[mannschott]

I'm familiar with this conundrum. I've been taking notes, managing tasks and appointments on paper since 2015; before that I took most notes in Emacs org-mode and managed some tasks there, and some in OmniFocus.

Lack of search is a definite disadvantage of handwritten notes. Here's what I've done to blunt that:

(1) Every notebook begins with a few pages for a table of contents. (2) When a notebook is full, I scan it in as a PDF. (3) I type up the table of contents to make it searchable and add that to the PDF. (4) The PDFs are all available on my phone.

I am generally able to find things this way, but it is not as convenient as i-searching around a giant buffer in Emacs or using something like deft.el. For the moment I am continuing in this fashion, but I do periodically consider switching back to using a computer for note taking. Perhaps some day I will.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

There are "smart notebooks" that make it relatively easy to send your handwritten notes to the cloud. The problem is that, at least when I checked a couple of years ago, they had no OCR, and only uploaded images to which you could attach a name, so they are not especially helpful when it comes to search.

I hope in a few years, with good OCR, they will be a good solution for those of us stuck in this dilemma.