Any good alternatives to pen and paper?

I have a two media philosophy.

1) Physical: I use a TWSBI ECO fountain pen and a Rhodia wirebound 6" x 8.25" notepad. A good fountain pen on good paper is the most pleasurable means I've found for note-taking. Pleasure is important to me. The notepad has perforations on each page, so if I ever need to digitize something, I just tear the page off and snap a pic using Dropbox, which creates a nice PDF for me. The PDF looks beautiful. Beauty is also important to me.

2) Electronic: For digital notes, I just use Google Docs. I have a single continuous document full of thoughts, observations, etc., each thought separated by an em-dash (--) on a new-line. I've tried more complicated systems, but simplicity ultimately won out. Also I can access Google Docs on my desktop, work computer, phone and tablet. I've since learned that some of my favorite writers scribble their thoughts on Google Docs too.

Do the two systems converge? Sometimes. Sometimes I transcribe stuff from my Rhodia notepad to my Google Docs document, but often times I don't. In my philosophy, they don't have to converge.

Note-taking on Google Docs is about archiving information.

Note-taking on a notepad about training the mind. I remember things better when I write them. Being able to flip through pages helps builds spatial memory. I rarely go back to stuff I write on a notepad because I tend to remember them. If I really need to remember them long-term and make them searchable, I transfer them to Google Docs, and in the process, reinforce that memory.

Having a two media approach sounds inefficient from an information collection perspective because your info is dispersed and exists in two disjoint forms. But if your objective isn't just to store information in a repository but to supercharge your own thinking, this turns out to be a surprisingly effective approach, I've found.

Oh wow, this looks like what I thought of, but the price tag is... well... it's present. :-D

https://remarkable.com/

After years of experimenting, I've concluded that it's not the medium, it's the ritual.

Things like meeting minutes I take electronically, but I still use physical notebooks as my main idea capture. I then go through and transcribe the notes onto the computer if I feel like follow-up action is needed.

I find that the most valuable part of the process is reviewing those written notes. Theoretically, I should be able to do the same thing with a program like Evernote, and I've tried that. In practice, I wound up taking shortcuts.

Going through and re-evaluating or adding to your original thoughts when moving from one medium to another is a valuable exercise.

If money is not really a problem you could use the 3rd gen iPad Pro with 12.9" display and apple pencil. The default note taking app works well enough. It's kept my notes over the last several years. The pencil is pretty great for drawing diagrams and figures, so I would definitely purchase that with it. I found the 12.9" display works best for me, because I like to split the tablet window in half with 1 app on each side with my notes app usually being on one of the sides. The other apps I use alongside the notes are brilliant.org's app and pdfs of math or programming texts.

If your looking for something more around the ~$400 range you may look at a cheaper alternative. I've seen advertisements for this paper-like e-ink tablet Remarkable [1] quite a bit and it seems like it might be a nice alternative.

[1]: https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable

I used an iPad 2 with a note taking app during my 2 years of engineering master in college. It was synced with my Google Drive, I didn’t struggled with complex equations and drawings and allowed in text search (which wasn’t that great at the time). I used a free pen given by a random company during a job fair and raised eyebrows to costly alternatives.

It was great however the battery lifetime and occasional bugs made me nervous sometimes.

Confort wasn’t that great, I couldn’t put my wrist on the screen and learnt to write without. The device was quite thick, which you suddenly notice compared to a classic paper when you take notes for hours.

Its the only notes I still have since I couldn’t easily scan perforated seyes paper (often double pages) that I used at the time and I let my huge binders at my parent’s home. Just for this, it has tremendous value. Maybe if I had to do it again today I would spend a few hours mastering LaTeX to being faster to take note of huge equations on a laptop.

In terms of focus and tactile cues to help you remember your notes, unfortunately probably not.

I've used an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, iPad Mini with pencil, Microsoft Surface with that pen, and a couple of different dedicated notes taking tablets (though not Remarkable... yet?)

Dead trees and ink, plus an app to scan and keep track of indexes has worked the best for recall and social factors. Practicing taking dense notes helps the notebooks last longer, as does only using 240+ page notebooks. Actual Bullet Journaling, instead of Instagram-worthy nonsense even the creator hates, works pretty well.

Transcribing the notes occasionally to a markdown for Git was annoying, until I realized I was editing and adding a lot by doing so, to the point where I usually updated my notebook a bit during the process.

My 2c, your mileage may vary.

You've already discovered the remarkable tablet so I'm just going to say that I'm a huge fan. I use it quite heavily for note taking. I can't recommend it enough. You may find second hand units for cheaper, since they've been around for a couple of years now and there exists a large majority of people who weren't really heavy paper users but bought it for the sake of novelty.

That said, if your primary problem is going through a lot of books quickly and you cannot afford the remarkable, even a used one, you may want to consider something like:

https://getrocketbook.com

One of my colleagues uses it and seems to be pretty happy with it.

I really don't want to move away from handwriting notes. You learn better that way. Plus, most note taking apps suck, look the same, and lock you in to a proprietary system that's going to be obsolete when the devs release the next paid update. For my scripts and code I do take notes electronically, but just in .txt files stuck in relevant folders. The best system is very little system.

