On Taking Notes

I’ve always felt like the way I took notes is very sub-optimal. Whether it was for class, meetings, or self-study, the way I took notes seemed flawed compared to how others did. I think seeing people color-code or create a bajillion nested folders has made me self-aware of my messyness and possibly insecure of it; I thus sought out to improve my note-taking skills. After years of improvements, upgrades, and optimizations, I realized that, drumroll, the way I took notes originally was near-optimal and better than the rest for my needs. Here I’ll cover each and my thoughts regarding its pros/cons, and why I eventually just went full circle to my original note-taking practices.

Using an iPad

I think practically every college kid either has an iPad or dreams of getting one (or a similar tablet). I had one myself; I bought it right before undergrad with the MacBook air and the apple pen using the university student discount. Truth be told, the apple workspace is very intuitive and easy, especially using airdrop to quickly pass documents between my laptop, tablet, and phone (I have an iPhone as well). And nowadays the ability to use the iPad as an additional screen alongside the laptop makes it very enticing to get one.

I originally found taking notes for class with an iPad very nice, especially for math. Notably, drawing figures with a note-taking app is easy and convenient when you have the lasso tool to move drawings around. Also, lecturers/professors inevitably make mistakes on notes that you’ve already copied down, so it’s nice having an undo button instead of using an eraser to clean things up. Lastly, given that so many classes are already digital anyway, directly importing pdfs into note-taking apps and writing on them directly is time-saving and saves the hassle from going to the library to print a document.

Unfortunately, all this convenience comes with a major cost, one that’s especially critical in fields like math where one writes a lot: the apple pen tip doesn’t feel great. It doesn’t feel like you’re writing with a real pencil nor a pen, and the screen doesn’t feel like paper either. Moreover, all these add-ons to the screen or pen nib that supposedly make the writing experience better feel like a complete scam to me, given they charge like crazy and all the reviews say they don’t work. I expected something similar to writing on a blackboard with hagoromo chalk, only to face reality that it feels like I’m scratching porcelain cutlery with metal forks. If you don’t mind this as much, believe me that I didn’t mind it either for the first two years of undergrad. Only then did I come out of the darkness and into the light. Now I only use my iPad to watch YouTube while I eat food, like the rat eating M&Ms.

My friend SeniorMars has a great video in which he talks about how he uses his laptop (specifically Vim) for notes. So, inspired by this, I decided to try out writing notes on the computer. I wasn’t going to use Vim though, mainly because I am not trying to spend too much time learning it (and emacs is better). So, I looked towards anything with a low skill floor.

Obsidian

Around that time, Obsidian was just starting to get popular. It wasn’t super well known (as compared to Notion, which we’ll touch upon later), but I saw a decent amount of YouTube videos and online blog posts talking about how great of an app it is. Particularly, Obsidian promotes that links (which are akin to wikipedia cross references) and “mindmaps” (which is a graph visualizing all the references) boost an individual’s ability to see connections that they never thought about previously. This seems intuitive; a physical interpretation of the connections depicts literal edges between things that otherwise wouldn’t seem connected (like how detectives in crime shows plot those charts with strings to connect a suspect to a murder).

Frankly though, Obsidian never stuck with me. I feel like the whole “make a mindmap in Obsidian!” thing is just bait. I thought that reading papers and seeing how they connect / cross reference each other would be cool, but then I realized that seeing this graph only looks cool and doesn’t actually help me with anything. This is definitely very subjective; I’d bet that this tool truly does provide great boosts in productivity for some (perhaps those detectives). But for me, I guess it just wasn’t it. I feel like I have more success just writing down only the important things on a list, not having so many things connected in a graph to the point it gets bloated and uninterpretable.

Notion

I mentioned it previously but there was another, more popular note-taking app that was gaining traction at that time - Notion. I feel like the best way to describe Notion is that it’s glorified Google cloud. Instead of having Google Docs, Slides, and Spreadsheets separately, Notion just combines all of it in one app, and even one document. This makes it the all-in-one app for writing things on one’s computer and keeping it saved on the cloud.

Hearing this, Notion seems potentially decent. Unfortunately, my problem was that it took up too much memory (RAM). It was like 10x worse than Chrome or Firefox, even when I had 40 tabs open on each. Perhaps it’s better now, but I’ve kinda already lost interest in giving it another chance. On another note, as I said previously, it feels like a glorified Google cloud. I don’t see what I can do in Notion of which I can’t do in Docs or sheets. Notion just seems prettier, perhaps, but I’m not really in the market for that. I just want something that works, and works well.

Doom Emacs

At this point, I gave up on these conventional note-taking apps. I thought: “SeniorMars used vim, so maybe it’s time to look towards what other super smart CS people do.” I didn’t want to use NeoVim, but I quickly found its competitor, Doom Emacs, and gave it a spin.

Basically, Doom Emacs is an enhanced version of Emacs. If you like using Emacs to write code, you may like using Doom Emacs to write notes. Writing notes in Doom Emacs was definitely fun for some time, especially doing cross references and writing in TeX. My main problem with it, and which it also existed for Obsidian and Notion but I’ve yet to mention, is that taking notes on the computer just feels awful for math. I have no clue how I would create figures as quickly as drawing it, and writing little footnotes or pointers feels impossible. I’m also lazy. I’m not like SeniorMars where I’d want to spend learning all the shortcuts he uses to customize his note-taking editor and optimize every little thing that way. If one had the ethic, they’d be able to make Doom Emacs work for them. Sadly for me, I’d rather just not take notes at all than spend months / years learning this.

At this point, I’ve realized the lack of expressivity within taking notes through typing, so I switched back to writing notes down.

Good Old-fashioned Pen & Paper

Upon coming back to pen & paper, I started to ask questions to myself like “why did I ever leave in the first place?” It gets messy sure and maybe your hand can start cramping, but I think these tend to be edge-case scenarios for my current note-taking usages. For example, I’m currently not taking rigorous live classes where I have to jot down every little thing, so there’s no demand to write fast. Moreover, I can just cross out any mistakes I have, rather than jamming an eraser on the whole page and potentially ripping it. Most of my note-taking now comes from jotting down little ideas, copying down a few lines of math, or taking a few notes during meetings - none of which require extensive organization or meticulous color-coding. I find that just using two pens, black/blue + red pen, helps me clearly visualize everything I need: black/blue for the main thoughts and the red for any highlights or side notes. I’m not needing to use a particular note-taking format (damn you Cornell notes!), I just write today’s date and bullet point any notes. Simple and clean.

Future

I think the next hurdle I must overcome is note-taking speed. While I’m not in fast-paced lectures anymore, I still do take notes during meetings. Problem is, I take notes mid-conversation, which sometimes stalls the talk. It’d be nice if I can quickly jot things down without ruining the momentum.

I think the answer to this is to learn short-hand, and I truly do want to optimize my note-taking ability by learning it. Also, it’d feel like a flex when others see my notes and have no idea what I wrote. Unfortunately this will take consistent hard-work to train and learn it, so maybe I’ll put it off to the side for now. When I feel like I really want to learn it, I’ll consider giving it a spin.