I once believed this since there were so many articles written over and over about it over the years. Religiously refused type notes. Handwriting only. Carried notebooks everywhere, the only person in a meeting handwriting notes.
Could never find anything again long after I wrote it, or took way too long to look it up. Idiotically transcribing my notes into emails to send off as meeting notes.
Switched to typing everything, even stream-of-consciousness stuff for myself, a couple years ago and would never want to go back. Feel quite foolish for falling for this for so long.
I've never heard anyone suggest you should only hand write. I type most of the time, but use handwriting whenever I need to learn something or absorb a lot of information at once. It's not an effective filing/information retrieval system, it's an effective brain training system.
Exactly. I use digital to keep notes (e.g. meeting minutes) which I need to refer to and lookup regularly.
I use a notebook to write stuff down while studying. I don't always refer back to them. Especially not after I've finished studying the topic but the process ingrains the ideas into my head in a way that typing can't. I also draw diagrams and things to illustrate ideas which further help retention.
Ditto. Some notes are evergreen though. I still have the single page of notes I made during your session on building web apps. Specifically, the dev setup necessary to stand up "Something that will last on the public Internet".
And --- you can't make this s*#% up --- that was twelve years to the day (I just checked); 14 Feb 2012.
As it turns out, that page is still entirely relevant, and I'm still working on it. [Insert :sweat-smile: emoji].
Back to hand writing; Too late in life I realised its value. I spent all my school and college life absolutely hating it --- writing was too hard.
Now I use it when I really need to pay attention to detail. It compels me to slow down and that is how I absorb material better. Further, I realized it is most useful when I am reading / thinking on my own, whereas live classroom note-taking disconnects me from the topic. So now I just listen through live lectures and only jot down keywords at points of confusion and/or insight.
This applies to code too. From time to time, for difficult topics, I will hand-copy code from textbook examples, and also hand-evaluate them on paper before typing the thing into the computer to see if it works. Even if I am following along by typing directly in my Emacs, I always type out any demo / sample code; never copy-pasting. Some of the mechanics remain the same; i.e. slow down, breathe, and pay attention to detail.
Absolutely this "it's an effective brain training system."
Apart from helping with faster memorisation, I have noticed that writing a problem down / solving on paper improves problem solving significantly. I always diagram out the problem & solution on paper whenever i get stuck.
part of the reason for me is that there's less friction to transition from writing to doodling random stuff while thinking about things and going back.
compare writing to typing in a computer, if while typing you start to visualize the concepts/topics and want to do some small doodles while thinking you're kinda out of luck, even if you have a tablet there's still friction and you having to have what's written and what's doodled in separate files.
tablets screen texture still feels less comfortable than plain paper and a ballpoint pen, that why I always have one on my desk.
I almost never return back to my handwritten notes.
I started using a notepad app on my phone a few months ago. I was quite surprised that they supported images and doodling right there in the middle of text. Felt like this could finally compete with pen & paper.
The lesson I've taken from learning drawing is that the observation accomplished by slowing down is different from the one made when you speed up. If you read, for example, Kimon Nicolaides, who was writing before any of the modern research on handwritten vs typed, he encourages students to progress to slower and slower contour drawings(outlines drawn without looking at your paper). The reason to use this approach is because it makes drawing more linguistic in nature: you "read" the line and instruct your hand to move slightly in a direction. You can't look back and check, so you have to know by feel how much you moved. Repeating this makes you extremely aware of tiny differences between lines, so you end up with good control over proportions as a result. Of course, you could get around this study and use a method like tracing, and get a very detailed outline. But then you wouldn't develop any awareness of what you're looking at.
So when you go slow and engage more senses and muscles, you aren't taking "better notes", you're making your brain linger on the content longer and in more depth. It's borderline useless if it's a business meeting that you're notetaking, but it's also potentially very helpful for developing the language of shapes and lines, math symbols, molecular diagrams, etc. A lot of study recommendations now say, "take the notes twice". Once in lecture, just letting your hand move without understanding and reducing anything that's lengthy and repetitive to a shorthand symbol. And then a second time when you are at home, allowing yourself to go slowly and develop more comprehension as a mode of study.
That! I would argue this can be generalized into other fields, to everything related to the attention span.
It probably boils down to actually giving a thought, consciously or not, to the new information: be it in a conversation with a person, when learning something new at school or at work, or in a work meeting making important decisions. Almost impossible if you only rush all the time, or if you are overloaded with the influx of the information.
