I like the idea of analog, there's something about writing on paper.

Practically, digital is much better. Everytime I see something that might be useful I past a link. I paste links to discussions I need to follow up on. And then I also use a homemade plugin for Obsidian that lists my to-dos across all notes(1), so whenever I think about something I need to do I just include it directly into the text and it's listed there.

I think you could do something somewhat similar on paper (I tried a while back), but the overhead is simply too much for me.

1: https://github.com/cfe84/obsidian-pw

How much retention do you require though? For me having a more organized week is probably useful, not sure about having to retrieves years worth of information ?

I've done analog for years and tried to do digital this year. I switched back to analog. With digital, I tended to just dump everything whereas with analog I reflected and edited for concision. The things I typed I forgot; writing things down I remembered. It's much the same as taking notes - the act of physically writing helps "set" the information.

I know a lot of people will say to do digital for ease of searching. I find that if I write it down, I'm much more likely to remember and not need to search in the first place. And digital I think it's easier to get lost in the ways to try and optimize the process with a file, format, editor, plugin, method, etc. With paper, I have some paper that I can write in whatever format I want at the time.

I use these every year for taking notes: https://www.leuchtturm1917.com/weekly-planner-and-notebook-2... . I've been using the A5, but will probably go up to the B5+ for next year. I've been using these for the past 7 years.

The digital camp tends to jump all over the place with a new solution to the same problem without ever getting it right or getting closer to the root of it. You will notice a whole lot of todo apps, organization articles and a new solution every couple years. None ever solve the fundamental problem - friction and focus.

The analog camp, solved this, each in their own unique way, but all using the same tools (pen and paper). Its much quiet here, as we all have moved on to real problems.

I've yet to find anything better than pen and paper. You just grab the pen and go. Also, it's really hard to hack paper.

Apple Pencil & iPad works fairly well, but the multipurpose nature of the device often means that I need to navigate back to my note taking app.

Typing things into a log (for me) effectively pipes it to /dev/null.

Pen and paper is far superior in my experience.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40953297

If analog works better for you, maybe a good stylus would be a usable middle ground? Don’t cheap out on it though. The inexpensive ones aren’t worth it.