There’s a magic to writing by hand. Many thinkers and writers love keeping a notebook, an actual paper notebook, rather than the many “notetaking” or organizing solutions of the digital world. You can find a hundred essays online on how writing notes by hand improves memory. But beyond any utility is the simple pleasure of making on the blank page your own words in your own unique hand.
There’s also thinking on the page, which seems give depth. Aside from the sensory magic of writing and the aid to memory is the something that happens when you are slowed down a bit, pen above the page, thinking deeper and slower about the next phrase. These are all real qualities that seem to die in cyberspace. Beauty, recall, depth.
But the power of digital text is still hard to reject. Efficiency is a wholly separate value, and what digital text excels at is efficiency in capturing a thought and especially in linking one thought to another – hypertext. And when thoughts are written in cyberspace they are easy to organize and retrieve. Call these efficiencies the quantitative gain, against the qualitative loss of losing pen adn paper. Capture, linking, retrieving. (Recall and retrieval are not the same.)
Over many years I’ve developed a method of keeping a notebook that straddles these two clusters of value. I’d like to keep the magic of notebook culture but gain some of what cyber technology gives in efficiency.
What are the requirements?
- Ease of capture, mobile. There’s an entire “zettelkasten” subculture online formed around a method of knowledge management invented a century or so ago. That original system used notecards which were filed in drawers. But using notecards is great for someone who an academic and rooted in a physical office where the file cabinets can grow. The notebook must be easy to carry.
2. No concern about sequence of entry or organization. This is the downfall of many notebook approaches. Where do I put this note? Do I need multiple notebooks? How will I find it later?
3. What about when todays’ note connects to something I wrote a month ago?