Just use fucking paper, man

There's only one method of doing to-dos that has worked for me. This method can be used with paper, Obsidian, Apple Notes, or any other app.

Every week I create a weekly note, and write my to-dos for the week. I may add more items to it during the week. If any items didn’t get done I roll them over to the next weekly note or drop them. That’s it.

I usually write my to-dos from scratch without looking at the previous week’s list. This helps me decide which items I should drop. If I can’t remember a to-do it probably wasn’t that important.

I still use the "hipster PDA": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_PDA

My problem with paper is that I can't keep up with paper. I will lose it several times a day, and inevitably, I will lose it permanently after a year or two. I need the sync and findability that an app on a device affords.

I love paper, but it's difficult for me to organise the notes properly, I have no search function, screenshots, links, endless canvas, etc.

I already own a Remarkable 2 but I really don't like it - it's not much more than an e-ink college block. After almost two years they added the function to draw straight lines, meanwhile I still can't search in handwritten notes - not even after converting them to text. You can add tags and the search works for them, but don't add a tag and you won't easily find the page.

So, I'm thinking about buying the Samsung Tab s9+ for studying math and sumerian, but generally also for planning. I find just having all my notes, pdfs, etc. with me, combined with smart features like search is invaluable.

I think "use paper" is good for lots of things. But if I'm trying to quickly make notes of lots of things, I end up not being able to find things. Org-roam (or some other similar system) is what I've found to be a good substitute for paper.

The thing about both paper and Org-roam/Emacs, is that it's under your own control, and can be tailored to meet your own actual needs, not how someone else thinks you should do things. That's where Apple Notes etc. fall down.

I don't understand why Notion is so damn popular. It's a textbook example of "jack of all trades; master of none."

It has databases that allow you to create many different views of things, but actually using this capability is one of the most frustrating things ever. No keyboard shortcuts; actions that you'd typically do in Excel don't work here; every table is its own page, even when it doesn't need to be; and so on.

You can also create a plain old table within Notion, but all of the complaints above apply here. Why even have a table object when it's going to just be a gimped database?

It has static web page hosting built in, but so does Confluence and other wikis.

If you try to use Notion off-line, it randomly won't show you changes until you're back online.

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That said, paper is great for worm (write once, read many) type data but is inflexible and really difficult to search through later.

Journaling is a great example.

It is easy and tempting to start with a paper journal. Feels more personal and connected. However, when you want to know how you felt on this day five years ago, or you want to find a pattern to explain moods that don't make sense, you'll spend ages sifting through notebooks. That's assuming that you haven't lost them.

Apps work so much better here.

I started journaling in 2014 but started journaling _daily_ after discovering Daylio in 2021. I use Day One now.

I regret not having used an app for this everyday.

There are so many moments of my life that I lost or don't remember very well because I wanted to "handwrite my journals" despite, often, not having the time to do so. Journaling has helped me understand why I feel things and when and gave me a great first step towards fixing them.

I will say that trying to modify a table in Notion makes me want to throw my Mac into the ocean and go back to paper and briefcases.

I don’t understand how note taking is such an impassioned subject on this site.

But fwiw, what works for me is to have notes everywhere. I take notes in a journal, ephemeral notepad, emails, texts to myself, apple notes, and orgmode. I just want to have lots of accessibility.

Now we can have a robust debate on the best paper and writing utensils! Some will advocate for top-spiral notebooks, some composition books, others will proclaim nothing beats a Moleskine.

Then the fight moves to pens vs. pencils. Fountain pens and carpenter's pencils will slug it out for supremacy in the comments. One lone maniac will die on the quill hill.

Paper is a sturdy tool; it doesn’t run out of battery, it’s interoperable… it beats apps in many aspects.

But as soon as you need automation, it’s a different story. I couldn’t rely only on paper notes to keep track of my work.

Obsidian has been very useful to keep track of my list of tasks and report what I’m doing. I would spend much more time doing all that with paper.

Details of my setup at https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/07/16-obsidian-contractor/

I use Org-mode because it is simple *and* capable - still just plain text, synced over iCloud, workflow can be as complex or as simple as I need it.

On the other side, I have some years of GTD practice and know, that tools themself matter little for productivity. I have some minimal feature-set I expect to be there, like some kind of daily outline and priorities and I don't care about the rest. Omnifocus is nice, but I barely use it on mobile devices, beorg is sufficent. Know you needs and don't go more complex than that.

I still use digital tools for documenting my projects and keeping track of long-term tasks, but I agree with the author that papers just fucking works for most things. I sketch out designs on paper. I treat as an ephemeral medium.

Lately I’ve taken to jotting down lists of things on my mind on index cards so I can carry those around and refer to them without the distraction of a phone. The nice thing is that space is limited, so I can’t take on too much at a time. Constraints are a good thing.

If a friend asks me how to get organised, I always tell them to use pen and paper as a first step.

You might use it just for a day or two, but something clicks in your head, you find your workflow, and now you’re able to use more specialised tools.

I'll use paper when they invent handwriting I can read.

Bonus: the handwriting is searchable.

