🌲 The Konik Method for Making Analog Notes

Life is tradeoffs. Analog notes last longer but aren't as searchable. They are, however, useful, beautiful, and less distracting to create.

Last week,

Robert DePriest

mentioned that he’s torn between using sticking with digital notetaking, and adopting a physical notebook and notecard-based modern zettelkasten. “I love the feel of pen and paper but end up going back to Obsidian for efficiency. But maybe efficiency isn't the ultimate goal? Anyone else struggle between digital and analog? Is there a happy medium?”

I too love the feel of pen and paper, but also love the efficiency of Obsidian and digital methods in general. I promised I’d write an article about how I balance the two, and in what contexts one or the other makes the most sense. Of necessity there are a lot of images, which take up a lot of space and make email providers unhappy, so to get the full effect I recommend reading this on the website because otherwise it’s truncated.

I’ve been making analog notes for a long time. Here’s why.

I first learned about bullet journals about ten years ago, and found the method — and the attendant instagram community — very useful after a lifetime of starting a new notebook for every subject or project, mostly due to habits taught to me in school. One marble composition notebook — or divider, when we got old enough to be trusted with ring-bound papers — for each class was the norm. I personally tended to pile up papers in chronological order at the front of my binder, but this was Frowned Upon and made me feel guilty and lazy.

Then Ryder Carroll told me that it was not only okay to write notes in chronological order in a notebook, it reduced waste and allowed for a more coherent notetaking system. This blew my mind, and back then the bullet journal website had a bunch of very straightforward how-to guides for how to set up a simple all-in-one system for organizing everything you did on paper. I can’t find it now, which is a bummer, but that is also a really good example of one of the dangers of digital-everything:

The Internet is ephemera suspended in a cloud.

Paper vs. Digital has been a hotly debated thing for years. Physical books can get ruined or lost, but digital files can also get corrupted or lost. Digital books aren’t really “yours” and certainly aren’t permanent. Digital files are easy to manipulate and search, and even easier to accumulate, but there’s something fundamentally tactile about writing and drawing on real paper. Oil on canvas paintings produce a very different kind of art than Photoshop, although I like both.

Some kids these days don’t learn cursive. Some don’t even learn to type. Swiping and voice-to-text are wonderful accessibility options — I use both frequently — but no matter how fancy typesetting languages like LaTeX get or how good the pens for digital tablet and stylus combinations like Remarkables, iPads, and Booxes of the world are, they are still different than writing on paper. Flipping open a physical notebook on my desk, or using dry erase markers on a physical whiteboard, feels different (for good and ill) than writing in a notes app, no matter how extensible the canvas or high-quality the OCR or how neatly they get filed in searchable folders.

Helen Vogelsong-Donahue

makes a good point when she talks about how even if you still have your old tapes and CDs, they’re functionally useless. Playing a DVD — and I do still own some — is a huge hassle compared to just finding something on Amazon Prime. Files — even files encoded on physical media — are just inherently trickier to deal with than ye olde paper records. If you manage to hold onto them, you don’t really have to worry much about backwards compatibility.

But for me, I fundamentally just trust physical copies more. Amazon isn’t going to sneak into my house and censor my hardcopy books, the way people’s Roald Dahl ebooks got changed. I’m not paranoid by nature, but in the age of spyware and computer tools that snitch on you to the cops, there’s something reassuring about physical copies.

Physical notebooks are more easily browsed.

If I die tomorrow, my family isn’t going to be able to figure out my complex digital life. A lot will be lost because there’s simply so much of it. But they’ll be able to dig through my notebooks, and there’s something timelessly reassuring about that.

I have ten LEUCHTTURM1917 notebooks on the shelf behind my desk. They aren’t all completely full, and some span fairly idiosyncratic timeframes, but I like to flip through them occasionally. It’s fun to see how my interests have evolved since starting a new career, getting married, having kids, and starting another career. There’s a linearity to it.

The more recent books tend to be prettier, more aesthetically pleasing — and more enjoyable to read through not just because they’re pretty but because my process has evolved in a way that generates more long-term useful notes.

My electronic notes are useful too — especially if I want to lay hands on something fast — but I find myself idly flipping back through them much more rarely — and when I do, it’s less satisfying. Oh, I reference them more — just the other day I pulled up some notes about Ptolemaic Egypt from years ago, and since I’m in the thick of potty training my daughter, I pulled up my notes on that, too. Electronic notes are a lot easier to search. But for just sheer nostalgia purposes, an analog notebook can’t be beat.

Paper is better for some things, like being “always open.”

I’m not arguing that we should never use electronic files. I certainly don’t print out all of my articles and shove them into a file folder or anything.

But there’s something to be said for embracing the analog alongside the digital, and for acknowledging that sometimes, the paper notes just work better. For myself, I hate digital to-do lists. After years of trial and error, I keep coming back to the one system that works well — a paper notebook, the left side full of blank lines for general notes, the right side broken out into days of the week. I went into this in more detail in my article about The Konik Method for Maintaining Sane Task Lists, but there’s just something about having a physical list open on my desk — instead of on my desktop where it can easily get hidden behind other apps — that really works for me. Lately I’ve been using an A6 pocket notebook (affiliate link) designed to be used in “portrait” mode so that it has the same size and layout as a single A5 page. I like it a little better than my dedicated agenda book because it fits neatly in the pocket of my A5 notebook but is easy to keep open to my weekly overview. Like I said — I am a big fan of “always open” for task lists.

