A few months ago I also looked into a bunch of note taking methods, even bought a similar A5, spiral bound, pre-formatted organizer and thought it'd be perfect for organizing my days. It remains unused except for a couple of lines where I began to note the days tasks, then crossed them out and tried to start again the next day.
But a dot grid purchased around the same time is filling up very quickly with odd chicken scratchings of work notes. The only hint of structure are dates scrawled wherever I happened to be starting from that day. Any very important things get circled or marked with an asterisk
For long-running projects, I also use A5 notebooks that are pre-partitioned at a given % (I use 60-70%). The idea is that you go over your old notebook with "odd chicken scratchings", count the number of pages spent on each topic, calculate the ratios and multiply them by 70%*NUM_PaGES. Then you allocate this number of pages in the new (clean) notebook and put tab stickers on each section. I also leave around 4 pages for the TOC in the beginning of a notebook. It's just 2 sheets, but the ability to go back and put an extensive TOC later helps a lot when you refer to a finished notebook. With a bit of patience, you can but together a perfectly ordered TOC in a completely messy notebook (by doing one pass over all notes before writing down the TOC and grouping them by project). I also tried keeping notes on paper and writing down the TOC digitally in my Evernote to keep it searchable.
Regarding spiral binding, I find it too flimsy. If you damage the spiral, flipping pages would cause damage to the pages. I prefer hardbound notebooks. I use fountain pens and previously used expensive paper but since the pandemic I tried Idena [2] and it simply blew me away with its high quality and ink resistance (except for some rare inks) at such a low cost (but I had to give up the dot grid).
Ultimately, I am convinced that all of this has a limit and a Zettelkasten method of sorts is needed for a long-running knowledge base project.
[1]: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B004F69CRC [2]: https://www.amazon.de/Idena-209281-Notizbuch-kariert-schwarz...
I'm not sure I'll stay with that, but so far it looks good. I like the thick paper, the wide availability and the low price. I can reorder stuff, I can take single index cards out, and I don't regret throwing cards away.
Edit: Apparently not relevant (I still think it is), or someone spends their day doing just this and isn't happy that its being pointed out. Either way, they're not happy
Obviously that rigidity has its flaws but not to worry, I'll deal with that later. Or at least thats what I tell myself ;)
The only time in my life i've taken substantial quantities of notes was when i was a student. When i've had a job, the learning i do isn't the kind where i'm making copious notes.
Are there a lot of students on HN? Are there a lot of people doing out-of-hours study? Do people make lots of notes at work? Is this productivity LARP?
I don't have a system though, just a series of OneNote notebooks that I organize when I can get to it.
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Taking your question from the reverse perspective, we can say that one does not take notes for at least one of two reasons, either because they think they can afford to forget the information they've already spent time to acquire, or they trust their mind to recall enough of it when they'll need to.
These are more so notes for personal projects, ideas I have, things I need to do/todo lists, that kind of thing.
The basic idea is to try not to hold everything in your head, because it limits your ability to think clearly if your stressing about not forgetting stuff. I don't know how true that is, but I can say that for me I'm less stressed about something if I know I have it written down somewhere, even if I never come back to it. Its almost like I make it future-me's problem, rather than something I need to deal with now.
I don't think the specific system matters all that much though. The recent popularity of Zettelkasten is not really about systems per se as much as it is about recognizing that being able to refer to other things, or tell what other things refer to the current thing, is valuable. For people who just sort their e-mails into Outlook folders and have never thought more deeply about any of this, it is often a helpful shift in one's mental model.
On a serious note, I actually like these threads. Earlier in the year I decided to look into better note taking and task management, and it became an entire month of me gradually becoming more and more stressed about it. HN was actually a great source for this, mostly because a lot of the people on here seem a bit less "into it" than dedicated sources, and help bring me back down to earth.
In the end, my solution was simple. Stop trying. Of course, because I get a bit obsessive over this kind of thing (who could have guessed that a man who spent an entire month thinking about note taking can be obsessive), I couldn't just stop. So instead, I set myself a reminder to come back to it in a month, knowing full well that by then I'll be obsessed with the next thing and will keep putting it off.
I write this in case anyone else is going through the same dilemma. Just take a break, get a notebook where you can jot down ideas for how you will jot down ideas, set a reminder, and move on with your life. Unless your enjoy this sort of thing, in which case, have fun :)