Take Better Notes, By Hand

Researching a topic is hard, because not only are you trying to puzzle together the causes and effects of a given problem or historical series of events, you’re also looking out carefully for leads and new threads to pull. Falling down rabbit holes is common—and encouraged—but eventually you need to pull yourself back out and collect your thoughts. What’s more, if you’re reading books you don’t own, you’ll need some way to record the interesting bits to recall later.

Of course, there are a lot of different ways to take notes and organize your thoughts. I’ve settled on this four-part system, here organized from least important to most important:

1. Pinboard: for links to PDFs & webpages + full-text search.
2. Books.app: the iOS/macOS app for importing PDFs & organizing them into Collections.
3. Book Tracker: an app that’s great for saving long quotes via OCR.
4. Good, old-fashioned paper notebooks.

Quote captured via OCR via Book Tracker
Photo: mine

While the first three options in that list might seem obvious or even a bit boring (and I’ll admit that is partly by design) the last one is the one I use the most extensively and is by far the most useful. There is something about writing stuff by hand that not only helps me remember and recall the information, but that helps me better engage with the topic at hand. Writing in paper notebooks is less distracting than using digital tools, it can be done basically anywhere there’s ambient light, and it comes along with a real-life progress bar that physically takes up space on a shelf.

Of course, paper notebooks as a knowledge base, have significant problems too. We did have a computer revolution for a reason, but there are several ways to mitigate and remove those downsides with good, old-fashioned note-taking techniques.

How to take Notes

Page numbered index at the front
Photo: mine

All through school I was a terrible note-taker. I basically just wrote down whatever the teacher/professor did on the board and then failed to ever go back and read them. So when I decided to start taking physical notes again to collect my thoughts while reading, I knew I needed to have a better method to my madness.

The simplest thing you can do to help yourself better decipher a physical notebook is this: date every page, every entry. Do this to basically everything you write, not just notes. It’s silly, but it works.

Next up: page numbers, and indicies.

If the notebook doesn’t have page numbers, add them. I usually only do the odd numbers, starting on the right side. It cuts the task down by half. Leave a few pages at the front or the back and use them to slowly build out an index of the topics you’re covering. Reading a new book? Note that in the index. Topic change? It goes in the index. Interesting quote? Add it to the index. Date the entries. This all makes it super easy to find stuff later.

Obviously, take notes and highlight parts you find useful.

However, one of the biggest downsides to paper notebooks is that the space isn’t infinite. If you come back to a topic at a later date after researching another idea, you necessarily have notes spread all throughout the book. What’s more, you might have additional thoughts or ideas that you’d like to jot down mid-session and those can sometimes get lost in the flow of quotes and chapter summaries.

Notes on the right, follow-up thoughts on the left
Photo: mine

That’s why, when I take notes, I only write on the right-most page. I write in pen, recording all sorts of quotes, observations, and mid-stream thoughts. However, if I need to puzzle out an idea or go back and point to a newer or relevant page, I can scrawl it, in pencil, either in the margin or on the left page! This is also useful in the index because, since the right pages are always odd-numbered, an even number in the index automatically conveys something “out of band” about the entry.

It’s not a formal system, but it’s worked really well for me. I have tons of different notebooks each designated for different purposes: notes on books I’m reading, my random thoughts, writing ideas, specific research projects, and many more. That leads to a lot of time spent trying to find and recall quotes, notes, and ideas, but with the system I laid out here, it’s really no trouble at all.

I’ve increased the space of my own mind and, at least anecdotally, the results are promising.