The One Notebook Habit (2018)

https://medium.com/@shauntagrimes/the-one-notebook-habit-699af3480e7d

by ColinWright • 7 years ago

58 55 7 years ago

m0zg• 7 years ago

Trouble is, even if I write stuff down, I don't have the time to go back and read it.

sachdevap3• 7 years ago

While reviewing helps a lot, even without reviewing, the act of noting things down in a place that you can refer to later is huge. A capture location for all that you need to do later is a great idea - it frees up space in your head, and you can go back to it whenever you feel like it.

drunken-serval2• 7 years ago

I’ll second this. For me, it even works with typing on a phone keyboard. If I type a note, I remember it better. I keep my phone next to my bed for recording ideas I have in the middle of the night.

drunken-serval2• 7 years ago

I do this with my iPad. There’s an option in the settings to create a note from the lock screen if you start writing on it with the pencil.

Now I’m not suggesting you go buy an iPad but if you already have it... it works well for this.

I use Apple Notes but there are plenty of other apps out there.

And if this sounds a little absurd, her chosen notebook weighs more than my iPad with its pencil and keyboard. My iPad is larger by one inch in height and width but also significantly thinner.

andreilys• 7 years ago

You can also download an app like Notability, which can convert your handwritten notes to text.

So many of my physical notes are lost in notebooks that I never bothered to transpose into the digital realm.

With my iPad I get the benefit of handwriting, while also being able to index and search my notes later.

xwowsersx8• 7 years ago

Serious question: what are people keeping so many notes about? I understand if you're a writer, or seriously studying something or involved in some creative pursuit. But I don't get why this resonates with so many everyday people. Maybe I'm just dense. I bookmark a lot of things and clip some things here and there and then, every once in a while, I just delete it all. If it mattered that much, I'd have looked it over or otherwise retained it. I know this comes across as a nihilistic viewpoint, but things just don't matter that much. I think there's a fantasy of "storing up" knowledge and it gives people some false sense of accomplishment. Just my 2c. Let the downvotes commence :P

bbv-if• 7 years ago

Same for me. I delete old notes every now and then, just to keep them manageable. Who cares how many notes I have if I don't even remember about them.

peterlk• 7 years ago

My notebook is a todo list. If your email/request/etc. doesn't end up in my notebook, I will probably not do it. This is a forcing function for me for prioritization, delegation, and escalation. It's become more relevant as my work has shifted away from pure software engineering. I'm still working on which items to duplicate to work systems, but usually the point is to capture ad-hoc work that is not already in the system.

xwowsersx8• 7 years ago

If your email/request/etc. doesn't end up in my notebook, I will probably not do it.

Haha, I like that!

vvanders• 7 years ago

+1000

I've tried a ton of digital workflows and systems, only thing that came close to a physical notebook was Org Mode.

There's a couple reasons why I like a physical notebook:

1. It's a good log of what you've accomplished in a day. Lots of times I'll have days that didn't feel like much happened, reviewing my notes however brings into sharp relief all the things that I either dealt with or accomplished.

2. There's something incredibly satisfying about striking an item off the list with a physical motion. Hard to explain but definitely something I've noticed.

3. It's a great catch-all that's always on you. I've found an A6 size is just about perfect for this.

4. I review each item from the previous day in the morning, carry though the ones that aren't done, strike off the ones that are. Not only does it put you in the right head-space but also you start to develop a sense for things that aren't getting completed. It's a good forcing function for knowing if you need to dig into something a bit more depth than you previously thought.

5. I tend to work a notebook from both ends. Todo/items to track start from the front to the back, ideas/sketches/anything else I take pages from the back towards the front. Once they meet in the middle I'll retire the notebook and grab a new one.

kashyapc• 7 years ago

Personally, a lot of notes I write down everyday are inspiring thoughts and ideas from the books I'm reading.

Something about the rotary motion of pen on paper, and the way it deliberately focuses my thoughts helps me recall them better. (Also ... people tell me my handwriting doesn't exactly suck :-).)