I did sort of the opposite. Used to do all typed, now I do both. I make a distinction between notes, which are ephemeral and for memory and quick reminders, and documentation, which is for long term reference. Notes are on paper, documentation is on my computer. I find it's actually a really helpful distinction to make at time of recording.
Same. For years I did everything digitally. I didn't do anything handwritten. The only exception was to put my handwritten signature on some document. That's the only handwritten thing I did for literal years, if not a decade.
What made me change my mind was (1) noticing that my digital notes were usually buried under several layers of backups of tarballs of backups of tarballs of backups so it was getting inconvenient because I have multiple devices and don't want to set up sync for reasons.
And then (2) there was this notebook from fscking high school that has somehow survived everything I've been through up until now, mocking me with all its perfectly preserved information that has lived more than my oldest device. Not useful information, mind you. But just the fact that it's still there, conveniently at hand, accessible in less time than it would take me to search my unorganized mess of backups.
Something clicked in me around last year, and realized that I could use notebooks for small things that I might want to reference in the future. Like some useful commands, ideas for things to improve, and small things like that.
So now I treat notes on my phone and computer as ephemeral, even if they might still exist in a nested backup somewhere.
Haven't regretted it so far.
Yes, I could improve how I organize my backups, but I won't. For reasons that I'm fully aware don't make sense to others. It basically boils down to (1) it's a back up, touch it as little as possible; and (2) whenever I change devices (e.g. because hardware upgrades), I usually want to start afresh because I no longer like the old way I organized things, while I also don't want to bring my old notes and re-organize them in the new way I like now.
But only loose-leaf notebooks work for me. I can't use more "permanent" notebooks because I still want to be able to move stuff around somewhat.
Adjacent, but I found my journal writing really took off after I switched to typing it. My handwriting was never really able to keep up with my brain, and typing allows me to rethink ideas and how I want to write them.
> My handwriting was never really able to keep up with my brain
I found value in hand-writing by doing morning-pages as a regular high volume stream-of-conscious practice which allowed my hand-writing to free itself from the deliberate part of my mind.
The mind should be alive while you hand-write rather than, as a imagine it, a child spelling out the letters as they print them. Ideally it should be more of a flow state with multiple parts of your mind working in parallel. You can basically queue up a sentence for the more autonomous part of the brain to hand-write while the rest of your mind is thinking more strategically and refining arguments.
For me, hand-writing can be magical because that semi-conscious autonomous part can be a source of creativity of it's own. The conscious mind has ordered a vanilla statement but the hand has embellished it with unplanned rhetorical flourish which can take the observing part of the mind by surprise by it's beauty.
This can feel like a bit of dialogue between parts of my mind as I write. The planning part is reading what is emerging from the hand and getting inspired beyond it's own plans. I'd be curious if this has any genuine physiological basis with multiple parts of the brain because it does fit into those right-brain / left-brain type models.
I go in cycles and start assuming I'm getting the same benefit with typing but I then rediscover how the craft of hand-writing opens up something fresh I've been missing. There is something to the constant forward progression, the uneditable ink and the physical movement that helps. The way words appear is allowing for creative supervention. There is something about how ink on a page materially changes the world but letters on a screen are intangible vapour. For me typing, can always feel a little unserious and uncommitted. No matter how I might try to set my mind, there is a temptation to edit after every keystroke.
I think it's related to how some people can speak with simplicity and grace but they write turgid crap. Whatever that natural off-the-top-of-your-mind circuit we use to speak can become overpowered by an overthinking inner bore. For me at least, hand-writing can activate some different brain areas and find some freedom.
Same. I also do audio journals, and I find that each type seems better suited to sorting different kinds of problems. Usually if I need to figure out many details, or something that has an enumeration or sequence, writing is better (and digital so I can rearrange it).
If it's about trying to understand what's bothering me on a subject, audio journal ("talking it out") seems to work better, though writing also works.
Sometimes I'll be surprised when I see or hear my thoughts laid out like that. Often I've thought something for a long time and never realized it explicitly.
Typed notes have never worked for me. In university I used a Surface Pro to take notes with OneNote, which worked decently well - and I could link other resources, search, etc. These days I just use a regular notebook. I've been tempted by eink tablets like Remarkable and Supernote, but haven't really convinced myself it's worthwhile.
Yes - it is true that I sometimes have to thumb through a couple different notebooks to find what I'm looking for, but most of the time it's only my current and maybe last notebook I need to reference.
