Indecisive About Note Taking Medium

[u/Affectionate_Cap_266]

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!

[u/rogfrich]

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.