Totally agree. Organizing notes into hierarchies is not necessary, most of the time you just care about whether it’s a business note or personal. Chronology is an organization method already available regardless of the note data, and we as humans experience most things rooted in time so it’s easy to recall a rough range as well.

I have also done the dance of going through various productivity tools and have often ended up back in the paper notebook camp. If you are interested in trying another tool out, I’d really love to know what you think of an app I am building. It is meant to be very lightweight with just one screen, and start up really fast, but when logged in, also lets you sync across all devices you have.

It’s available at https://notebrook.app with code ALPHA2020. Everyone is welcome to try. [email protected] for feedback. I think it’s striking a good balance so far of being extremely lightweight but also let’s you recall when you need.

> Organizing notes into hierarchies is not necessary, most of the time you just care about whether it’s a business note or personal.

...for some (most?) people. For others, like me, it simply is necessary - we have too many notes, ideas, reminders, thoughts, whatever, of too wide a variety, to use the system described by GP comment, or yours.

I use paper notepads too. Two things I do:

1. I put lists in the notes and mark them up with these symbols (inspired by the bullet journal community):

◯ = task, ◐ = in-progress, ● = completed, > = migrated.

2. I also require that the notepads have perforations on every page so that individual pages can be torn out. This is important for keeping the notepad uncluttered -- and lowers the inhibition to freeflow write, because if things don't work out, the page can be torn out.

The Rhodia A5 Dotpad is my go-to

https://www.jetpens.com/Rhodia-DotPad-Notepad-No.-16-A5-Wire...

The two biggest takeaways from Bullet Journal for me were the task markup you mention and numbered pages + index. When I have to refer to some previous work I did, I note the past page numbers I had to look up. It's a simple way of cross-linking notes, but I find that it works quite well for me.

I try to avoid notebooks with tearable pages, because I found them to be too fragile. I carry my most recent notebook everywhere and some of them end up quite beat up. Tearable pages tend to start falling out on their own.

> I try to avoid notebooks with tearable pages, because I found them to be too fragile.

So in my experience Rhodia (and other "higher-end" perforated) notepads are pretty sturdy and tend not to fall apart even with rougher than usual handling (mine haven't). There is a slight price premium however.

I believe it works well for you. For me one of the important parts that got me to consistently write a journal years ago was also switching to the cheapest notebooks I could get.

With something (relatively) expensive I always had that small, subconscious fear that what I have to write in the notebook wasn't worth ruining the page.

One way to avoid this is to buy something like Rhodia that you want to use but is a bit more expensive. Then buy one even more expensive notebook. Now the Rhodia is your cheaper notebook and there is no longer an inhibition to writing in it!

(Yes this actually happened to me)

The most useful Bullet Journal lesson for me was having periodic task migrations (weekly, in my case). Infinite task lists don't work for me.

I adopted the exact same technique this year after making the jump from engineering to product management.

Previously, everything was scattered in notes on sublime or notion. This is because in the dev world, everything was happening primarily over email or slack, if i ever did have a call with a client, i just made dot points in a text editor and that was it.

My first week as a PM I realized how much more meetings and talking there are. So, I switched to a notebook, but I quickly found the issue of general meeting and “standup” notes being scattered amongst drawings and diagrams etc.

Hence, I now also have two small notebooks. One is for sketches, rough wireframes or ideas, the other is a daily tasks which I use as my standup notes.

Of course, processes can always be further refined, and I’m now also incorporating notion back into my work process.

Paper and digital note systems are not in conflict. When I'm working through the math in a paper, I'm not going to type 50 lines of equations into a text editor. I take a picture of my notes, upload it to OneNote, and copy the link into my text notes on the paper. It's surprising, but you can have a 100% digital note system while using paper for 90% of your notetaking.

For years I took notes both with pen/paper and digitally, and either cross-referenced things or scanned pages into a master digital document like you describe. For me, the game-changer has been getting a RocketBook. It’s handwriting recognition is about 98% accurate for me, so it only takes a few minutes for me to scan some pages, drag the emailed text file into VS Code, join lines into paragraphs, and check for typos. Gives me a chance to review what I wrote too. Then it goes from there into a plain text file (or more recently, WorkFlowy) which is my preferred system. I started with the free PDFs that RocketBook makes available, but finally bought one mostly because I wanted to pay for their server resources. :-)

The RocketBook is actually what got me started on this. My pen died, so I started using the OneNote app (service provided by my employer) and it's worked well enough. I definitely recommend the RocketBook.

> diagrams and write equations

This is why, for digital use (since I cannot write without pain these days), Microsoft Word is imo the best digital notes software. Full text search, tag integration (#tag), images, hyperlinks, tables, diagrams, equations, and macros (Macros are incredibly awesome.)

There is OneNote but I dislike the org structure and the walled garden approach.

Zettelkasten can be done on paper too. Its point is making connections between notes and being able to do discover new connections giving you new insights.

Simple note taking just records what you know and think. ZH can lead to new understandings of the same set of notes.

You can use a date as a "link" in a notebook. A normal person does not create that many different entries per day. You can add a keyword to the notebook margin as well if you feel particularly systematic (then a link/reference would be 18jul23 for example).

This sounds time-consuming, is it?

I dont see myself following permanent links by timestamp. It is so time-consuming and error-prone, I would drop the whole thing immediately. I know myself this far anyway^^

The idea is that it is a _good thing_ that it is time consuming, as thinking about the connections between the notes _is_ the actual productive work that you have the system for.

Another major benefit of pen on paper is it's far less tiring, at least for me. I find staring at screens for extended periods utterly draining and often use paper for notes and code reading.

Major disadvantages - lack of relatively easy search, security, duplication, archiving, integration, accessibility to others, etc.

So it's a complementary tool for me, but the digital-only brigade are missing a useful, and - vital to some - dimension.

Searching for information in analog notebooks can be a pain. Also they might get lost, spilled over with water, burned, eaten by the dog, etc... easily. In that respect digital notes with a backup in the cloud are superior.

However I agree that no digital solution beats paper so far when it comes to drawing diagrams or writing mathematical formulas. However the conversion of handwriting to LateX by https://webdemo.myscript.com/ is quite impressive.

Similar approach. I use loose a4 paper in a binder, which can be more easily scanned and ordered by project etc. later on.