My issue in college was that my handwriting was garbage when I tried to write quickly, like one would do while taking notes during a lecture. If I zoomed in all the way on One Note on my Surface Pro, the lines of the pencil tool would be heavily smoothed and actually legible. I could also go back during downtime and rearrange text and diagrams, rewrite mistakes cleanly, and erase doodles (or move them).
Suddenly I went from taking horrific notes to taking absolutely amazing notes that I could actually use later. I believe that this contributed a decent amount to my success later on in college.
I don't mean this as a criticism but I think a lot of the perceived benefits from handwriting are precisely from the overhead of needing to be organized about it. Just jotting it down by hand is not the source of the benefit, but of the resistance that forces you to grow abilities to overcome it.
> Just jotting it down by hand is not the source of the benefit
That's not what most of the studies I've seen say. I can't remember the specifics (since I didn't write them down by hand) but IIRC the differentiating factor was whether you hand wrote your notes, not how you organized them. In other words the literal act of jotting it down is the source of the benefit.
That said, these psychology studies are pretty useless most of the time.
That's my point. That's why I think it's confusing. You could go to an elite gymnasium and think that training lots of hours is all you need, but everyday orders of magnitude more people put in a whole lot of hours and never get anywhere near elite level performance.
In other words, I think there's a strong selection bias at play here. Meta analysis would shed light there but I am satisfied with my note management so I don't really wanna put any effort into that.
My experience is the same but opposite. I have probably 200 notebooks filled that I never needed to reference because writing them by hand made me memorize their contents. I could never replicate the phenomenon with typing.
I find paper to be the best way to keep track of checklists and information that I'm actively working on, or long term continuous work. Digital is best for information I'll need to search through quickly or access large amounts of at any time.
Sketching out ideas for something I'll build over the weekend: paper.
A list of things I need to get done and chip away at over the next 2 months: paper.
A complicated web of info that I might need just a part of at some indeterminate point in the future: digital.
This mirrors my experience, except I went through a whole additional phase in-between where I tried digital inking thinking it would bridge the gap... only to find it was the worst of both worlds.
Insufficient canvas on a digital screen, lack of immediate access that flipping pages has, and poor handwriting recognition.
Wish I could get all the wasted hours back that I spent correcting bad OCR.
I have this same issue. I just wanted to be able to put my thoughts to paper. Especially ToDo notes when the boss is verbally listing out everything they want you to do off the top of there head. I could never keep up or transcribe but I've found more of a balance since I've started practicing shorthand stenography.
Stenography or gregg shorthand can have you hand writing at 60-80 WPM depending on how good you are. While I'm not that fast yet I am to the point we're I can grab some conversations entirely on paper and nothing gets by me anymore. It used to be a industry standard to learn if you were a reporter before hand held recording devices entered the picture and it was taught at nearly all schools across America. Why we quit teaching this as a country I will never know.
I am trying to learn typing stenography as well but the learning curve is a bit more steep for me.
Yay for shorthand. I learned Orthic. Taking notes with pen and paper is now more convenient than taping them into a phone: speed about the same, but you only need one hand, and it's more comfortable.
I’ve found it’s definitely the case, though memory is neither perfect nor infinite.
A couple of years ago I switched to ipad and apple pencil. The key is that the ipad indexes the handwritten text.
It’s nowhere near as nice as pen and paper (and I’m no snob — mechanically it’s not great). I added a screen cover to increase friction and practiced a little. Works pretty well and I have all my notes with me.
I'm more of a visual person. I usually "draw" my notes to make things easier to understand. When I need to revisit it, remembering how things relate to each other, I find it easier to picture what I drew, "retrace" my thought process, and recall relationships.
Everything else like recipe, TODO list, I just type it directly into my phone/tablet.
Yes, I just can't believe in this handwriting good - typing bad idea. For what it's worth, I can't handwrite fast enough to follow my thoughts, and therefore I make errors. Typing gives me no such problems.
But the other thing is - as soon as I start (or started, back when I was a pupil/student) taking notes, I stop learning. Everybody always insisted that "you have to take notes!", so I tried that sometimes - and it was a disaster. Didn't learn. Had to go over the notes and trying to learn from that. Not good at all.
When I didn't take notes I could focus 100% on what was shown and said, and I learned it. I understood it, to the extent that there was nothing to remember (just like you don't have to remember that an apple will fall, if given the chance). So, when class was over, I understood. Easy on the brain.
Obviously there are equations and pure facts. Those you should simply look up when needed. That's how we were thought in my college anyway - learn how to find what you need, when you need it.