I nearly pulled the trigger on an e ink tablet but ended up bailing on it. Pen and paper is cheap and ubiquitous, and I can recycle it unlike the tablet that's mostly going to end up in the dump, and just another thing to charge or forget at home.

I don't think you can beat pen and paper. It's cheap, portable, it's easier to remember what you write vs digital input and it's easy to access. Given that, I think it can be improved.

I've used OneNote before and it's great at organizing note so I've started to take photos of my notes and organizing them in OneNote. In theory, it can OCR them but it's really wishful thinking given my handwriting.

I suspect that my notebooks will outlast my OneNote notes but only time will tell.

A fountain pen and paper.

I found that putting ink on dead wood with a livescribe pen gave me all the advantages of paper and a lot of the advantages of a tablet. I can search through my notebooks from several years ago with the digitised copy on my phone.

The other advantage is that you don't get distracted by email and other things on it.

Do you want somehow to digitalize your current notes or software to create your own?

I can recommend you Zettelkasten. I actually wrote software for myself, in my opinion you get the most freedom that way and second brain should be custom tailored for you.

New software that is getting praise right now is Roam Research, but I haven’t used it

Pencil and paper is excellent.

I'm currently going down this route myself. I fill 6-10 notebooks a year and am wondering if there is a better way. For me it's specifically how can I take what I write and then make that editable text so I don't have to duplicate work.

My current test is an iPad Pro and Apple pencil with GoodNotes. It's not inexpensive and I didn't buy the tablet specifically for this reason, but it's a test.

It's good for some things: meetings notes, proposal work, things I need to send to other people.

It is not a replacement for pen and paper. For me I like fountain pens and paper. So I still have one or two notebooks that I'm using for daily schedule, etc.

I use onenote at work. As an editor it sucks for tables etc., but as an organisation and search system is alright, and for team collaboration it’s pretty useful. I.e. I can promote personal notes to team ones easily.

NEO2 - it's ancient but so well built. Buy used, there's no modern better product 'cause the NEO2 was so common and well made. Instant on. Neo makes a pen product now, if that's more appealing to you. But what I need now is software that auto sorts (according to tags) each note into the right place in my various notes documents. Now I'm doing that manually.

Onenote.

For everything, literally capturing meeting notes, screenshots everything. A local notebook but can sync to the cloud

Digitally, I use a variation on BuJo rapid logging, implemented in Markdown with plaintext. BuJo itself has become essentially scrapbooking for task management, but the basic idea of logging in bullet lists makes a lot of sense.

Markdown has three legal bullets for UL lists, which along with some sigils after the bullet/space is plenty for complex logging one line at a time. Here's the "key" at the top of each of my journals:

    #### Entry Key
    
    *   Event
    *   Project
    *   Planned Task
    +   New Task
    -   Note
    
    #### Event Status
    
    * ! Key
    * ? Maybe
    * % Cancelled
    
    #### Task/Project Status

    + ! Key
    + ? Watch
    + ^ Tracked
    + ~ Carried 
    + $ Completed
    + @ Delegated
    + % Dropped

Sample log for a day looks like:

    ### Friday :: November 8, 2019
    
    #### Highlights

    -   This cool thing that happened!

    #### Planned

    *   Some event
        -   Meeting notes
        +   Action Item

    *   Some planned task I copied from OmniFocus

    #### Journal
    
    + ^ Follow up on so and so issue
    + ^ Make sure stakeholders aligned
    
    -   Reached out to Coworker
        + $ Wait for followup
        + $ Schedule lunch for Tuesday
      
    - ! Some great idea
    -   DJSON awesome for nested JSON
    -   To extract from logs, wrap with [""]

I use Keyboard Maestro macros to quickly create the header skeletons from templates as needed and I fill in "Planned" during my daily prep. From there it's just appending to the bottom. I also have Alfred workflows and other scripts that know how to append a bullet line to the journal file, which helps a lot for logging notes from anywhere.

Periodically, I search for "+" in the text file, and it finds all the new tasks I haven't marked with sigils in the gutter row. That lets me quickly move them into OmniFocus for longer-term tracking. Someday I'll script it.

For you, if you really only want notes, even simpler. It's just a day header and appending a bunch of - bullets!

But there'll always be times when it comes down to paper. When all that fails, I have a nice-looking aged-brass Fisher space pen in my front pocket and a Moleskine Cahier (the cheap cardboard ones) in my back pocket. If there's something important to catch unexpectedly the last thing I want to do is fumble with my phone. The notebook is by far the quickest option.

There are some really nice leather wallets for Cahier/Field Guide-sized notebooks, and it actually helps balance my sitting posture by having wallets in both sides. Here's an example of one wallet I bought--I bought both a Horween and Chromexcel version from this seller and they're both high quality.

https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Horween-Leather-Moleskine-ref...

If you make it nice enough to carry around, it quits feeling like a chore to do so.

iPad, Apple Pencil, Paper-like screen protector & Notability

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