Normally I kind my preliminary ideas for these columns on a pc, however this week I wrote them in a paper pocket book as a substitute.
I’ve by no means been a lot of a paper individual. Though I did carry round a reporter’s pocket book for a newspaper job within the pre-iPhone period, I want to file my ideas away in digital type, the place they are often categorized, backed up on-line, and accessed from any machine.
However after a latest workplace cleansing venture yielded a stack of unused Field Notes notebooks—together with a few good pens that I’d amassed as presents over time—I’ve been impressed to provide paper notes one other attempt as a complement to my digital note-taking.
This story first appeared in Advisorator, Jared’s weekly tech recommendation publication. Sign up for free to get extra ideas each Tuesday.
The case for paper notes
Already I can see why paper notes endure.
There’s the apparent stuff: Paper is reasonable, you don’t need to hold it charged, and it by no means nags you for in-app purchases. At worst you simply purchase extra of it.
There’s additionally the immediacy issue: You don’t have to consider which app to make use of or which folder to open. Do you have to resolve to digitize a handwritten observe—extra on that shortly—you possibly can nonetheless write first and categorize later.
Paper notes are extra stress-free to work with as properly. I began scribbling some issues down whereas watching baseball on a latest night, and it felt much less traumatic than having a glowing display in my face and keyboard in my lap. The dearth of fast distractions inside a number of finger swipes can also be useful.
Maybe better of all—at the very least for me—is which you can’t delete what you’ve written in ink. I’ve tried utilizing an iPad with an Apple Pencil for handwritten notes and have reviewed a few digital writing tablets, and so they all the time really feel counterproductive to me. As an obsessive self-editor, I can’t resist the erase and undo instruments that digital notepads present. The one choice with paper is to forge forward.
None of which means I’m ditching digital notes. I nonetheless stash fast bits of information in Google Keep once I’m out and about, and I make intensive use of Obsidian to plan my week, arrange story concepts, and write my precise drafts. For interviews, I nonetheless depend on Notability, an iPad app that syncs handwritten notes and audio recordings collectively (although I’m additionally beginning to weave in Apple’s Voice Notes app for automated transcription).
However simply as I’ve carved out distinct roles for every of these apps, I can foresee a spot for paper as properly. On the very least, it helped with placing this column collectively.
Digitizing handwritten notes
Whereas I don’t intend to instantly digitize all my handwritten notes, I like the concept of scanning accomplished notebooks for archival functions, and the apps that I’ve beforehand beneficial for doc scanning work simply as properly for handwritten pages:
- On iOS: Open the Recordsdata app, press the “…” button, and choose “Scan Paperwork.”
- On Android: Open the Google Drive app, then press the Digital camera button.
Each apps will open a digital camera mode so you possibly can level at your notes, and so they’ll routinely scan and crop every web page without having to even hit the shutter button between scans. When you get in a rhythm, you possibly can flip a whole pocket book right into a PDF file in only a few minutes.
There are additionally a bunch of free methods to transform that handwriting into textual content:
- iOS and MacOS: Simply choose the textual content in your PDF file as if it had been a printed doc. Apple’s system will routinely detect and spotlight the textual content, which you’ll then copy and paste elsewhere. (On a Mac, you possibly can even hit Cmd+A to pick out all the doc.)
- Home windows: In the event you’ve put in Microsoft PowerToys, press Win+Shift+T to pick out a bit of your notes and duplicate the textual content to your clipboard. Alternatively, a free program known as NAPS2 could make textual content selectable in PDF recordsdata.
- Any net browser: Open your PDF in Google Drive, then use the “Open with” drop-down menu on the high and choose “Google Docs.” This may create a brand new doc with all of the handwriting transformed to textual content.
- Yet one more trick: Attempt importing a PDF to Google’s NotebookLM AI device to generate a abstract, brainstorm additional concepts, or—strangest of all—turn your notes into a podcast.
Sadly my handwriting tends to stump even essentially the most refined textual content recognition techniques, however maybe you’ll fare a bit higher.
This story first appeared in Advisorator, Jared’s weekly tech recommendation publication. Sign up for free to get extra ideas each Tuesday.
