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article - The Best Tools For Universal Note-Taking
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Posted by jimspoon
Jan 27, 2012 at 06:32 AM
Jot Once, Remember Anywhere: The Best Tools For Universal Note-Taking | Fast Company - http://goo.gl/IWIHO
Posted by MsJulie
Jan 27, 2012 at 12:57 PM
Interesting, Jim! Thanks for posting.
Posted by Gary Carson
Jan 27, 2012 at 06:06 PM
In the interests of killing time when I should be working, I have to point out that most of the items on this list don’t meet the basic requirements described in the opening paragraph. Dropbox, iCloud, Evernote, OneNote, Google’s cloud, etc., may be nice applications, but are you really going to use a laptop or whatever to take a fast note while standing in line at Shake Shack? Of course not. And I can’t imagine taking notes on a smartphone’s sub-microscopic keyboard in situations like that. It would take forever.
If you need a tool that’s fast and always available, it seems to me that handwritten notes are the only item on this list that really fits the bill. Stick a pen and a small notebook in your pocket. What could be simpler? Writing the note is a little slow and can be awkward in you have to hold your notebook in your hand while you’re writing, but searching through handwritten notes is incredibly fast, especially if you underline key words and phrases. You can search pages of notes in a matter of seconds. Nothing, in my experience, is faster than a visual scan.
I’m surprised that the list didn’t mention voice recorders. They’re even more minimalistic and efficient than handwritten notes—at least for TAKING notes. After all, you can dictate fairly lengthy and involved notes in a matter of seconds with a recorder and you don’t have to carry a pen around with you. Using recorders involves a trade-off, though, because there’s still no way to search an audio file for specific spoken words or phrases. You can insert index marks into a recording and/or play the recording back at higher speeds, but it’s still slower than visually scanning a handwritten note.
So I would reduce the list to two options:
1. handwritten notes
2. voice recorders
As far as I can tell, those are the only really universal tools for these situations.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 27, 2012 at 06:36 PM
It depends on various factors, including the size of the note. I have actually taken quite a few notes in Evernote on my Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro’s keyboard (it doesn’t get any smaller than that) under quite uncomfortable positions. Not whole essays, but enough to remember what I needed.
On a shaky bus, for example, my writing with pen and paper would only produce illegible scribblings.
Gary Carson wrote:
>In the interests of killing time when I should be working, I have to point out that most
>of the items on this list don’t meet the basic requirements described in the opening
>paragraph. Dropbox, iCloud, Evernote, OneNote, Google’s cloud, etc., may be nice
>applications, but are you really going to use a laptop or whatever to take a fast note
>while standing in line at Shake Shack? Of course not. And I can’t imagine taking notes
>on a smartphone’s sub-microscopic keyboard in situations like that. It would take
>forever.
Posted by Pierre Paul Landry
Jan 27, 2012 at 06:39 PM
Along the same lines, you can use free voice to text mobile app and services…
1- Speak into your iPhone / iPodTouch and have it convert to text. You can even have it automatically go into an email and off to your Evernote notebook
2- Or, using a regular cell, call a service, such as Jott (discontinued) to feed your Evernote notebook with searchable content