Hacker News Reader

Comment by arendtio | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, I don't like notebooks, because they make it hard to reorganize notes and I prefer electronic notes, because they take less space. However, I use notebooks when I have to think and they help me concentrate. So while I prefer to organize things electronically, I feel that the thinking process actually works better for me, with pen and paper in front of me.

Usually, I make some notes while thinking things through and return to the PC to implement them afterward (Code as well as PowerPoint).

So I can't emphasize this enough:

> They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process.

View on HN

I had this reorganizing problem too, but still wanted to write on a notebook. I finally discovered Kokuyo campus smart binder. It's an A5 or B5 sized loose leaf binder that has these small plasic rings and can hold about 30 pages. Reorganizing is simply opening the binder and rearranging the pages and that worked really well for me.

I do the same for the same reason and have the same Kokuyo binder! Though recently transitioned to just an American size (?) loose leaf with binder paper for cost an ease of procuring paper, as well as that I find the Kokuyo cumbersome to put in and take out paper with so many holes.

I have this too and really loved it. But now I just use the cheapest B5 notebooks I can find, for the refill paper was somewhat expensive. For organization, I use the postit-like flags to label pages, and sometimes I'll write a table of contents on the front cover when the notebook is full.

The point of paper notes is not to use them as a sole source of truth. If you're jotting something down, it's probably an outline or some sort of shorthand that needs to be cleaned up.

Paper notes are most effective if you go through them 1x a week and upload the important parts to a digital store. This process helps clarify my thinking as I get to reflect on my recent thoughts and prioritize the most important ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com