Ask HN: Do you use paper notebooks? Why and how?

I too enjoy writing in notebooks. For me I get the sense that it reinforces memory, and I find that I refer to notes rarely, but I stash the notes away on shelf. It’s not organized in any way except chronology, and many subjects sometimes crowd the page, from technical, to dos, phone numbers, shopping lists, etc. If I need to take an action item I snap a picture of the page onto phone and go from there.

I use two types of notebooks. One where I don't care about structure or content. I just write whatever I'm thinking about as I think it when tackling hard or large problems. Kind of like an unstructured unspecific mind-map. I find going back to this is highly effective to get me back into almost the exact frame of mind up to a couple of years later.

Then I have project notebooks, where each page is dedicated to one project. I only take it out after spending some time in the mind-map kind and I have made enough progress that it's worth writing in the project one. This notebook is written as documentation for an imaginary third party. It's useful for sharing with others and more importantly myself in the further future.

I use this system for work and personal projects and while I don't too often have projects running long enough for this to matter I regularly refer to my old solutions and thoughts. It has definitely prevented me from walking in proverbial circles.

Always, for everything at work. Reach over, pick up notebook, write, done. No boot time, no drop down menus, no learning/adhering to someone else's way of doing things, no end-of-life versions, no stylus driver issues, _NO BUGS_. A5 size pretty much any brand that's immediately available when I need a new one. Lined, not dot and not graph. I'm very visual-oriented and am always rendering thoughts, processes, algorithms, etc. as a _diagram_. I've found nothing digital even comes close to pen/pencil and paper. To digitize and share I take pictures of my drawings. Meeting notes, discussion summaries, decisions (and who made them) all dated. Hugely important when I have to remember histories of events, etc.

I use the bullet journal technique (1), I keep it simple and don’t go in for all the decoration that you see online. I also don’t do any fancy life tracking; it’s for recording tasks, making notes for meetings and notes around any work ongoing. I sometimes stick in examples of anything creative that I’ve done that I might want to reference at some point. Glued into the front cover is a picture of my dog.

I use a leuchtturm1917 A5, dotted paper. (2) Paper quality can vary, if you use a proper pen you’ll want to go for the thicker paper. You can get better journals on Amazon (cheaper and more pages), but I am lazy and can’t be bothered to number the pages myself. I also attach two pen loops, for a pen and a mechanical pencil.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_journal 2. https://www.leuchtturm1917.co.uk/edition-120g.html