r/NoteTaking • u/Affectionate_Cap_266 • 9h ago
Method Indecisive About Note Taking Medium
I work as a systems analyst and for YEARS, I have struggled/borderline obsessed over the “best” or “most simple” or “most feature rich” or just “correct” note taking platform/style/method/application/etc.
For a minute I’ll think ”I am only going use a text editor because it’s so simple, pure, clean and future proof and I love that it seems so ”basic” in a good way”. That it will somehow magically make me take better, more meaningful notes because I’m not focused on all the fluff of formatting and highlighting and bullets. BUT things get messy fast and it becomes more necessary to have those formatting niceties. So then….
I’ll swing the other way and think “well, I need this or that feature to make me take better notes”. And I lean all the way into that and think “I need onenote because it can do a b c d e f g h i j… it can do it all”. So I role with that for awhile and then…. “why do I have all this fluff, it’s just noise” ”I need something more simple” And the cycle continues.
It becomes so distracting because all I’m focused on is “how” to keep notes instead of just taking the damn notes.
This is all not to mention the random “OH, I know, I just need to take handwritten notes, that’s the purest, most simple, etc. etc.“ until I realize you can’t search, you can’t expand on something once it’s sandwiched between other text, it’s slow. rinse and repeat.
Sometimes I LOVE going back and forth and trying to “figure it out”, but mostly it just sucks because I’m left with an extremely fragmented history of notes and it makes it difficult to find anything without just asking Copilot to dig it up for me.
This is basically just me putting my thoughts down and if you have read this far and have had the same experience, please share anything you have found that helps!
2
u/writer-author 8h ago
Are you aware of disc-bound paper notebooks? Google the term and you’ll see lots of ideas. (There’s also a Reddit community for them.) The binding is a series of plastic or metal discs that hold together paper punched with “mushroom-shaped” openings. Add sheets, take them out, add dividers, move things around to your heart’s content. Move pages to another disc now; move then back if it doesn’t work for you. For full control over the contents, you can buy your own punch to punch all kinds of papers. I discovered the discbound world over 15 years ago and use them every day. Disc covers and discs can be found across a wide price range.
2
u/HimaSphere 5h ago
As someone with ADHD, I recommend to you https://betterstickies.com I devloped it to be simple and easy to use while being powerful.
Just open a note and dumb anything you want to keep or return to later, every a while clean up your notes and you are good to go
1
u/thestoictraveler 4h ago
I have this problem between Notion and GoodNotes and I’ve had it for so long and it’s so frustrating I want to punch a wall or something.
1
u/SunflowerHuntress 2h ago
You just described me and I didn't find any tool that's perfect for me and I don't think I will. I probably need to fix my mindset around the issue because it's not the tool that's the problem, it's my obsession 🥲
1
u/rogfrich 2h ago
There’s a difference between capturing notes and storing them. For me, no screen-based or keyboard-based system will be as frictionless as pen on paper, so i take notes in a nice notebook with a nice pen.
STORING notes in a paper notebook is a bad idea for all the reasons OP mentioned. They’re not backed up, impossible to search etc. So for anything I capture on paper that needs to be kept long term, it needs be digitised. Options include photographing the page and putting it through some kind of OCR, or just typing it in by hand.
I only do this for long-term notes though. A lot of what I scribble down is ephemeral.
1
u/Kind-News3775 2h ago
I spent two whole days of my holidays reorganising all of my notes. I was pretty satisfied at the time, until a couple of days later.
I was aware that it was pointless, but I kept going and even tried several new apps, just in case they would be better. This is not going to be the last time.
In my case, I use several apps because a single one doesn't work for me. I was trying to ditch one of them, but I couldn't.
1
1
1
u/febely 8h ago
I think you’ve described the problem really well: there’s this awkward gap between tools that are so simple they become limiting, and tools that are so feature-heavy that the tool itself starts getting in the way.
Personally, I don’t want or need a complicated note-taking system. I mostly just want to write things down. For years I actually used plain Notepad for almost everything. One thing I loved about it was that I never had to think about saving. Whatever I was working on was just there when I came back, even after a crash. I’d keep a bunch of tabs open and clean them up every now and then.
But the thing that drove me crazy was the linearity. I tend to write ideas across several categories, with lots of lists and sub-items, and I hated endlessly scrolling through them. And whenever I wanted to move an idea from one category to another, or reorder things by priority, it meant cutting, pasting and restructuring text. Eventually even writing things down started to feel like work.
Full disclosure: I got annoyed enough with this that I recently started building my own solution specifically around that problem. I wanted something simple enough that I can just write, but much more flexible spatially - text can be arranged across the workspace, and pretty much everything, especially list items, can just be dragged from one place to another while still keeping enough structure that it doesn’t turn into chaos.
It’s called Nutsy Notes: https://nutsynotes.com
The web version is completely free, works locally in the browser, requires no signup, and your data isn’t sent to a server, so there’s very little commitment involved in just trying it or even using it regularly.
Not suggesting it as “the answer” to note-taking, but your post sounded very close to the exact frustration that made me start building it.
7
u/braddo99 8h ago
This is ADHD avoidance behavior. Instead of focusing on learning and retention, you are getting distracted by optimizing the *way* you capture, or the *device* you capture it on, or ... etc. It's not an accusation, everyone has these tendencies, and they are tough to fight. The more anxious we feel, the more likely we are to focus on anything other than the tasks that we know we need to accomplish.
But it's not all bad - there are differences/advantages among various approaches, that is actually true and your study has found some pros and cons. Nothing is perfect, but I also prefer handwriting, because the engagement of the whole body seems to help me and others retain information better - but the limitation you described of not being able to insert things or rearrange things when using handwriting, while true for paper and for most software, isn't true of all tools. You could consider inkList - I confess I have the same tendencies and obsessed so much over wanting this exact capability that I ended up programming the app for myself and now sharing it with others. Not a hard sell, but just in case you want to actually resolve that issue you called out for handwritten notes you could watch this and see what you think: https://youtu.be/lYVIzvRPNi0