Analogue Note Taking

Digital Mess

We all need to take notes. Short messages for git commits, ideas from podcasts, quotes from all over the Web. At some point, a question comes up: where do we store these notes? It gets even worse with regular diary entries and to-do lists. One possible solution is to use a premade program like Evernote or Notion. It will store and organize text files for you, but this also means you should trust developers and server owners, as well as the encryption protocol.

For anyone who worked with programming, there is a temptation to throw notes into a git-managed folder full of plain text files. Yet managing files by yourself is also a problem: plain text markdown works wonders for a while until there are too many files to keep track of. A system of folders and subfolders will take you further, but at this point navigation and linking become troublesome. The synchronization is an issue as well, although there are good tools that solve it even on mobile and Linux.

At the end of the year 2021, I realized that my notes directory became an utter mess. With hundreds of files, organized weakly with wiki links and a few “Maps Of Content” that some creators on YouTube praised. And this clutter was a distraction, to say the least. It would take far too long to organize and clean everything up, so I threw everything into folders and bought a notebook.

Analogue Alternative

It took me some time to get accustomed to the new format. I had my to-do lists in a paper planner before, but longer-form writing was not something I’ve done for a long time. With that said, there wasn’t any clutter to worry about and tweaking to do on the intricate system. Once something is written, it is there, on paper. Occupying some space, for sure, but never time or attention.

After a while, I realized that it is the absence of tweaking and reorganizing everything that made the process much easier for me. It is not the only benefit, however: the paper cannot be leaked or hacked. A notebook can be stolen or lost, for sure, but photocopying important pages is usually good enough if you worry about it.

Maybe most important of all, writing on paper gives a much-needed break from screens and keyboards. For programmers who spend large chunks of their time on screen, it may become the “killer feature” of the notebook.

Advanced User’s Benefits

For more advanced writers, drafting on paper brings the same benefits outlined before. Yet, there are even more opportunities hidden in the digital format that easily outweigh the time it takes to write by hand. The first one is the ease of editing. Using a pen of a different color or a pencil, the first round of editing can be done blazing fast. The changes will be done when typing text on the computer, which will also force you to reread the entire text and edit it the second time around.

There is no formatting in paper notebooks that would distract you from writing. No overhead in the form of the app, text editor, or browser, no distractions in the form of other apps. It’s just you and words on the paper, the most streamlined process imaginable.