Multinotophilia

Oh note taking, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways:

Six paper-based note taking systems:

  • One large plain softcover Moleskine. I use this mostly for work related notes and sketches. I like their softcovers much better than the hardcovers.
  • Of the same size, one hardcover spiral-bound Muji notebook with an unusual (in Europa, at least) 0.5cm dot grid. Use it for non-work related design notes and sketches.
  • One Rhodia No. 19 non-punched uni white A4 pad. Purely visual designs, sketches, mindmaps.
  • One Rhodia No. 19 non-punched yellow lined A4 pad. Mostly work notes and financial/numerical stuff.
  • A stockpile of little ‘Field Notes’ notebooks and almost identical Moleskine mini notebooks, white graph paper. For capturing thoughts when not carrying a bag (they fit in jeans pockets).
  • A small home-bound little booklet with goldleaf paper cover and blue suede back that I made under the guidance of Abi Sutherland. Almost full and badly damaged, still used sometimes for no specific reason other than marveling at the fact that it’s actually bound, not just glued.
Five Mac-based note taking systems:
  • Simplenote (the web app), which is synced to my iPhone. All kinds of notes, work in progress stuff. I like it very much, but it doesn’t scale well in terms of filing many notes.
  • Sidenote. Mainly for “lists” (movies, books, vacations, etc) and passwords/serials/etc. I like the thinking behind it a lot, but has quirky behavior in terms of keyboard focus, resulting in random loss of info by typing over existing text without knowing it. Also, window size is too limited, and no good filing system.
  • Notos. A Mac app I built myself. Notos is slightly smart, very quick in usage, has proper default typography of helvetica headers and monospaced body text, very low-threshold note addition and finding. Use it for quickly taking notes when people call me at work, without having to file and save stuff afterwards. The monospaced font makes it easy to do bullets and stuff like that without having to grab the mouse for formatting.
  • Plain text files. Mostly for recipes.
  • Evernote. I want to like it, but I just can’t seem to (I’ve tried three times). It’s got a couple of notes in it, though.
One iPhone-based note taking systems:
  • Simplenote, the iPhone app. Like it a lot. Completely in sync with the mac one.

The keen observer will have noted that I have no less than TWELVE FREAKING WAYS of taking notes in use at the same time. Yes, this is surprising to me, too. I think I suffer from a new mental disorder that I shall henceforth call multinotophilia. Anyone care to start a multinotophiliac support group? I’ll bring the lemonade. I guess taking notes of our meetings won’t be an issue.

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Published:
09.03.09 / 9pm
Category:
Usability