With so much note taking apps nowadays, I can’t understand why does anyone still write notes with pen and paper. You need to bring the notepad, book or that paper to retrieve that information, and most of the time you don’t have it in hand. While my phone almost always reachable and you carry when you go out. For those still like to do handwriting, there’s many app does that and they can even convert it to text notes.
So, if you still write notes with pen and paper, why?
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I do not trust things in my phone to stay private.
Typing is better than writing in a solid 75% of cases in my opinion. I agree that you tend to remember things that you physically wrote down better than things you type, but that can be mitigated against if you’re in a situation where you need to remember things with strategies like spaced repetition.
In a lecture setting I would prefer to physically write things down, but you also have to be careful with this and only try and summarize because many people have the wrong strategy and try and transcribe slideshows or the lecturer’s words verbatim, get halfway through a sentence, the lecturer moves on to the next page, you then have to try and remember the rest, probably get bits wrong, and by the time you’ve finished that then they’re on to the next page and you’re just not having a great time. If you get good at typing then you can keep up much better but that’s still not the right thing to do in the lecture hall, unless your lecturer doesn’t give out the notes or slideshows afterwards or record the lectures. then you’re just kinda shit outta luck.
In just everyday settings, like writing a shopping list, keeping reminders? probably on my phone or laptop.
Since I got a Remarkable 2 tablet I don’t write on paper anymore. It’s still handwriting so it’s kind of the best of both worlds.
I’ll answer with a simple test. Do the following first on your phone and then on a piece of paper:
Design a thing, something physical; a box, a house, a chair, whatever. In addition to the diagram, this note must include a description of the item, the bill of materials, the dimensions and, if applicable, assembly instructions that you could confidently hand to someone else and have them follow. Ideally, you should include the dimensions of the object directly on the sketch itself.
Now give this to someone and see how accurately they can reproduce the item while you go off and make a phone call.
In addition, the mere act of giving that information to somebody else.
On a phone I can obviously text somebody, but what if I’m somewhere with bad signal (and yes, those places often exist), or the person doesn’t have the phone in their pocket right that second (yes, this also happens in places with work where people don’t want to risk the phone in their pocket breaking)?
With a mini notepad, I can rip a sheet of notes off and hand that diagram to somebody else. If it’s work that will take some time doing while following a diagram, having a phone screen locking up because it isn’t being touched is a hassle and going into the settings to change it back and forth is annoying.
I get a lot of scratch paper as part of my job entails troubleshooting printers (kill me) and so I have stacks of printer test pages, pages printed out with PCL and PS errors and what not. These make good canvases for sketching up quick network designs or diagraming things such as work flows. I usually scan them in a note taking app before shredding them to keep my desk clear but it’s much more convenient that having to use Visio or something on things that just need to be sketched out
My laptop died in June, so I had to write my entire master’s thesis in a notebook with a pen. Typing on a phone is terrible for writing more than a few sentences.
Typing on a phone is terrible for writing more than a few sentences.
A bluetooth keyboard might be helpful here.
Yes, when i need to concentrate
Yep. My little Field Notes books don’t send me notifications about emails, and I can toss them around without breaking them. And use a lot of notation and drawing methods that are very slow when typing with my thumbs.
Sometimes i need to hand info to someone, or paper is just nearby, or i need to draw a diagram.
I do have an ipad, but if you are brainstorming with other people, they don’t always know how to use it/touch the wrong thing.
All other notes are digital, because i am bad at keeping track of pieces of paper.
Because you remember it better when you actually write it out instead of just using a keyboard. And you can draw diagrams with ease. Most styluses are inaccurate and one dimensional, and buying a phone with actual proper stylus support in both the display and stylus itself is expensive. You could buy a separate technical device just for note taking with proper stylus support and have it upload notes to the cloud so you can access it at all times, but that requires a constant internet connection and mobile data is expensive. And then you have to carry this seperate device with you in the same way you’d carry a much cheaper physical notepad anyways.
I use a mechanical pencil. Pentel 205 for life baby.
Most of my writing is in pen and paper, I eat through a 200 page composition book about every year. I also do writing on shared drives, like Google docs mostly, and I have grapheme notepad installed on ever electronic device that I own, and I use it fairly often. Something about handwriting makes it easier to get started, maybe its my art/drawing background. I also write in cursive, and people seem to think my handwriting is nice. Admittedly I have practiced letters since grade school, which is kind of unusual I think. Maybe not, I just don’t have as many type/font/lettering conversations as I might like