Another example: In the last two weeks, I've visited four different museums and exhibitions of an artist I'm studying (Peter Bruegel the Elder[+]; 2019 is his 450th anniversary). Based on these study visits, in a good few pages, I jotted down what I learnt so far (on language, art, culture and science), drawings and copperplate engravings I wanted to further study, Dutch proverbs I learnt, several threads to further explore, new things I wanted to learn, relating ideas from Bruegel's work to topics I've learnt from a recent book I've completed, and so forth.

Do give the handwriting thing a try.

[+] https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/%2Fm%2F0h6nl?hl=en

(This Google Culture project has some splendid high-resolution scans of Bruegel's paintings.)

runjake• 7 years ago

Ideas, notes, random thoughts, code examples, part numbers, when I worked out or went to class, lists (books,movies,grocery, etc), to-dos, diagrams, planning, sketches, etc.

burlesona2• 7 years ago

There’s a famous quote that I think is the best answer to this question: “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it to remember it now.”

There’s a lot of research on this, but in short, most people develop much stronger memories of the things they physically write (typing is less effective IIRC), whether they ever refer back to the notes or not.

Your mileage may vary, but for most avid note takers, that’s the gist of it.

xwowsersx8• 7 years ago

Oh I couldn't agree more, great quote. Verbalizing or writing down your thoughts absolutely crystallizes your thoughts and the act of writing is most of the benefit. But this and other articles have all these systems of tagging and organizing and other things which seems to indicate they're building out some perfect reference for later use. In my mind, the crystallization benefits of writing can be accomplished without any of the other fancy add-ons.

joegahona• 7 years ago

There’s a lot of research on this, but in short, most people develop much stronger memories of the things they physically write (typing is less effective IIRC), whether they ever refer back to the notes or not.

Do you remember why typing would be less effective? Is it something to do with writing being much slower, therefore you have to think about it more while recording it?

seventhtiger2• 7 years ago

I also do that. I don't even keep notes because the act of writing is so powerful on helping me retain the information. So I really don't relate to all the note systems and note management. I can take any random printer paper, do my notes, and throw it out. This gives me the full use I will ever get because I have never in my entire life wanted to go back to my notes.

gen220• 7 years ago

Personally, I see writing as a symbolic form of “doing”: the disintegrating and reintegrating information. It’s one way to learn and remember.

At work, I find note taking to be almost useless for me personally, even though I feel like I’m learning new things each day. Although, I’ve noticed a quirk - whenever I learn something that surprises me, I feel the urge to share it out loud to my coworkers. I feel like that might take the place of writing it down?

Sometimes I feel guilty (?) about the fact that I don’t write as much any more. But, on reflection, I might have just replaced writing with orating...

Running with that idea, maybe oral conversation is an underrated ruminative method: with its great space for nuance and emphasis, and its tight feedback loop between speaker and listener. The only limits are working memory and persistence; if you’re dealing with too many interacting concepts, and your original point doesn’t stick, it’s usually gone forever. Although, maybe those are very useful filters :)

silasdb2• 7 years ago

Another quote says "if you want to know how well you know something, try teaching it to someone else". As a occasional programmer and math teacher, I usually gets astonished on how much I learn when teaching "basic" stuff for students. The learning/teaching process is amazing! Now, going back to what we were talking about, writing for me is essentially teaching myself a thing I thought I knew.

EDIT: fix English

jshaqaw• 7 years ago

Legit question. I think people are just different. I need to take a ton of notes because without them I’m lost on my work and life. My memory needs a refresh tool. I work with someone who can juggle 50 complicated situations at once and keep it all in his head. If I could do that too I would.

mark_l_watson2• 7 years ago

I take a lot of notes, switching platforms occasionally. In the past I used Evernote, Google Keep, Emacs with org mode, and then Apple notes. I tend to toss out old notes periodically. A few months ago I copied current notes back to Google Keep and that is what I am using now.

I write a lot (20 books, 1300 blog articles) and I just need to write notes with new ideas, links to resources, etc.

