<story><title>The benefits of note-taking by hand</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200910-the-benefits-of-note-taking-by-hand</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wenc</author><text>Cue the HN note-taking crowd....&lt;p&gt;From a retention&amp;#x2F;recall perspective, I think most people are enamored with finding the perfect note-taking method because we want to find the one method that optimizes both retention (memory) + recall (long term searchability) at the same time. It seems to me these two objectives are somewhat in competition.&lt;p&gt;(there&amp;#x27;s also comprehension and thinking but I see those as separate)&lt;p&gt;I think splitting up the two objectives makes more sense. Handwriting notes enhances memory formation, but is less optimized for searchability. Digital notes are great for long-term searchability, but are weaker for memory formation.&lt;p&gt;Why not have two systems instead of one? Just handwrite whatever you want to remember, and type whatever you want to stash away? It seems inefficient, but in multiobjective optimization we usually end up with Pareto optimality rather than a single point of optimality.&lt;p&gt;One might ask, how would I know a priori what to remember and what to stash? I personally prefer handwriting,  so I&amp;#x27;ll usually go there first and if I need to stash it I&amp;#x27;ll retype it into Google Docs. That said, I&amp;#x27;ll hop on Google Docs first if it happens to be more convenient (like if I&amp;#x27;m browsing and want to copy-and-paste something for long-term storage, or if I&amp;#x27;m outdoors and all I have on me is my phone)&lt;p&gt;Meetings are a great candidate for handwriting notes -- and then discarding. You and I know that most meeting notes are throwaways. Despite that, I personally find that in complex multiparty meetings, I&amp;#x27;m able to follow the flow better if I continuously take notes. Being able to remember who said what, and being able to summarize a meeting are all very valuable skills to have.&lt;p&gt;(p.s. with regard to memory, Socrates didn&amp;#x27;t even believe in writing -- he believed writing things down would weaken our memories in the long term. He believed that talking about things was a far superior way to form memories and to understand subjects deeply. He&amp;#x27;s not completely wrong about the role of discussion and disputation [emotional connection is a potent force in memory formation], but all the same I&amp;#x27;m glad Plato didn&amp;#x27;t take to this thinking and actually wrote stuff down).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Terretta</author><text>Used to fill a large size moleskin a month by hand, and for this sample size of one, the aid to recall from deciding what to write and processing it back out is remarkable.&lt;p&gt;So, of course, I’ve tried the Remarkable pad, as well as apps like Goodnotes on iPad that try to support handwriting while also supporting search.  Goodnotes suited my needs better, as the Remarkable pad latency was too high, though I did prefer the feel of writing.  Apple materials research needs to get their glass and pencil closer to this.&lt;p&gt;However, for recall, I find there’s something about the physicality of a paper notebook that gives the facts a place to live.&lt;p&gt;With real x, y, and z dimensions in space, perhaps paper notebooks offer a fine grained version of the “memory palace” method of storing facts for in-memory browsing and recall.&lt;p&gt;Digital notebooks as well as digital books on Kindle lack the physical depth of the relevant page.  It seems likely a visual “depth” indicator would assist recall of information in e-books.  Unclear how that would work in digital notepads unless they had a fixed quantity of “pages”.&lt;p&gt;Aside from this loss of physical memory mapping, iOS 14’s handwriting to text is compelling.  One gets to write notes out by hand, exercising that pathway, but what ends up on the page is real text.  Haven’t played with this long enough to have any opinion on whether this transformation defeats recall.</text></comment>
<story><title>The benefits of note-taking by hand</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200910-the-benefits-of-note-taking-by-hand</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wenc</author><text>Cue the HN note-taking crowd....&lt;p&gt;From a retention&amp;#x2F;recall perspective, I think most people are enamored with finding the perfect note-taking method because we want to find the one method that optimizes both retention (memory) + recall (long term searchability) at the same time. It seems to me these two objectives are somewhat in competition.&lt;p&gt;(there&amp;#x27;s also comprehension and thinking but I see those as separate)&lt;p&gt;I think splitting up the two objectives makes more sense. Handwriting notes enhances memory formation, but is less optimized for searchability. Digital notes are great for long-term searchability, but are weaker for memory formation.&lt;p&gt;Why not have two systems instead of one? Just handwrite whatever you want to remember, and type whatever you want to stash away? It seems inefficient, but in multiobjective optimization we usually end up with Pareto optimality rather than a single point of optimality.&lt;p&gt;One might ask, how would I know a priori what to remember and what to stash? I personally prefer handwriting,  so I&amp;#x27;ll usually go there first and if I need to stash it I&amp;#x27;ll retype it into Google Docs. That said, I&amp;#x27;ll hop on Google Docs first if it happens to be more convenient (like if I&amp;#x27;m browsing and want to copy-and-paste something for long-term storage, or if I&amp;#x27;m outdoors and all I have on me is my phone)&lt;p&gt;Meetings are a great candidate for handwriting notes -- and then discarding. You and I know that most meeting notes are throwaways. Despite that, I personally find that in complex multiparty meetings, I&amp;#x27;m able to follow the flow better if I continuously take notes. Being able to remember who said what, and being able to summarize a meeting are all very valuable skills to have.&lt;p&gt;(p.s. with regard to memory, Socrates didn&amp;#x27;t even believe in writing -- he believed writing things down would weaken our memories in the long term. He believed that talking about things was a far superior way to form memories and to understand subjects deeply. He&amp;#x27;s not completely wrong about the role of discussion and disputation [emotional connection is a potent force in memory formation], but all the same I&amp;#x27;m glad Plato didn&amp;#x27;t take to this thinking and actually wrote stuff down).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>abhgh</author><text>Avid note-taker here. I agree with you in that the two mediums -  (1) a note taking software  where you type in things (2) writing notes on paper - have different benefits and use-cases.&lt;p&gt;In my case, I pretty much now know what kind goes where. For the &amp;quot;planning&amp;quot; kind - these are TODOs, movie and reading lists, project ideas, project subtasks -they go into a tool like Notion, or Google Keep if they are very simple transient lists. What I need here are: the ability to search, modify in place (not strike-throughs), and access on any device (so this s&amp;#x2F;w typically is cloud-enabled). The last aspect is needed because I need a way to accommodate ad-hoc ideas into a larger pre-existing plan, when I am travelling and I just have my phone, or a different laptop.&lt;p&gt;When I am reading a paper, or watching a lecture, I &lt;i&gt;strongly&lt;/i&gt; prefer handwritten notes. I have experimented with standard notebooks, moleskins, having a &amp;quot;two-level&amp;quot; system: one notebook for quick notes, and another one for well-formed versions of notes from the first one, and finally, taking notes on loose foolscaps and adding them to a folder. The last one has stuck, mostly because I don&amp;#x27;t have to worry about &amp;quot;wasting&amp;quot; pages with ill-formed notes; I can choose not to add it to the folder. Also I can change organization at a later date. For this category of notes, I am looking for: the handwriting experience, the ability to arbitrarily format and color things (very helpful for technical material that need diagrams).&lt;p&gt;PS: the article links to some ways of structuring notes, which seem interesting.</text></comment>