How, Where, and Why I Take Notes

29 Jul 2024

I take a blend of digital and hand-written notes. It’s a bit of a hodgepodge, but it’s working. I used to lean heavily into full-digital notes, but I started drifting towards a mixture of digital and hand-written notes. Initially it was complicated, but I think I’m converging on a good setup. What I describe here will continue to evolve I am sure, but I am enjoying where it’s currently at.

Pen and paper is best for thinking #

I’ve fallen down the fountain pen rabbit hole. I used to write with a Pilot G2 pen, and I loved how dark ink was. The primary drawback was that it bled through the paper of my Leuchtturm notebooks a little bit. I also had some problems with the extra-fine 0.38 pens: after a few months of use, they’d break before all the gel ink had been expended. This was frustrating.

Now I write with a Lamy Al-Star with an extra-fine nib. I use Pilot’s black take-sumi iroshizuku ink. It is lovely to write with this pen. Compared to the G2, the fountain pen writes just as fine as the 0.38 G2, but the ink doesn’t skip, the tip never breaks, and the ink doesn’t bleed through the paper at all. Sure, the fountain pen requires a little more maintenance than a gel or ballpoint pen, but it is fun to have a little mechanical thing to maintain and form simple rituals around.

Getting the fountain pen had the curious effect of making me want to take more notes by hand. I started writing a lot more. But I have a bunch of infrastructure set up for digital note taking, so when I initially started writing more, I would get a little lost as to where I had put certain notes. I didn’t like that.

I did find that I enjoyed writing my thoughts out—it was like doing a one-person rubber-duck session. I strongly believe that writing helps you think: it forces you to be explicit with your thoughts and it helps you notice gaps in your thinking. This can push you to answer questions that you wouldn’t have asked otherwise.

Quasi-digital for classes #

In class I take notes on an iPad with an Apple Pencil. I like that I can keep all my notes for all my classes with me at all times. I also like that I can write in different colors when needed, the ability to download or take a picture of a slide and mark it up, or do some lightweight diagraming. I feel like it gives me the best of both worlds: I get the storage, versatility, and searchability of digital notes, but I get the memory benefits of handwritten notes since I am writing rather than typing.

Full digital for research #

Backlinks:: The set of notes that link to a given note. Suppose note A has a link to note B. If I am looking at note B, then A will be in the set of B’s backlinks.

Whenever I have something that I am researching, I typically keep notes in a plain-text file on my computer. (I use org-mode most of the time, naturally.) This lets me link and search through my notes really easily. Being on a computer means that it is easy to copy-paste things I want to remember and then store links to recover the source. I use Denote to organize my notes; Denote lets me format my notes consistently, as well as recover backlinks.

Fun aside: I recently contributed some code to Denote that adds an indicator in the mode-line if the currently-visited note has a backlink. I like getting a heads-up that there’s some digging to do.

I also will put notes that I made by hand during a thinking session into my Denote files after they’ve had a little time to marinate in my head. I will typically use this step to flesh out ideas that I only got in skeleton form in my notebook.

I really like Denote: it is simple, requires no external dependencies, and it plays nicely with synching systems. Today, thanks to my tag system, links, backlinks, and some searching, I ran into some notes I had taken a year ago and forgot about—but now these notes are helping me with my work right now!

Summary: what I write and where #

After thinking a little bit about what mode of note taking benefits most from a given medium, I came up with the following system for myself:

Meeting with my advisor: I take meeting notes by hand on paper, usually in my notebook.
Thinking through something: Again, hand-written, usually on my Rhodia pads as these are typically ephemeral notes. If I get a good idea, I’ll write it down in my notebook and then transfer it to my digital Denote notes later.
Reading notes: If I am reading a technical paper or book that I want to understand, I’ll take these notes in my notebook.
Research lab notes: Digital. I have a template that I fill out every day that helps me keep track of basic information and links all of my daily lab notes to a big note for the whole project. This makes it easy for me to go to that project note and flip through the backlinks.
Class notes: While I only have one more class left, I still take class notes on my iPad. I feel like class notes benefit the most from a digital-handwriting hybrid.

Should you adopt the setup I have? No. You should arrive to your own system yourself. The only thing I would advise anyone to take from my experience is that you should put a little time and effort into being intentional about how you take notes and how your organize them. You need to find a system that works for you, and only you can do the work to make that happen.