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Comment by chefandy | Hacker News Reader

If you're in charge of other people, it's worth noting that some very common cognitive problems like ADHD, Dysgraphia, and Dyslexia negate these benefits in some affected people. The cognitive load of making legible marks can become high enough to become the focus, rather than the actual content. Pressuring someone already struggling with working memory to do things like this, is counterproductive, if not demoralizing. Work style advice is great, but make sure you listen if they say it doesn't work for them rather than getting into the "it worked for me so you must be doing it wrong" mindset.

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I have ADHD, which affects my short-term memory a lot, and my most valuable tool while working is a notebook and a pencil. I rarely look at the previous pages, and they invariably end full of scribbles, but it helps me a lot to keep my current goals in the current page and looking at it while thinking. Once it gets too messy I turn to the next blank page and copy whatever part of the text/diagrams that's still relevant.

I struggle similarly with ADHD but found that I prefer typing over writing. The valuable part of note taking is having somewhere external to use as an extra memory cache. With diagrams, I realized that using a digital tool made it easier for me to physically reorganize what I wrote down. I used pencil and paper in the past but my handwriting and organization were so messy that I never felt like revisiting it to extract information.

Yeah, I know a lot of other folks with ADHD who get a ton of use out of a bullet journal or something similar. The variance is not at all surprising considering that even the two primary symptoms, inattention and impulsivity, often aren't both present. These things aren't cut-and-dried, but these sorts of cognitive problems often impact writing: sometimes enough to make basic mark making a real chore.

Interesting I was diagnosed with ADHD and always felt the teacher was stupid for making us hand write because I spent more time focusing on the writing than remembering what I had written down (and I thought this was likely the case for most people)… but never knew these two things could be related.

As a fellow ADHD-er, the way I handled this as a student was to customize my note-taking system. My whole life people had told me how to take notes in an extremely structured way, and insisted they must be detailed. That required so much focus like you that I couldn't learn. So when I was allowed to stop taking notes, I did, and my grades slightly improved.

Then in university it was too much information to not take notes, and I started on my own again, in my own way. Most importantly there was almost no structure, and very little detail. Never take notes in full sentences, just keywords that are semi-digestable to you, and in math there were lots of equations and diagrams. Secondly I got a tablet with a pressure sensitive pen. This allowed me to still take hand "written" notes that looked and felt like my real handwriting, but I didn't have to deal with trying to organize my notes in real space, which inevitably would end up crushed at the bottom of my backpack or strewn around my room; digital notes are self-organizing.

Sounds like you were primarily having trouble balancing focus with the content side of making notes. With many people, the challenge is actual mark making. We need to intellectualize writing words the way I've heard some people with autism need to intellectualize ingesting and responding to social queues. That muscle memory just doesn't connect the way it does for most people... it's like I'm using the mental process for drawing and don't have some parallel, more automatic mental process for writing. For me, typing is an instant cure for that.

I had the same problem, and unfortunately continued taking handwritten notes well into college, despite the fact that I literally never referenced my notes. I never knew what the point was, only that if I didn't take notes I'd be "breaking the unwritten rule".

The only point of creating any sort of reference material is to increase the likelihood that you'll be able to recall the information later. Handwritten notes are one of the many possible ways to do this. I find that re-designing an abbreviated textbook and splitting all information into tables is the only way that I can reliably learn, but I didn't think of that in school and thus struggled some with grades.

I don't think you can lump those 3 together like that, though you did qualify it. I don't know anything about dysgraphia, but dyslexia is probably the standout thing in that list that make writing very stressful.

With ADHD, I've always struggled with consistency and memory, and what's been helping for a few months is to start my day by writing it out in detail, so I'm forced to work out the kinks.

I wasn't qualifying categorizing these things, I just gave a list of things that can cause difficulty writing among some who have them. Dysgraphia is a writing-specific neurological disorder.

I meant that you qualified it with "some" which is probably true, but I guess on the ADHD side, there are so many other management issues that would supercede this and be much more impactful. For example, my formerly laidback team lead used to give me the agency to get my work done without much oversight, but now they feel like checking in frequently to get "updates" is a good idea. It's provoking me to procrastinate and avoid being near my keyboard, and will probably push me to look for a new job.

Sure, there are. Using written notes is the topic of the article, though, so that's what I was commenting on.

There's a high comorbidity[1] between ADHD, dyslexia & dysgraphia so it does make some sense to group them together.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivit...

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