My oldest notes are probably a few years old. Deleting old stuff is easy and feels tidy.

xwowsersx8• 7 years ago

Oh hey Mark, I know you :) You worked for us for a while at Grasswire. Hope you're well!

analog31• 7 years ago

Because I'm a scatterbrain, and I'm often dealing with 100 things at once including projects, interruptions, and so forth. And I deal with a flood of disparate information. Maybe those things are all related.

Of course 99% of my notes are useless, I just don't know which 99%.

Sadly, my notes are as disorganized as my brain, but I'm doing what I can. I've been trying to make consistent use of Evernote. The only problem is that many of my notes include calculations. Being able to insert a Python cell in Evernote, a la Jupyter, would be the bees knees.

xwowsersx8• 7 years ago

That would be pretty cool. There's no plugins to do that kind of thing (does EN have plugins?)?

jecxjo• 7 years ago

I've found that while I can keep a lot in my head, my ability to prioritize doesn't maintain the life of the thoughts. Everything is some form of Todo list but they range from tasks I need to do to ordering my purchasing habits to fit within my financial constraints to listing books, movies and TV shows I want to watch. Working an 8 to 5 plus a side business with kids means my time is very limited. The less I need to remember the better and trying to go from work mode to relax mode needs to be as easy a transition as possible. Otherwise I just stay working.

jessmartin3• 7 years ago

I’ve been keeping a notebook with multiple entries a week since about 2005. I’ve got 30 of them, full. Which makes me feel pretty nice.

But in reality, I don’t actually revisit my notebooks very often. Their main purpose is to be a canvas on which I work out my thoughts. I’m an external processor, which means I need to get my thoughts out of my head in order to flesh them out. I talk them out often (see my burgeoning YouTube channel) but a notebook is an effective and societally acceptable way for me to work them out while in a coffee shop, during a lecture, or on an airplane.

I tell people often when I am taking to them: “I’m writing while you talk because it helps me listen better.”

jessmartin3• 7 years ago

To answer your original question, I keep notes in an unlined black Moleskine “work journal” about: - talks, lectures, sermons I’m listening to - meetings I’m attending - ideas that I have - outlines of a talk or an article I am about to give or write - sketches of product designs - diagrams for explaining complex concepts visually - quotes I hear that I enjoy - product ideas or business model ideas that I have

I have a “personal journal” where I write a prose account of my life and take time to process the events and think through what I’m feeling, thinking, and learning.

jplayer012• 7 years ago

Note taking has become such a core part of my process, no matter what it is. You’re always learning (or at least, ideally, you should be), whether it’s at work or engaged in a hobby, and I find it invaluable to record the things that I learn and in which situations I learn them, because I’ve noticed that even if I “learn” something now, I probably won’t remember in a week, much less in a month or a year.

At some point I grew tired of googling for a certain command usage in Linux yet again, or the solution to a certain sort-of-rare problem that crops up every couple of months but it would be a waste of effort to memorize what it is. So I started recording it. I have tons of text files filled with solutions, command usages, tips on possible problems/bugs, issues I’ve run into and what caused them, etc. I’ll even take notes on what programming practices seem to lead to issues and my thoughts about it, as well as resources I can find about it about better practices that avoid the problem. Programming, using Linux, learning Starcraft 2, learning guitar, learning a new programming language. I’ve reached a point where if I have to google something a second time, it gets written down.

Hell, I think it makes more sense to turn your question around - why aren’t you keeping any notes? Human memory is abjectly terrible, and becomes worse the more time passes until it’s less a “saved image” and more of a drawing of a painting of a polaroid of an image of a memory, filtered through years of experiences and growth.

hliyan• 7 years ago

Writing notes is part of my thinking process too. Sometimes people would find me staring at a list of just 3-4 items on a piece of scrap paper, or a whiteboard with just three boxes connected with arrows (usually representing a part of a system) and ask me, "That's just 3-4 items, why do you need to write it down?"

