alt Hacker NewsThis "it has to be handwritten" stuff is nonsense. Do that if you enjoy it, but also you should acknowledge the downsides to it.
I started keeping a work journal a few years ago and it has changed how I work for the better. It is just a text file.
The main value of it is that I can search it! When I'm figuring something out for the first time, and I have a lot of trail and error, I write down what I did. And then I might not touch that thing again for 6 months. When I come back to it, it is unlikely that I will remember what I did exactly but because it is written down and searchable I can quickly recover my old state.
I like this so much I also started a personal work journal for my home lab. It really is useful for me. But its primary value is that I can search it.
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> This "it has to be handwritten" stuff is nonsense. Do that if you enjoy it, but also you should acknowledge the downsides to it.
From the submission:
"Should you use one?
Maybe! I can't answer that for you. "
There is a middle ground. Write on paper on the spot. Transcribe to digital form later. I've been doing it for many years. Painful, but now I just get an LLM to OCR my handwriting.
And oh, definitely - for me the brain works differently while typing vs handwriting.
It's not nonsense. At least it hasn't been for me. My memory retention shoots into the stratosphere when I write stuff (that I need to remember) down. Something about it being slower and actual effort needing to be expended to commit the information.
Handwriting is my primary notetaking route, but in situations where it isn't (typing is faster after all), I'll scribe what I typed into my reMarkable later. If the note I created was for work and I wrote a note by hand first, I'll type it into a Google Doc later and upload both versions (since they might differ slightly). I learned this as a study hack while I was in school 15+ years ago and it still works flawlessly for retention.
Handwriting everything has held me back sometimes, though. Ironically, insisting on handwriting everything is the reason why I didn't keep a daily journal for a long time. I started journaling in 2012 and stopped as work and life got busier. I picked it back up in 2021 with a mood tracking app to, well, track my mood and reactions to emotions and fairly quickly regretted not having just typed my journal entries.
I find there's an advantage to writing if I'm trying to memorize something. But if that isn't going to happen because I only did this configuration once and then never needed to reference it again for two years and now I need the exact commands I executed, can't beat a searchable txt file.
Writing things by hand leads to better retention, but if you can't remember it...yeah you'll have a fun time finding it again if you have a nontrivial amount of notes and haven't spent a significant amount of time indexing them.
I guess you could OCR them. Best of both worlds.
I handwrite notes because it commits it to memory and I don't have to search it later (most of the time). Important stuff goes in electronic notes, but 90% of things aren't that important.
it sounds like the author is using an e-ink device for note-taking. i use an ipad app for a lot of hand-written notes and i'm consistently surprised at how well it can search my chicken-scratch.
my biggest issue with handwriting is it just takes so long that i end up leaving out important details. it's a shame because i do enjoy it.
For me the advantage of using digital journalling is it's easier to switch between multiple threads. It means if I have 3 tasks to complete, I can switch tabs to the notes on the new task without thinking about the physical limitations of a notebook.