On the search for a note condensing process
A year ago, I started carrying a small notebook with me to write down anything I find essential during the day. A habit that works very well, and I’m amazed at how many ideas I have during the day, which is otherwise would forget. But after I’ve written the notes into the book, I don’t do anything with them.
I initially planned to regularly scan the written pages of the notebook to digitized the notes. But my handwriting is very cramped, and it is not easy to read this after some time. So I would also need to rewrite the notes on the computer. The scanning also has the side-effect of creating a backup of the notebook in case of losing it.
But what happens now after I have the notebooks scanned. Right now, I have multiple pdfs per book – one pdf for each scan session – and I started collecting notes of the same categories into a big OmniGraffle file. But then the process stops.
An example of my hand writing
(The text in the note is: Fantasy buildings on clifs are stupid. Errosion will destroy it / But they look awsome)
I tried adding the text of the notes next to the original page inside of OG, but I’m not sure about the value this brings. I fought about adding the text into a text file, either one line or a file per notebook page. But with this idea, I would lose the connection to the graphical part of the notebook. And sometimes, my pages contain drawings alongside the text. I also thought about using a Number table for it – and I’m not fond of such tools at all :-)
In the end, I want to have a searchable collection of my thoughts, and it should also not take too much of my time. OCR is also something I look into, but the chances with handwriting are pretty slim and with my writing impossible.
Another stray thought I had is that perhaps I should not be too strongly connected to the pages as a unit. And should just regularly combine the notes into new abstracted thoughts and write them down digitally.
Comments
@jack having only a searchable index is an excellent idea. And it would save a lot of time as well. And I already have a table of content page for each of my notebooks. Andifdone regular, it would not be gruesome to do. Thanks for your insights.
by V_ on
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@V_ What I've started doing is reviewing the notebook weekly(ish) and highlighting key words and phrases. This makes skimming easier. My plan next is to use this to build a digital index of topics. The index will reference the original notes. I'm not worried about having all the text searchable, just the index. Anything "important" gets repurposed elsewhere anyway. I've not actually started the index yet, but I'm hopeful :)
by jack on