For some reason, getting it out of your head into a physical medium helps to reason about it better.

xwowsersx8• 7 years ago

Keeping some notes on things you google over and over again kind of makes sense, but honestly I find that it takes just as long it not longer to find it in my notes than it does to just Google it. Search is so fast and accurate, why do I really need to write it down when I can pull it up in my browser?

For deeper topics, I totally get it (as in some of the examples you provided), but for snippet things like that, I just don't see the advantage of keeping it in my notes. Hell, the few times I've done that, I forgot it was even in my notes and just Googled anyways. Even bookmarks end up being ignored and I search again rather than finding my bookmark!

I completely understand the inclination though and (perhaps self-contradictorily) I myself use Raindrop to save and organize things I find online. But I rarely end up doing anything with them.

I guess the point is that writing things down makes sense to me when either a) the act of writing itself is beneficial or b) it's more involved than a Linux snippet or the like...something that ends up more like a personal README.

I do hear your points though and genuinely like to hear about other people's process so thank you for sharing.

Baeocystin• 7 years ago

I can only assume that other people get something out of it. The most I do is use Google Keep for shopping lists or the like.

I have tried many times over the years to use a journal or notebook. It has never felt like anything more than a waste of time, and I gave it genuine, honest tries. It's just a lot easier for me to simply remember what I want to remember in the first place, and if I'm hashing out an idea, I can refine ideas mentally more rapidly than if I involve the written word.

My father, on the other hand, was a fastidious note-taker his entire life. His books are brimming with marginalia, and he was never without a notepad within easy reach at home.

His note-taking vs. my not didn't seem to make any difference in terms of the quality and nature of our ideas; we just used different means to get there.

I will say that now that he is gone, it leaves me with a wistful, warm feeling to be able to look through he more favored tomes and follow along with his thoughts.

larrywright• 7 years ago

As I approach middle age, I can definitely say that my ability to “simply remember what I want to remember in the first place” has diminished. I take a lot of notes, both digital and analog, and even if I don’t refer back to them the act of recording it helps me remember.

kube-system• 7 years ago

There's a lot of people here stating that notes help them retain material. Maybe that works for some people, but it doesn't work for me.

I find myself more likely to forget things when I write them down, especially in a meeting/lecture/discussion. Maybe it's just because my hand just doesn't go fast enough to get the information down on the page, or maybe I can't concentrate on thinking at the same time I write.

xwowsersx8• 7 years ago

Ah very interesting. What about in a situation where you aren't rushed? Say you're learning/studying/hacking something on your computer and came across something worth remembering or committing to memory?

markus_zhang• 7 years ago

As a business analyst (and looking forward to moving to Business Intelligence in a couple of years), notebooks are invaluable tools. They are more convenient than laptops and I have yet to find a note-taking application that is as flexible as handwriting.

The pain point is that it's extremely difficult to find a suitable notebook because most notebooks do not have computer professional as target customers. What I need is something with a lot of tabs, with one tab takes about 10-15 pages. as that's pretty much the amount of pages I need for one small project. But again this might be too much for a notebook because I'd also need to move the tabs to any page, so the only viable solution is to make my own tab notebooks with an ordinary notebook and some stickers.

I think maybe there are some hardware and software out there that allow us to write on a screen with the same flexibility and speed, but so far I didn't find one. Would be very nice if I can write quickly and comfortably in OneNote as it's so easy to tab in an application.

matwood• 7 years ago

For me at least, writing is the best way to organize my thoughts. I think writing requires more precision and thought over talking or just thinking. I believe this is one of the reasons Bezos makes people present ideas starting with a short written memo. When I have an idea, even if I'm going to share it with the team by talking, I will share a document first. Just the act of making those notes will help me see holes in the idea.

Taking notes also adds another retention mechanism.

Taking notes frees my brain from dwelling on or thinking about something that I don't want to forget.

Taking notes captures me at that point in time. I have stacks of workout notebooks. Writing down my numbers every workout plus how I felt probably gave me the biggest leap forward in my workouts than anything else. I'm doing the same now with BJJ and it really does help.

