I got out the habit, but now I’m involved in a four year multimillion malaria vector project I’m back on the wagon!
I suspect that Universities are holdouts in transitioning to electronic lab notebooks, owing to the way they operate. Essentially, every PI wants it to be the exact thing they want but not pay for it.
I have a .txt file on my desktop for incidental notes.
I have stacks of notebooks - all the client meetings and all my interview notes for candidates are in there.
It would be great if I could get a decent writable tablet and be able to put the notes somewhere online but for the moment, its pretty old school
I once worked on a project where my boss wanted everyone to write digital notes in a common location so he could look at what people were up to.
I suspect that’s what has put me off.
A colleague keeps digital notes of every conversation, email, meeting and bit of work. I’ll admit it’s impressive to be able to search all of that info but I can’t bring myself to try.
I’ve been through three notebooks covering 2018 to 2023. Somehow I have 8 more covering 2011 to 2018.
Crikey - I have three just covering 2023!
I use an e-ink tablet, which is a nice balance between the physicality of a paper notebook and the compactness of digital storage.
In my younger years, simply writing something down with pencil and paper was enough for me to internalize the information; I often would simply write something down, look at it, then toss it in the pile of notes on my desk destined for the recycling bin.
These days, after decades of, what could only be charitably described as, aging, and also having children, I have learned that not only do I need to keep the notes, I may actually have to refer to them from time to time; something I’ve never learned how to do and don’t have the skillset to execute properly.
My distaste for inefficient workflow and swivel-chair task processing is now at odds with my requirement for physical notetaking. Typing something isn’t the same as writing it; I could type literally anything and have essentially no recollection of that event whatsoever or the contents thereof (my middle school typing teacher would be proud!). But writing something… probably just because it’s slower and, notably, more tactile. This likely shares a commonality with my distaste for computerized board gaming vs playing using physical components.
The maths portion of my degree was all blackboard or OHP taught, if you didn’t take notes you didn’t have the material. The computer science portion of my degree was all PowerPoint slides.
No prizes for guessing which portion I scored higher on.
I have an app on my tablet I use for notes. So digital stuff… it gets more and more and throwing notebooks out would be easier. I tend to still scribble on paper when I find some in the vicinity of wherever I am thinking. Paper is still superior to any and all digital means I have tried despite them getting better and better. But my paper notes are so chaotic that keeping them or going back to them is rarely interesting.
I am keeping a 1 sentence (book/paper) diary that is due to be a complete 5 years in a couple of months or so. I tend to only write my sentences once or twice a week and backfill the other days but it is still a very neat way to keep track of the passing of time. I expected it to be thoughtful interesting stuff but instead it’s just “I did this with these people. I had a migraine. I did yoga. I ate this food and played that game” but even these kind of banal things are really interesting to remember. “Hey last year around this time we had dinner with so and so… that was fun we said we should do it again soon, how about… next week?”
@pillbox I am rarely in the shower long enough to think more than “I need to clean the hair out of the drain again?” but I like the principle of them a lot. I tend to eat the crumbs when nobody is looking because they have most of the “eat me powder” on them. (I usually avoid foods with eat-me-ingredients but we do have crisps every once in a while)
It took me two tries to decipher this, despite my partner and I having a conversation literally yesterday about how overhead projectors were ubiquitous when we were in school and are essentially non-existent now. When my partner applied to enroll in her Music Education program at college, she had to spend an afternoon in a classroom with a teacher; said music teacher was using an OHP at the time for their lessons. By the time my partner was in the last year of her degree and was student teaching, the entire school was using Apple TVs (because the brand new SmartBoards all broke in the first 3 months of school, and it was cheaper to buy Apple TVs than to replace the SmartBoards?).
This came up because we had both recently used wet-erase markers for different things, and we were mentioning how, when we were in school, it seemed like all teachers constantly had ink-stained hands from cleaning OHP transparency sheets.
One of my maths lecturers sweated profusely, so it was usually a race against time to transcribe the notes before they became illegible.
Even though I’m not that old, most of my lecturers at uni seemed to favour those huge rolling blackboards that take up an entire wall of the lecture theatre. I don’t recall many using PowerPoint, but there were certainly a few who used OHP slides.
When I want to marvel at the speed of technological progress I remind myself that when I was 18 I had to submit my A-level coursework on floppy disks and 10 years later I wrote my PhD thesis entirely in the cloud.
Doesn’t surprise me at all. Smart Boards are sold as a specialised product requiring training. Apple TVs are essentially just an extra display to the computer marketed at an affluent consumer. I was in school/college (Under 18 education level) when Smart Boards became a thing.
Other students would decalibrate the pens so the tracking was off and colours were different, and most ended up being expensive projectors.
We had all three depending on the room and lecturer. One lecturer even had movie clips embedded in Keynote!
I also experienced the same technological progress during my education years.
If I have a proper keyboard available, notes go into an org-mode file. (Org-mode is the reason I use emacs.) On Android, there’s Orgzly, which is mostly compatible.
So I found out that Bohnanza has a hilarious Horse retheme and a beautiful Dahlia retheme.
I want both of these
I want the Dhalia one but it won’t get to the UK for ages yet 
Seems to be US only. Can get it from Amazon US though
What If…My Collection Was Lost and I Can Only Buy Back 10 Games…2023 Edition | BoardGameGeek
Someone did a Reverse Kondo
I had a math prof who lectured with chalk in one hand and an eraser in the other.
Fortunately, he provided a pretty good paper copy of what he lectured, and he was mostly working a problem out on the board.
I write notes on paper, but the expected life of them is a few days tops. I take meeting notes in a google doc, because that’s the standard practice at ork I also scratch drafts of stuff on paper, and transcribe them into not electrons, usually with substantial expansion and revision in the process.
What do the wink tablet users use these days?