I use org mode for personal note taking and todo lists, and it has been working very well for me. for projects I put a TODO.org inside the docs folder and any TODO and bugfixes goes there (a simple todo.txt can do the same)

paper has never worked for me, it's hard to keep track of it and others can easily read it.

If I need to make some research for a project, I keep my findings on my computer (publicly available knowledge, facts, ..).

BUT I keep all my new ideas, thinking, todos, agenda, ... offline (analog) to prevent AI tools reading them and sending it back to big corps. I keep them in a Filofax so it's easy to shuffle/insert/... pages if required.

I work in IT since 1995 (now 15 years as a freelance/consultant) and honestly I start returning back to analog information management for most of my stuff. I don't trust big corps. It's not new but it's more true today than ever.

So if you have a really revolutionary new idea/discovery: NEVER EVER put it on ANY big corps infrastructure (Cloud, OS, ...) to prevent leaking it everywhere.

I've tried many note taking methods, including paper, and none of it really fit my needs. So I wrote my own application, just for me, with nobody else in mind. It's perfect and I recommend everyone to do the same.

Super agree here, I went through countless software solutions but just few months ago I decided to buy a small paper notebook and a pen. It feels really damn different. Almost something magical clicks when you engrave those cellulose sheets with ink giving more mechanical attention to every letter, word and sentence, instead of hammering it down on a keyboard. Noticed that I'm really much more attached to the manual kind of writing, and I value and follow the paper more than files. Maybe because they are real and tangible after all.

As a scientist I keep organized in the following ways:

* I text myself on slack random idea I have about various projects

* I regularly use a white board to write down the current state of all my projects, where they are at, what needs to be done

* I have a notebook that I write todos in for day to day things

Also these things are basically interchangeable. I have had several different thoughts about how to make a better organisation system through software. But so far I didn't come up with one that i would abandon my research to spend the time writing organisational software instead.

Paper is good if you are solo. I tried Notion, waiting inside the grocery store 30 seconds for it to boot up or load or update or whatever on mobile, gave up on it for day to day tasks. Google Keep is still king. Am I going to be able to consistently pull down a text file from a server on mobile? How will I share a paper shopping list with others?

What cheap hosted service should I be using that lets me CRUD my text files on mobile + desktop and share with others?

Next we'll see people wanting filing cabinets.

Love this.

I sit here at my desk with post it notes scattered everywhere, organizing my thoughts and things to do for the day. Something about being able to physically move them around and cross things off just makes it easier for my brain to work.

The problem with this workflow is getting it into the apps that I use to organize my life. These change from time to time, but Sunsama is the clear winner for me at the moment.

PostIt has a great app to use your camera to organize your notes.

I've also found that Apple's FreeForm has a fantastic feature for scanning. Over the weekend I scanned hundreds of old post-it notes of mine that I was trying to declutter, yet some of them had important thoughts that I wanted to stash for later. I used Freeform to scan all my notes.

Next up I'll try feeding this to a model and see if it can organize my notes and create action items from them.

Come to think of it, I could have done none of this and just organized the notes by hand while scanning them :)

Maybe I should try turning my computer off next time and just thinking before I do something.

Things I tried:

-Actual physical whiteboard

-Notepads (moleskine, amazon branded notepad, all colors, fancy stuff that is $20+)

-Obsidian with a bunch of plugins including Exalidraw (I wish flowcharting could be easier but still sucks compared to yED)

-Google Keep (I use it on my iPhone and sync with my computer when needed. I only use it before homedepot or some hardware store shopping. I don't use lists for grocery)

-One Note

-Wacom Intuos Pro with other 3rd party drawing / note taking apps

-My own website (Wordpress with notetaking plugin to have it on the "cloud")

-Perfex CRM

-Asana (still use it for client projects with limited access to them)

-My own Kanban mutation

-Microsoft Notepad in a dedicated folder for notes (was probably the longest-running among all other methods)

-yED Graph (still use it for client presentations with basic flowcharts)

-Google Calendar with excessive notes

-365 Word With fancy plugins

-Notepad++ since it doesn't delete if I don't save the document (MS Notepad brought it with win11 though)

Nothing worked out but I am forcing myself to use Obsidian in a Dedicated monitor and never move it. I think I am getting close to liking it. I don't know what's wrong. These apps are SO CLUTTERED. And real paper is not searchable. I have a shelf dedicated to 1/5 used notepads.

Additionally, I thought I didn't like writing with a pen. Then I dedicated a very good chunk of my life to finding the perfect pen. So far G2 and Jetstream are my favorites. I used zebra in the early 2010s because I thought "If police are using it, it must be good". It wasn't that good. I needed flow.

A low-overhead bullet journal (i.e. zero time spent to make it look pretty) works best for me - preaching to the choir, man!

Org-mode for notes, because notes tend to have variable meaningful life sometimes till the entire human life, so I need a stable tool and Emacs is definitively one, not a service who might disappear or change terms suddenly, no matter if I still have my data, missing the tool to use it my way, and well, that's enough for me.

