Use paper to assist thinking, but store everything digitally

For about three years now, I’ve been loosely following the Zettelkasten method of taking notes (here’s what that is) and I’m quite pleased with how it’s going. I’m finding that having everything in one system (daily notes, book notes, meeting notes, church notes, other ideas, etc) is amazingly valuable. I’m currently using Tana for that, but there’s likely a dozen different solutions that could do the job for you.

Two things came up in the past week that tie together in interesting ways.

Book notes

I’ve heard from a few people that they prefer to take notes literally inside of the books they read. That’s great! The act of doing that can help you remember the content better, and is a good way to go. I’ve even written before about how I work through physical books.

The problem, at least in the cases of these few people, is that the notes stay in the book. They can always grab the book off the shelf and find the old notes, but they’re never put into a system that might surface them again in the future to tie into other ideas.

Paper to assist thinking

In a recent post on the Zettelkasten.de blog, they covered this concept. For the author, she previously had some notes on paper and some digitally, but found it helpful to make them all digital. Here is what she said:

I did end up migrating away from doing paper and digital Zettels, because who has the time to sustain that? Apparently, not me. I’ve been operating 100% digital for a long time now and have zero regrets. It’s so much easier to find what I’m looking for by using the search function in Archive.

A user named Sascha followed up with a concise response to her:

This is a recurring experience. My personal recommendation is to use paper to assist thinking and store everything digital.

Granted, this takes a good bit of effort. I wrote earlier this year about post-processing and how valuable it is, but it certainly takes some time. I still enjoy writing by hand, whether on paper or like on tools such as the Kindle Scribe, but all of that content needs to end up in my digital note system or it’s of little long-term value to me.

Using paper to assist with your thinking is excellent, but migrating it into a digital system is where you’ll really find the long-term gains.