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xkcd #2912: Cursive Letters
(imgs.xkcd.com)
Alt text:
๐ ๐ฝ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ท๐ด ๐ฌ๐ช๐น๐ฒ๐ฝ๐ช๐ต ๐ ๐ฒ๐ผ ๐น๐ป๐ธ๐ซ๐ช๐ซ๐ต๐ ๐ฝ๐ฑ๐ฎ ๐ถ๐ธ๐ผ๐ฝ ๐ฏ๐พ๐ท ๐ฝ๐ธ ๐๐ป๐ฒ๐ฝ๐ฎ, ๐ฝ๐ฑ๐ธ๐พ๐ฐ๐ฑ ๐ต๐ธ๐๐ฎ๐ป๐ฌ๐ช๐ผ๐ฎ ๐บ ๐ฒ๐ผ ๐ช๐ต๐ผ๐ธ ๐ช ๐ผ๐ฝ๐ป๐ธ๐ท๐ฐ ๐ฌ๐ธ๐ท๐ฝ๐ฎ๐ท๐ญ๐ฎ๐ป.
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, Iโve 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, Iโll 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, itโs Alexa. For professional notes, itโs 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.
Iโm not sure I would use a nationโs 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 Iโve 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 donโt 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 thatโs where weโre 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.
Iโve tried various ways of taking notes over the years. So many times Iโve had that โfinally, this is the oneโ 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.
Iโm not a fan of my handwriting. And Iโve 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 couldnโt manage.
Use the right tool for the job. Which it sounds like youโre 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 ๐ฉ
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.
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 promise you I've used both, pretty sure I had to write in pencil for mine and I'm sure you can argue the minutia back and forth all day, however objectively, the iPad is a more versatile writing tool than a notebook.
I disagree with your "objective" opinion lol. The iPad you have to keep charged, can break, they overheat in sunlight especially when you put an OtterBox on them, they might get laggy with big documents. And with paper you can write with any pen/highlighter you like, you can take it anywhere. Tablets are not always the best tool.
What large documents are you keeping in that binder? Your notebook can break, if one iPad isn't charged I grab another one, we've been over this, okay the battery fails; again, it's backed up. Maybe it can overheat in the sunlight (110ยฐf haven't had it happen), maybe you want to keep something extra private. I don't really see the difference between changing writing tools in an app and in person tbh, but I'm pretty sure I can take an iPad almost anywhere. A tablet can do almost anything a notebook/binder can, the same is not true in reverse.
I don't really have infinite money for new/multiple iPads lol, neither has any habitat restoration job I've worked in.
I don't need to keep large documents on hand in my notes binder. I do sometimes print them and file them in an organized filing cabinet though. It's super fast to find whatever I'm looking for, add post-its, notes, whatever I want to them. And I can read them outside without glare.
I have had my phones overheat in sunlight regularly, just listening to podcasts. Not even that hot, like coastal California sunlight. Multiple devices, over years, it's just something I've accepted that can happen when you're working outdoors.
I already described all the advantages of paper notes. They don't break. You don't need to carry extra batteries around. No glare. I would not take an iPad into thick brush on a hot day, I wouldn't even be able to see the damn screen half the time. But you do you!
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
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.
He can be as disorganized as he wants up until it makes my life more difficult. Then I'll be mad at him.
Don't gatekeeper being mad at annoying people.
lmao gatekeeping? calm down ๐
You actually seem to be the one with the personality problem here.
People are telling you their stories, and you're like "no your stories are wrong you're a shit person." What the hell is wrong with you?
you're projecting a lot here? but go off
Do you mean drawers?