Too Many Notes

September 14, 2005 9:16 AM

What is the best way to track all my handwritten notes?

I have recently started a new job at my company, and I have found myself making lots of little notes on a small notepad. These notes are important, and I would like to retain them.

However, I don't want to keep hardcopies of all of these notes around forever, and I'd like an easier way to deal with them.

I've looked for possible solutions. One I found was a Logitech io2 pen, but that requires special paper.

Another thought was using a PDA to write my notes down, but I have used them in the past and found them to not be very accurate because of poor screen resolution. Are the new VGA 640x480 PDAs that are coming out better than the older, lower resolution ones?

A tablet PC is not a viable solution since laptops are company specific.

posted by benjh to computers & internet (14 comments total)

Don't go so high tech. Use one of those paper clips that clamp down and a stack of 3x5 blank index cards.
posted by geoff. at 9:18 AM on September 14, 2005

Check out 43 folders and the companion wiki. Scads of advice there.
posted by adamrice at 9:44 AM on September 14, 2005

I go through my notes periodically and type in anything I want to keep. Everything else goes in the trash.
posted by grouse at 10:13 AM on September 14, 2005

I have the same problem, but I used to have lots of notepad files all over the place. I've started using keynote to keep track of all my notes. It's useful in that it's on my pc, but it's by no means portable. Keynote lets me organize all my notes in a way that's meaningful to me. I can also print notes that I need to take with me, or search the entire file for a particular entry I need.
posted by indigo4963 at 10:28 AM on September 14, 2005

My suggestions, write notes, but do not keep them. I have a huge stack of clean white A4 paper on my desk. When I need to write something, I quickly scribble it on a piece of A4 I drag out.

But I never let them stay more than a day. Either I do what I scribbled, or I transfer them to my PC the next morning. So I usually squeeze the pieces of paper and throw them away.

And I don't actually have a paper waste basket in my room, which I find to really be good. Think about it, why keep waste in your room? If you need to throw away something (how often does this actually occur?), just walk to where there is a wastebasket.
posted by markesh at 10:34 AM on September 14, 2005

And I don't actually have a paper waste basket in my room, which I find to really be good. Think about it, why keep waste in your room? If you need to throw away something (how often does this actually occur?), just walk to where there is a wastebasket.

What are you on about? Why is it somehow better to have to walk a bit before putting something in the bin? are you trying to discourage trashing stuff? Why NOT keep waste in your room?
posted by bonaldi at 11:52 AM on September 14, 2005

A tablet PC would be the best solution, if you can convince your IT team. OneNote really is a fantastic note-taking tool and the closest thing I've found to hand-taken notes. No PDA - not even the newer ones - comes close.

Try this:

• Big stack of index cards as suggested by geoff - one note/thought per card.
• Spend 10 minutes at the end of every day sorting through and processing the day's notes. The GTD workflow is very good for this.
• Store this information in a personal wiki: either a hosted service - try PBWiki - or a local one like TiddlyWiki.

Also have a look at the Fuji ScanSnap range - they produce some good paper-to-electronic tools.

And I strongly disagree with markesh; you need a wastepaper bin close-to-hand. File/scan/wiki everything that you'll need, throw out everything else. Do this regularly.
posted by blag at 12:09 PM on September 14, 2005

I would love to have a Tablet PC, but we are a Dell only shop (except the people in the design department with Macs), and a Dell is all I will be allowed to have. Unfortunately, and oddly, Dell does not make a Tablet PC.
posted by benjh at 1:06 PM on September 14, 2005

i second the index card suggestion. it's scalable and customizable! and other such buzzwords.

an alternative to one note per card is to use the luddite's tag system. write a few words in the top margin describing what the note is about - the first usually being the "main" category. then you can add other things to it later if need be, and also sort your notecards by tag/heading/categories. the tactility of the notes makes it a lot better for organizing papers, talks, stories, etc. than with bits of data on the screen or arranged statically on a printout - at least that's what i find.

combine this with a system of aggressively parsing your notes at the end of every day or week for what you can toss and what you should consolidate, and it takes up surprisingly little room. i'm looking at a stack compiled over the last year right now and it's still portable (though obviously i wouldn't even need to carry it all around with me). cards and bulldog blips are your friends.

plus if you need to enter it in to another system, OCR has come a long way. you can scan your cards, and if you write neatly it's probably not too long before there are consumer-level solutions for turning handwritten text in to computer text (that may even be widely possible now - i don't know).
posted by poweredbybeard at 1:52 PM on September 14, 2005

Levenger has some nice (albeit pricey) options:

Swiftnotes
Shirt Pocket Briefcase
Book Jot
posted by invisible ink at 4:23 PM on September 14, 2005

Shame about the Tablet PC. Have a look at the Nokia 9500 - I use one extensively for meeting notes and jotting down thoughts in places where a tablet is impractical.

I forgot to mention the GTD version of TiddlyWiki - it prints out directly onto index cards.

Or maybe a dictaphone?
posted by blag at 8:09 PM on September 14, 2005

Take photos of them with a digital camera.
posted by smackfu at 12:34 PM on September 15, 2005

I would second that advice - taking digital photos, I use a camera for photographing notes, flipcharts, whiteboards and anything that I may want to refer back to like that. My trusty camera has become a really important component of my work toolchain.
posted by mattr at 3:32 AM on September 16, 2005

Use 3 x 5 cards but don't throw any away. Buy a very cheap 3 x 5 storage box and toss them in there when you no longer think you need them. If you someday desperately need the odd note, it may take awhile to find it, but it will be there.
posted by phewbertie at 6:54 AM on September 18, 2005