This is the sixth of my blog posts detailing how I am and have been trying to remove big tech from my life. Read the introductory post first: Exorcising Big Tech. Also check out my posts on operating systems, office suites, reference managers and web browsers.

My bottom line: Accept that you cannot take detailed notes of everything. Use pen and paper in combination with a more elaborate program, like Obsidian or an open-source Notion-like.

Okay, I’m not good at taking notes. I have to be up front with that, because I’m really not the best person to be advising on this. But I can at least take you through my thought process and show you the alternatives I’ve come across.

What’s important for notetaking?

This is a very personal question. The most important thing to do is to decide what you even want your notes for. Probably, you want some combination of the following:

• To help with active listening and recall.
• A reference that can later be used.
• Organisation of your knowledge as it relates to your tasks and projects.
• A space to connect new ideas that are generated from the thing you’re taking notes on.
• A space for all of the above, but collaboratively, for working with colleagues on projects.
• Something that can be easily and quickly readied for notetaking and is easy to transport.

The problem I’ve always found is that some of these can become contradictory. Research seems to show that taking notes by hand is superior for long-term memory, but it’s tricky to corral your scrawlings into something usable later as a reference, and especially something that’s supposed to cross-reference other notes. On the other hand, creating detailed, wiki-like repositories is time-consuming, can distract from what you’re trying to focus on, and can be a rich source for procrastination later down the line as you tweak and tune it. Even if we’re just talking pen and paper, do you take a pocket-sized notebook for maximum convenience, or something bigger for more space for writing and impromptu diagrams? Or do you use a combination of tools, but then have to commit to some time taken to transfer things from one platform to the other?

I’m trying to divide my notetaking approach into three kinds of notes, using terms I’ve stolen for this purpose just right now as I’m writing this:

1. Ephemera

Random, tiny notes intended to be discarded soon. These might be for taking down details in a phone call, a sticky-note reminder on my desk, or a random thought that just can’t wait.

The priority here is ease, speed and accessibility. I need to be able to just get these notes down as soon as possible in whatever form is easiest. A pad of sticky notes on the desk, the default notes app on my phone (for me that’s OnePlus Notes, at least until I change phone), and my PC or laptop’s default text editor (on my PC running CachyOS and KDE Plasma, Kate, on my work laptop running Ubuntu and Gnome, Text Editor, and when I’m using a Windows machine, Notepad). The goal is simply to have as little friction as possible between having the thought “I need to write this down” and actually writing it down. I won’t recommend any specific apps for this; use whatever you find easiest. I think that to force yourself to use something else – even for the good reasons of this project – defeats the point. If you can replace your default notes app with something open source, do it.

Most of these notes are discarded (or forgotten and left to languish forever more in my phone’s storage). Those that I need to keep for longer are later put into whichever format is most relevant for their long-term use.

2. Archivalia

Notes that I will need to reference long-term, present to others, or put in relation to other notes as part of more complex ideas and projects.

For these, I need more features, software that would be called more something like ‘knowledge management systems’ or ‘second brain apps’.

I used to use Notion. I loved its database feature, something I couldn’t find in any other software. It’s fortunate that you can now have this outside of Notion, because I very quickly became disillusioned with Notion. The company started purchasing apps like mail and calendar and only haphazardly and half-assedly integrating them into Notion (no talking to Outlook? Only Gmail? Really?), and then starting going absolutely hell-for-leather on AI. Long-asked-for features like offline editing were also not forthcoming. These gave me the unmistakable stench of enshittification when coupled with the fact that Notion is for-profit and not open source. I felt like its days as a high quality software that I could use for free with a university email were definitely numbered. Fortunately, it works using Markdown, which makes exporting notes from it fairly easy. Some features break, but it’s not too bad.

Which brings me to the alternatives. Since the success of Notion, there have been many copycats, which is great. You might hear about Coda, Xtiles, Mem, Loop, AFFiNE or Joplin. I tried Anytype and I really wanted to like it. It uses its own philosophy of organising things (everything is an ‘object’ with properties and relationships), and I just couldn’t get into it for some reason. But it’s worth a go. I might try it again.

This is where I think we should be most thoughtful, because we’re not looking solely at convenience here. For our archivalia, we either need a pen-and-paper system that I am nowhere near disciplined enough to use (I’ve tried), or some more feature-filled software. My personal choice – at least for the moment – is Obsidian. It’s not actually FOSS, which is a shame, but it is free, powerful, broadly ethical, and interoperable. It works just using markdown files and folders, so it’s easy to transfer my notes if I ever want to change software. It’s also very extensible, with endless plugins. (And you know how much I like tinkering.) There are paid tiers – $5 or $10 per month – which give you the ability to sync your notes on the cloud, have version history, collaborators, end-to-end encryption, publishing, etc. But for individual use, the free tier is more than sufficient. You can even sync your notes still, if you set your ‘vault’ location to a folder in an already-synced folder, like on in your cloud storage. Or you can use Git.

3. Potentialia

These are the notes in-between. They’re not quite ephemera, but you’re not yet sure if they need to be archivalia. Most often, these are the kind of notes I would take at a talk where I don’t yet know if it’s quite interesting or useful enough for me to feel the need to store it long-term, but I also want to actively listen and be able to recall things from it.

For this, I think that nothing beats a notebook with nice paper (I use an A5-size one) and a pen that is a joy for you to write with (I’m using a Kaweco Sport Classic Fox and a LAMY AL-star).

The best advantage of pen and paper is the freedom to structure notes however you wish. You can just write simple text, or you can draw diagrams, tables, mindmaps or whatever kind of weird hybrid structure makes sense to you as you write it. These can be polished or changed later, but it means there is as little friction as possible between your thoughts and the notes you produce. You don’t have to do this extra translation step of rendering your thoughts in a way that the software you’re using can accommodate.

Pen and paper is also mostly free from big tech. Don’t be swayed by digital things like the reMarkable that claim to replace pen and paper. They don’t. They can’t. They may have their place, but it should be as part of archivalia. Free yourself from the digital here. Apply actual, real ink to actual, real paper. There are of course ethical questions regarding notebook and pen brands too, but that’s going beyond the scope of this project.

Closing thoughts

I’m far from an authority on how to take good notes. Maybe you should even do the opposite of what I say, But I do think that something that is important to recognise and accept is that (a) not all notes are equally important, (b) elaborate systems can cause more stress and friction than they’re worth, and so (c) we need multiple ways of taking notes that fit the situation at hand. And it’s also worth noting (hah) that, sometimes, it’s best not to take notes at all. Taking notes can be exhausting and even distracting. I think we need to be a little more strategic than stubbornly insisting that we can take detailed, well-organised notes all the time about everything.