[NeedMoreTea]

I'm also in my 50s, and have been carrying A4 hardback notebooks around since 80s or 90s, that I use similarly. I add a margin, leave 5 pages at the front for indexing, and I've adopted a few highlighting habits to cross reference and link for easy reference later.

It's my definitive memory, and has been worth it to answer the months later questions of why we did or didn't include some feature, or designed something as we did. It's also where I think by pencil, so there's lots of plans, hierarchies, thoughts too. Those rough scribbles go at the back.

The few times I've tried to improve on this either by tech or organisers like filofax etc, it's quickly proved much worse or slower. The old Psion 5 got closest! Simply happy to stay old world now. It works, it's quick, and never needs charging.

[linker3000]

Yep, I think it's good to note that like me you have tried tech options, but not found them to bring anything useful to the party.

It's too easy to look at us old farts and draw the conclusion that we're just too stuck in our ways and unable to cope with this new-fangled stuff, but I've spent periods (maybe perhaps a few months at a time) taking notes in other ways to see if I can 'evolve' - off the top of my head I've tried: Mind mapping meetings (on paper and electronically), netbooks (I still have a Samsung NC10 running Mint which is great as a portable terminal when a physical keyboard is a 'must' and the company HP laptop or home T420 is just too bulky for the situation), tablets and phones with styluses. (I used to have a Note 1 phone and still use a Galaxy Note 10.1 daily for research at home).

Some things 'just work'.

[NeedMoreTea]

Yeah, it hasn't been for lack of trying. Laptop I thought too intrusive, though the earliest versions (before the weather widgets and web additions) of Google Desktop search showed lots of promise for retrieval, the note taking itself just took me too much out of the discussion, and too much into faffing about with a laptop. iPad is brilliant for home surfing but useless as meeting tablet. Maybe smart paper and AI indexing one day...

Then there's the software. Evernote was something a previous boss swore by - until some change he really couldn't get on with forced him to migrate, with much muttering, everything to something else. Evernote, wikis and most of the rest are best if you do proper categorisation of notes and indexing. Indexing always feels must be a second pass after, as categories and choices from before never quite do it. So it's always ended up slower than simply writing in an index at the front at the end of the day or week.

Six months later I often don't know quite what I'm searching, haven't a clue of keywords needed, but it's more archaeological, going back through layers of time, then re-following choices and paths. Grab a handful of pages that is about six months... Skim, find the follow-up. Oh, yeah this, that, who and why. Job done.