For other things - not attending classes I mean - I most definitely prefer using a keyboard (designs, thoughts about designs etc). Handwriting would be the worst for this.
TL;DR - my own experience absolutely tells me that typing is at least as good, probably much better, than handwriting, and it's all a red herring anyway because taking notes is detrimental to deep understanding. Keep that to the absolute minimum, and it can be useful, but only then. And for that, it makes no difference what writing method you use.
> Obviously there are equations and pure facts. Those you should simply look up when needed.
In math, at least, part of the difficulty of higher level problem solving is that you simply need to have a large number of definitions and theorems memorised to be able to do anything interesting or difficult. And you need to have seen (and remember!) examples of things. This lets you reach a higher level of thinking where your intuition about what is and isn't true is much better.
"Look at up when you need it" doesn't work if you don't know what you need.
Typing out math doesn't really get my juices flowing. I freely admit I have no real evidence for this.
+1. I used to be a big fan of bullet journal and keep all my todo list / planning in my notebook. Sometimes I'm not sure if this really has more practical value or it just makes me FEEL better.
But now I'm close to 100% on note taking apps like bear or ios default notes.
In the heyday of handwritten notes it wasn't so different from how we organize files on computers today. After all where do we think those common fields came from? Timestamps, data blocks, pages, tags/keywords, etc.
Notes are front-to-back and empty space on pages is minimal (especially pocket notebooks). Regions of the pages are broken into numbered blocks. Index is written back-to-front with each entry containing at least a timestamp and block number. Keywords, if you can fit them, greatly enhances searchability.
I'd love to know of any books written about this topic.
A regular topic-to-page-number index has served for about 1500 pages of work notes since ~2018, but my personal journal's quite a bit longer and I lacked the foresight to index that from the start. It's not that I mind an excuse to reread in detail, but I'd like to begin as I mean to go on and I just haven't come up with a way to do it that looks maintainable.
My indexes are probably a bit harder to read than topic-to-page.
I don't group anything when I'm writing and just stick to a more or less consistent set of general keywords per entry. Each index entry is its own numbered row. Index entries may need their own numbers so I can come back later to group. I may not even index if I'm really rushed until later as long as I mark my regions I can index it all later. Not hard to count them up.
An example of an index entry:
"56 2024-02-13@22:30 39.1 hn"
where the format is: "<index entry #> <timestamp> <page #>.<region #> <keyword>"
I would have to linearly search if I haven't yet updated my groups in a meta index that spans notebooks e.g. "showerthoughts: 3.30.3 9.42.1 10.3.2 ... " where the format is <book #>.<page #>.<region #> or more concisely <book #>.<index #> I've done both before. I prefer the latter when my index has lots of columns that are more helpful (such as bigger notebooks and I always label my columns so I don't confuse myself because not all my notebooks are the same format depending on size).
There's always time for indexing and metaindexing later and I find it relaxing. Sort of like washing the dishes. It's a discipline thing, but doesn't have to be perfect. If I had a bunch of old unindexed books I'd start by just broadly labeling the books first (mostly/all school, mostly/all work, mostly/all personal, etc.) and then lazily drill down into pages and regions and keywords as I actually need the info. Just as long as I didn't waste the effort I took to find things the hard way and be sure to index it's better than no index at all... wabi-sabi and all that.
Also worth pointing out I don't have separate books for topics. Fuck that it's going on whatever paper I've got on hand and I've even stuck loose pages into books later. As long as the actual content has matching numbers on it (in the corner) the index will keep track. I number it according to where I'm gonna stick it or just n+1 non-loose soon-to-no-longer-be-blank pages/regions. I truly treat paper like disk space and write whatever whenever. It really freed me to think that way. If the index is lost it's not unrecoverable either, just tedious.
Pretty sure I picked up the habit of decimal numbering in like the 3rd grade. I had teachers whose assignments were like that: <assignment #>.<problem #>
i.e. "Did you turn in homework 5.1 through 7.15? No?! You're going to the office if you can't sit in the hall to finish it by the end of class!" Thought all teachers were like that.
> My indexes are probably a bit harder to read than topic-to-page.
A master of understatement! But this is an impressively well developed scheme, and if I take nothing else away from it I suspect the idea of metaindexing will prove useful. Thanks for taking the time to go into such detail!
Could never find anything again long after I wrote it, or took way too long to look it up. Idiotically transcribing my notes into emails to send off as meeting notes.
Switched to typing everything, even stream-of-consciousness stuff for myself, a couple years ago and would never want to go back. Feel quite foolish for falling for this for so long.