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article - The Best Tools For Universal Note-Taking
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Posted by Cassius
Mar 3, 2012 at 11:24 PM
Gary is spot-on:
I have used shirt-pocket planners for maybe 20 years, into which I put meeting info, notes, ... I finally bought a leather cover into which I put a new planner every year. Plus, it holds a list of my contacts, recent medical info, ruler, sun glasses, magnifier, stamps, toothpicks, blank checks, extra cash, ....
I also use a pocket voice recorder. It’s the ONLY way to record a thought that pops up while driving. It’s also god for recording travel directions: (One recording for each turn.)
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.
>
>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 Cassius
Mar 3, 2012 at 11:32 PM
In this respect we are (unfortunately) quite alike. Most of what I saved in GV I never used.
Gary Carson wrote:
>I’m completely sold on using voice recorders to make fast notes. I carry one around
>with me all the time and I’m constantly dictating reminders, task lists, memos, etc.
>It’s really fast and efficient and I’ve found that I don’t even need to save ninety per
>cent of this stuff since it’s all transient material that I can usually delete after a
>day or two. If I do need to save a recording for longer than that, I can usually just leave
>it on the recorder, which has 4 gigs of internal memory and also takes 32-gig microsd
>cards. One interesting result of using a recorder like this is that I’ve realized that
>I don’t really need computers and PIM’s and the like as much as I thought I did. I also
>realized that I’ve been saving a ton of “information” in OneNote that I’ll probably
>never need again. I’ve been obsessed with collecting information for years and I’m
>starting to wonder if I’m really all that different from someone obsessed with
>collecting string or rubber bands. That’s just me, though. Everybody has different
>needs.
Posted by Cassius
Mar 3, 2012 at 11:40 PM
With voice recordings, I found that just quick notes about the topics of my thoughts were all I needed to record. I remembered the rest…besides which, I would sit, or preferably lie, down to really think about the topics. (Today, I’m thankful for guanfacine.)
Gary Carson wrote:
>>How do you actually find something in there? I can’t imagine fast forward audio
>working for the ear as images do for the eye.
>
>Good recorders have
>digital-pitch-control playback which lets you play a file back at two or three times
>its normal speed (or faster) while keeping the dictation legible.It works pretty
>well, but obviously it’s not as fast as doing a search in a personal information
>manager.
>
>In general, though, organizing and searching through audio files is a
>problem. As far as I know, there’s no way to search a recording for a specific spoken
>word or phrase. I’ve been looking for something like this for years and I don’t think it
>exists.
>
>Good recorders let you create folders on the recorder and move files around
>and professional-grade recorders let you attach custom keywords to files, so that
>helps keep things organized. Also most decent recorders have some kind of index-mark
>capability so you can jump directly to a specific point in the file. They also have a
>preview feature so you can hear the first five or ten seconds of a file while you’re
>scrolling through a directory. You can also download audio files into audio
>management applications like Olympus Sonority or DSS Player Pro and attach
>annotations to them which explain what’s in the recording. The best way I’ve found to
>minimize the problems with searching files is to keep the recordings as short and as
>concise as possible.
>
>Personally, if I have a long recording that I know I’m going to
>want to search later, I’ll transcribe it in Dragon Naturally Speaking and dump it into
>OneNote. That’s probably the best solution to the long-file problem. I dictate
>drafts for essays and books that are sometimes several hours long.
>
>Using recorders
>is a trade-off. Finding things in audio files can be time-consuming, but dictation is
>so productive that it makes it worthwhile. At least, it does for me. I guess it all boils
>down to what you’re doing. I still think they make great tools for note-taking.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jul 6, 2012 at 05:37 AM
jimspoon wrote:
>I like the Swype function on my Android
>keyboard. I like being able to swipe my finger across the keyboard to spell out words,
>rather than having to tap tap tap. Accuracy is pretty good. Can’t match the speed and
>ease of speech recognition though (when it works!)
Along with Swiftkey and Swype, three other interesting Android keyboard apps are mentioned in this article:
http://lifehacker.com/5922522/five-best-android-keyboards