When I began my professional life, we were still literally cutting and pasting text–often as not handwritten scrawl—to produce 50-100 page reports. We’d cut-and-paste chunks of typed or handwritten text onto yellow legal paper and hand it over to a secretary to enter into his or her dumb terminal connected to a Wang minicomputer that lived where the IBM mainframes did. We’d get a hard copy back hours later, at which point we’d review it and start cutting and pasting again.
No email—just faxes and telexes sent to a central “wire room.” Paper calendars coordinated by administrative assistants. Hard copy memos that circulated via buck slips. Flowcharts prepared by hand. (I still have my stencil.) And of course, planners, notebooks, and ring binders.
I’m not the least bit nostalgic for analogue anything. I still handwrite my thank you and condolence notes, however, and I do print out photos to share. I’ve got one little Levenger Circa notebook that I have with me always in case I need to write something down. Otherwise, it’s digital all the way down.
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I hand-write a lot. I find I think differently when I write by hand. I transcribe a lot of the notes I take, depending on their ultimate purpose. Now, those notes go into Obsidian. But I draft in long hand/printing. I use 3 x 5 cards because I can see them all at a glance on a wall or table in a way I can’t with a digital corkboard. I use multiple kinds of notebooks, for different purposes and projects. Cheap rice and cane paper composition books are my go to for throw-away notebooks because they work with pencil as well as fountain pens.
When I take notes from audio, live or digital, I remember what I write down better than when I keyboard. i’m a slow writer, and a fast typist, faster than I can think. Slowing down is often good for my brain.
Many special collections, especially those with mss., still require pencil and paper; some even issue both, not allowing you to bring in anything at all. So keeping note-taking by hand a practice is a necessity for me.
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An app like Goodnotes or Notability allows you to create notebooks and take handwritten notes esp. on the iPad although there are also Mac and iPhone apps.
So you can have as many notebooks as you like but there is only one thing to carry and remember where it is.
The Goodnotes app has pretty good searchability too.
I wonder about OneNote but I can’t get my head around the infinite canvas especially if for some reason you have to print out something.
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