I do understand your point though. I used to be the same way until it dawned on me that a more general notebook was just like my stacks of workout notebooks, except for my entire life. Now I take notes, journal, etc... whenever I have thoughts rolling around in my head.

guidoism• 7 years ago

A good deal of what ends up in my notebooks are just random thoughts I’ve had. Ideas for stuff to make, questions I want answered about everything from some pedantic programming thing to the meaning of life. These little insights help me construct larger patterns of thoughts.

foundart• 7 years ago

Sadly, Medium requires me to upgrade to read it.

sachdevap3• 7 years ago

https://outline.com/AvA2tz

sachdevap3• 7 years ago

Non-medium link to read: https://outline.com/AvA2tz

BooneJS• 7 years ago

I have many empty notebooks. I put a title on the front with the subject and then do nothing with it. Diary, a project name, etc. My notebook I keep on my desk at work is a running log of everything I do. It’s easier to stick with it when I don’t care about order. Maybe there’s something to it. Maybe an iPad with many virtual notebooks would be easier, but damn if I don’t love paper.

jessmartin3• 7 years ago

I have an enduring fantasy of building an app that would bridge the physical notebook with the digital world in an entirely seamless manner, giving up neither the affordances of analog nor the data-driven features of digital. I’ve taken several runs at it, but none serious. Thus, it remains a fantasy.

lethologica• 7 years ago

What are your main hurdles?

Multicomp• 7 years ago

We almost had this with the Microsoft Courier. Digital notes first, but could quickly copy/paste/undo/take a picture/record sound. It was all about seamless data entry whether in written, audio or visual form. A shame it got cancelled.

I'm watching the Surface Neo very closely to see if they bring the same focus of seamless data entry (and offline export hopefully) to it...if so then not only will I buy it, I will issue it the only passport to my home ever to be issued to a Windows 10-based device.

silasdb2• 7 years ago

The Neo smartpen [1] looks great. They claim it can automatically saves a digital version of what you write down. The downside it that it only works with their notebooks.

[1] https://www.neosmartpen.com/en/

peter303• 7 years ago

My notebook at work was a yellow legal pad: records of meetings, todo lists, code outlines, debug lists, etc. Maybe a page or so a day, two 100 page pads a year.

kbutler• 7 years ago

I hate writing by hand. I have since elementary school. When we ran out of time for an "in class essay" in Junior High, and our teacher said finish it at home and turn it in, I typed it and turned it in.

And the great thing is, even with my handwriting, I can read what I've typed.

So I take notes in apps - searchability, persistence, and no need to manually copy data are the big wins of electronic data. That, and ease of writing (and reading). But I've been feeling like I need to consolidate to a single-app habit.

And I do keep a pen and notepad in a "planner"-style wallet, because 1) sometimes it's faster for a quick note, and 2) it can be socially more acceptable to write on paper than type into a device.

So I need to have one-app-to-rule-them-all, and it needs to easily incorporate the occasional hand-written or other paper note.

Shank2• 7 years ago

The biggest problems I have with paper notebooks are essentially:

1. Privacy. Anyone who acquires the notebook can read anything in it. I'm not discussing anything particularly important most times, but I'm reluctant to write down things that are...embarrassing or otherwise private if I'm taking that same notebook through airport security, for example.

2. Integrity. Destruction of the notebook is easy, as this author can attest. Spilling water or another substance on the notebook can immediately render it unreadable, which would somewhat be counter to the idea of recording information in the notebook.

3. Perfectionism. I'm sure I'm not the only one who grows really agitated by making errors in ink and then not being able to correct them without striking them out. Pencil is better obviously, but you can tear the pages...

I'm sure that these factors don't affect everyone the same, but for me...they're overwhelmingly influential in my choice not to use a paper notebook. I get the upsides, but the downsides are...really meh.

codemac• 7 years ago

This is what I use org-mode for largely, but I do miss hand written notes for the flexibility and freedom.

If anyone is linux/unix minded and has used an eink tablet for writing and loved it, please let me know!

The One Notebook Habit (2018)

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