For basic todos like "buy the milk" I've tried for a little time Home Assistant tasks, very basic more comfy than Orgzly, but I do not need much of such lists so... I do not much feel the need of anything special. I've used of course in the past paper notes, I tend to forget them when used as reminder so they are not better for this specific usage, while I still have a small A7 notebook for sudden things to note when I'm not at the desktop.

Aside from my notoriously illegible handwriting (which becomes even worse after just a few seconds, but more on that later), my main gripe with using paper is that I end up with smudges all over my hand—being left-handed doesn’t help. The smudging often makes my already hard-to-read handwriting even more of a mess. (This issue even contributed to my struggles in English classes back then.)

These days, the only time I use pen and paper is during language interpretation sessions. It helps me retain very short-term memory, but afterward, I can hardly make sense of any of the notes I took.

For everything else, I rely on apps. I currently use OneNote. I've tried various solutions, but I found OneNote strikes the best balance between online and offline functionality—it’s saved me many times in situations with spotty or slow international roaming.

I use the BOOX NoteAir, just to keep from having a dozen scattered notebooks and having to replenish the paper/ink supply. I use it just like paper. I don't do any handwriting recognition or anything, and at most will split ideas off into their own notebooks. Personally, I've found that it is the act of writing things down, more so than the act of looking through notebook archives, that helps me with retention and creativity. The VERY IMPORTANT THINGS are kept on a whiteboard I look at multiple times a day, because I WILL FORGET dates and appointments (and I'll forget to put them into an alarm on my phone, and I'll dismiss those alarms multiple times and re-forget) no matter how critically important it may be. So the whiteboard keeps those items literally in my face.

Agreed.

Use either todo notebook [1] or a todo card [2] and voila.

[1]: https://www.jetpens.com/Paperian-Make-a-Memo-Sticky-Notes-To.....

[2]: https://www.jetpens.com/Paperian-Make-a-Memo-Sticky-Notes-To.....

As @kabdib says, "You can't grep paper."

I think you're onto something! I'm still on-device because I joke that I'm allergic to paper (seriously, I actively dislike the experience of using pen & paper…just a me thing I guess), but I've basically taken a similar route lately of just having a very small collection of Markdown files and I simply jot stuff down in them, check things off, and then delete bits that aren't relevant. Sync via Dropbox and away you go.

Plain text is enormously useful, as it turns out, and the fewer bells & whistles, the better!

It's hard to reproduce in digital the feeling of checking off the last to-do on a page, ripping it out, balling it up and then making a 3 point trashketball shot to close out a week.

I grew up taking copious handwritten notes and making pencil-to-pen sketches so I get it but sometimes markdown's just as fast for list making and edits are no-mess. The closest I've found to the two is the Boogie Board but IMHO as far as being its best self -- some temp/limited storage, levels of undo, maaaaaybe cut-n-paste? -- it's still about a microcontroller hack or addition away from awesomeness. At any rate, perhaps the headline could be dialed back to "Just use f-ing paper (for now), man"?

Paper is great for transient stuff that is relevant for at most a week or two, but it really goes downhill when you try to capture information you'll want to revisit in the future. Paper is great for todo lists and in the moment notes, but not so great for knowledge base building.

I used to struggle with a lot of tools before too and now use org-roam for longer term notes. The linking model helps a lot with just _writing_ the stuff down and not worrying about how to organize it too much in the moment.

I've been using a pocket notebook for a while now: https://fieldnotesbrand.com

The problem that I have with paper is refactoring.

Creating my todo list, investor update lists, company admin info, idea explorations, and everything else always involves me evolving the idea continuously and shifting things about as the structure changes.

With paper this means using an eraser until I end up with a crumpled mess, or laboriously rewriting it all over and over.

I like the tactile nature of paper, if only I could select chunks by dragging and erase (fully) without wrecking it.

I tried to keep a simple table in Apple Notes and it got frustrating, fast. Couldn't control formatting and it would randomly change font sizes. Looked at alternatives and was confronted with more complexity - looks like notes are just the entry point to mindmaps/braindumps/network diagrams of thought processes. Creating a table in Markdown is even less fun that creating it in Notes.

Now I just track my blood pressure on paper.

I get it, but had to move away from paper.. the simple fact that you cannot move stuff around without erasing stuff leads to disjointed notes.

For when I need to write by hand, I moved to a reMarkable digital tablet. For notes, I've been experimenting with obsidian/logseq, and it's been going good. For task management , I gotta recommend Super Productivity, it's just fantastic.

I just couldn't live the sticky note life anymore...

For todo lists, I agree and at most a plaintext file or the Reminders app on your phone is enough. For daily notes though I feel like Obsidian is only as complex as you want it to be. My vault for work notes is mainly a haphazard bunch of copy-pasted snippets and chat records pasted in an auto-dated daily note, and it's saved me a bunch of times when I've needed to go back and search something.

100 percent agree. I keep a todo list, in a notebook, copy undone items over every two or three days to a fresh list. It reminds me what's not getting done. It is easy to look at. I feel a sense of accomplishment. It reduces my stress to put an item on the list for later. I can look at non digital, simple, complete synopsis of my work and get an instant gauge on how things are going.

Flagging emails as "to be read later", keeping track of responses I'm waiting for, reminders, ... all tricky to do when using paper.