[urbushey]

I tend to take two kinds of notes:

1. Running todo list or quick combo-list of todo's for a specific project.

This is basically throw-away but has some historical interest in that it can be fun to flip back to todo list pages and see what a previous week looked like, in general. There is also interesting signal in the notes itself ... for instance, the more stressed I am, the large and more illegible my handwriting grows.

2. Notes taken on paper from a meeting or class or lesson.

These are often taken on paper for a specific reason (for one thing, when I talk to clients in person, I hate to have a laptop in front of me, even though I could type much quicker than I can write.) These notes I will generally photograph with my smartphone and upload directly to an online note taking system (Evernote has gotten a lot better again recently). I find that Evernote and presumably several other note taking systems are actually pretty good at basic OCR / I can generally search text that is written legibly on these notes. If I add some basic tags or other information to the note after it is uploaded, this pretty much fulfills my needs to be able to interact with the note digitally after the fact.