[iammjm]

I have finally solved this for me. My system consists of two notebooks:

1. Small A6 pocket notebook which I always have on me because it fits in any pocket. Write down anything and everything in it. Bundled with a pen, leather cover,and tiny e-ink ebook reader

2. Big A4 notebook which I usually use at my desk. I used to have an A5 but since it’s not portable anyway, I might as well go with an A4

I really like this setup. There’s also a digital side to it, which consists of Obsidian for creating notes, Quartz for converting obsidian-generated .md files into static websites, and a simple self-hosted web server which gets new files via git.

[lionkor]

What kind of notes do you take? It's always been kind of difficult, as someone who takes maybe a page of notes a week, to imagine what people fill entire books of notes full, outside of university etc.?

I had a friend who would write notes on everything. Every time he learned something, he would write it down in his own words. This sounds good, but he ended up basically internalizing and studying his own misunderstandings, as he never referred back to the source material and instead studied off of his notes.

So I'm very curious how you take notes, if you're willing to share?

[iammjm]

Sure. For me writing is an aide to thinking and remembering. When I have a thought, a task or anything I don’t want to lose, I just pull up my pocketbook and write it down. For my bigger notebook, I use it to jumpstart any task or project that needs several steps. I feel it helpful to write thoughts down, like it forces me to actually think thoughts through and end a sentence with a dot. I also sometimes sketch, make tiny drawings or tables to see ideas visually. Basically anything that gets thoughts out of my head and into some semi-permanent medium. Also for each day I usually write down its date and throughout the day write down what I want to do, what I did, and how I feel. I think it helps with emotional regulation. I believe in the act of externalising thoughts as a way to improve and remember them. I noticed this while listening to writers, as many of them are very eloquent and outspoken. No wonder - they are not improvising, these are the thoughts they thought through before. So I think if there’s something you care about that you would like to think more deeply or clearly about, it only makes sense to write it down. The physical movement of your muscles while you write also force you to be more deliberate and to remember better. If you’d like to start, I can recommend just getting a small notebook that fits in your pocket and a nice pen/fountain pen/mechanical pencil to go with it and just get into the habit of pulling it out as much as possible to just write down whatever concerns you at the moment. It keeps you off social media and doomscrolling too!

[Imustaskforhelp]

This is an insightful comment that you have written and I appreciate you writing it, I had bought many pocket notebooks from a local shop but I ended up using them less than I imagined though I do have it near me but I don't end up writing on it.

Personally I have found recently that Excalidraw is really good in terms of drawing with one of the mouse that I have (Logitech Razer) though I also found that drawing with mouse or staring into screen while writing is a bit more dizzy experience than I expected and I still thrive on pen/paper when thinking about coding problems and within that a standard A4 size notebook really does wonder but the problem to me is also what many people here face and I didn't know that everyone felt so much of this exact same problem!

I will try to keep the pocket diary in my pocket now, and probably a pencil (maybe mechanical) with it :)

but do you keep the content from diary and merge it with your digital notes and if so how do you proceed doing that?

[iammjm]

I digitise some of my handwritten stuff, but not all of them, just what I really want to keep or be searchable.

For that I created a simple Shortcut on my iPhone: take a photo > rotate it > resize by 20% > save file > rename > share with Obsidian and add it to either Daily Note or a specific note.

In Obsidian I have a Claude integration (Claudian Plugin) with an /ocr skill, which runs optical character recognition on the uploaded image and corrects any mistakes and adds some markdown formatting. I have a pretty ugly handwriting but it still does a great job and gets it like 95% right.

All this results in a lightweight (~200kb) image in chosen note in my Obsidian vault with a transcribed and edited text below it.

Generally I’m a big fan of Obsidian because it’s very intuitive and customisable. Like I also have an Excalidraw plugin there for example :)

But most things start in one of my notebooks before they get ingested into obsidian just because I like to handwrite and stay away from my phone as much as possible

As far as pencils go, I got annoyed by the “normal” pencils because their tips kept getting broken or flat and I would need to carry yet additional thing with me, a sharpener. So I looked into mechanical pencils and settled on a 0,5mm tip with HB or H leads. I ended up getting a couple of mechanical pencils to test out and then gave away most of them as gifts to friends. I really liked the Pentel Graphgear 500 for its metal grip which make it well balanced; the uni-ball kuru toga for its rotating tip that keeps the lead sharp at all times; and the Parker jotter for its full stainless steel body. They are each like 10-15€ on Amazon and I think they are all great quality and just fun tools to use

[jmhammond]

Can you share the shortcut link? That sounds very useful

And if you like the Pentel GraphGear 500, you might want to check out the Pentel Sharp Kerry -- it's metal but with a post-able cap which makes it very pocketable.

[iammjm]

Sure - here’s the shortcut:

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/1be6bb1d4b3c458eb4600314805...

Some notes on using it: - Don’t input any degrees if you don’t want the image rotated (I wanted an option to also take vertical photos)

- I usually save the image directly in my obsidian vault (folder)

- In the final “share” step you have to choose the obsidian app and then import it into your vault and into the daily note or somewhere else. Or some other app of your choice.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Thanks your overall comments and the discussion below have been good for me to read :D

[lionkor]

Thank you very much, these are some very interesting ideas! I appreciate that you took the time to write them down.