helped me get back to block print after six years of being required to write cursive is a shop/engineering drawing class that required us to use block print for our plates.
Our teacher in that subject taught us how to do block print, paying attention to each and every stroke and in what order we write them. I remember one of our first handful of plates just being the alphabet and some of the often used symbols. That helped us with our penmanship, without shaming anyone who might have had developed bad habits from previous years. Everyone is required to do it, so there’s no shame in sucking at it.
Heard it’s good to master fine motor skills.
So’s Minecraft and Fortnite, and I dare say they’ll enjoy that a lot more than trying to remember how to join a p and a b.
It is neater and faster but people cannot read it nor reciprocate. It used to be more or less universal. I like it and use it, but won’t if what’s being written is for the public.
When I was young my teacher said “If you want to be taken seriously you must use cursive!” She also said I’d never have a calculator in my pocket when I needed it, so there’s that.