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…