Interesting. I hand write notes in a notebook and I'm unhappy with how difficult it is to find things later. But I can't install an app like Obsidian on my work computer, so I think I will use a simple text editor for now.
I think I've tried just about every note-taking app, as well as a few fancy "smart notepads" and the like, and in the end, I returned to using pen and paper.
None of the electronic alternatives worked for me because they seriously reduced the quality of the notes I took. Apparently, pen and paper is just how my mind works best.
I still wish I had a solution that let me search them, but it appears that's just not a thing for me. In practice, I'm pretty good at searching my notebooks, though. I seem to have a navigational sense that takes the various doodles and diagrams as landmarks and gets me there.
My use case is rather different than what the article and others here are talking about, and that might matter. I don't take notes in meetings at all, because if I do so then I don't really absorb what's happening in the meeting. I take constant notes about what I'm doing when I'm actually working, though.
Finding things later is downstream of deciding what you want to remember, which isn't going to be clear on the first pass through. The act of taking the note is supposed to be more intense than sitting there and thinking "yeah I'll remember that".
So my workflow is to take notes from my notes repeatedly, until I've distilled what I want out of them. Having a variety of stationary is part of this, but I'll also use text editors or spreadsheets. That is, I think, the "bicycle for the mind" use of the computer. If I start acting like an archivist that has to publish cited works or a student grubbing for the grade by dotting the i's and crossing the t's, then I get away from the thought.
None of the electronic alternatives worked for me because they seriously reduced the quality of the notes I took. Apparently, pen and paper is just how my mind works best.
I still wish I had a solution that let me search them, but it appears that's just not a thing for me. In practice, I'm pretty good at searching my notebooks, though. I seem to have a navigational sense that takes the various doodles and diagrams as landmarks and gets me there.
My use case is rather different than what the article and others here are talking about, and that might matter. I don't take notes in meetings at all, because if I do so then I don't really absorb what's happening in the meeting. I take constant notes about what I'm doing when I'm actually working, though.