Here’s next week’s page, since this week’s has a bunch of private stuff. I used yellow since they don’t sell this version in maroon or teal :(

After a long day of monitoring pings, answering emails, staring at progress bars, and fighting with computers to reproduce persnickety bugs, sometimes I just want a quiet moment without distractions. My Boox e-readers are great distraction-free tools for reading (I reviewed the Palma and Go Color 7 last year and everything still stands), but sometimes I don’t want to read. Sometimes I’m too tired to read but can’t sleep for one reason or another, or I’m processing a book I just finished, or I want to be available for conversation while doing something with my hands.

Enough About Why, Here’s How

There are a thousand and one ways to take paper notes.

Jillian Hess

showcases the systems used by hundreds of famous poets, artists, philosophers, travelers, and fans. My way is highly idiosyncratic and perfectly optimized for my skills and preferences. I am not claiming that this is the one true way to help you — yes, you! — overcome your learning disorder, sense of overwhelm, or whatever.

I’m just here to share some neat tricks and hope you find some useful.

Develop a Consistent Aesthetic

All of my notebook pages use black pen. I’ve tried colored ink and I hate it. I usually have a big, bold, splashy heading, although the style varies slightly depending on which pens I have on hand and what kind of mood I’m in. I’ve found that no matter how messy my actual handwriting is — and it can get pretty messy when I’m in a hurry — as long as I have a splashy heading, it looks pretty good. I like to use an accent color, and keep it the same throughout a notebook. I typically try to match it to the notebook cover, but any combination is fine as long as you like it.

I’ve never considered myself a particularly artsy or creative person. Words are my thing, not pictures. But I do appreciate a tidy environment and a neat notebook, and after spending a couple of years helping out in art classrooms early in my teaching career, I came to the conclusion that technique is less important than having a consistent aesthetic.

Back when I taught elementary-aged kids how to make their first video game during summer camp, part of the curriculum involved showing this video about the difference between “high fidelity graphics” and “a strong aesthetic.” It had a huge impact on me.

The overall point is that comic artists like Randall Monroe have a strong aesthetic but are not doing particularly complex hyperrealistic art. Minecraft’s 8-bit inspired art style — like the original 8-bit games in the vein of Tetris and Pac-Man — doesn’t take a lot of computational power or artistic skill. What it requires is taste on the part of the creator, and branding consistency too of course. I’m not trying to say that Randall and the Minecraft designers aren’t good artists, obviously. XKCD is very expressive in its minimalism, and having spent the better part of a decade drawing stick figures to demonstrate things to students, I know the difference between a good one and a bad one.

But if you pick one color and one pen and one handwriting style and build a consistent decoration habit — be it an illustration style, or stickers, or marker lines in a particular color, or quotes with a particular boxy offset, or almost anything really — your notebook will probably look pretty nice! And it feels nice to write in a nice notebook, there’s a hobbyist sort of pride that comes with it. I love this blend of practical and fun, personally. I don’t think everything I do needs to “be productive” but there’s an added bonus when the things I enjoy doing for relaxation have an accompanying benefit, like making it easier to get my tasks done, think straight about my upcoming day, or reflect on a tricky technical problem.

Wikipedia is Great For Note Taking Practice

Several pages of my notebook are just notes from Wikipedia deep dives. One of the nice things about sitting down with a notebook in front of my computer is that I don’t really worry about careful sourcing or crafting highlights I’ll want to see again later or proper annotations — I just jot things down in a way that I find much harder to do in the high-fidelity environment of my digital life. This helps me focus on the process of learning neat stuff and less on the preparing to use it stage, which I sometimes need.

There’s always time later to go back and fill in the gaps with better sourcing and more coherent narratives, but for that initial learning stage, a physical notebook paradoxically helps speed things up precisely because you can’t get it all. I’ve seen studies along these lines when it comes to lecture notes, as well — the more compressed your notes are because you can’t write as fast as you type, the more you retain.

Write Quotes If You Don’t Know What To Write

“Just do it” is a great slogan, and there are a thousand bits of advice online along the lines of “stop thinking about it and get it done” or “there is no try, only do” or “you can fix it later, just get started.” But the tyranny of the blank page is definitely a thing, and when you sit down to write, it can be hard to figure out what to write about. Especially if you’re tired, or trying to get away from the thoughts circling in your brain, just mindlessly copying quotes can be a nice way to decorate a notebook in a way that leaves you breadcrumbs for later.

I like to go through my Readwise daily note review (disclaimer: I work for Readwise), or the chat with documents feature (which suggests topics based on my notes) and pick quotes that resonate with me in the moment. You don’t need to use Readwise to do something like this, though. Sometimes I copy out something I’m trying to remember, like a particular prayer or poem I like. Songs I’m trying to remember the words to so I can stop singing the same refrain over and over is another good candidate for this. Then I practice my handwriting and try to find a way to make it look nice. Sometimes I fail and it ends up ugly and that’s okay, because the process of getting better at something always involves a lot of mistakes.

Later, when I’m not at my desk or don’t have my phone out, I can flip through my notebook for a quote that makes me think, and maybe I’ll have something to say about it then. Sometimes I find two quotes that go together really well, and put them together. Eventually, perhaps an article grows out of it.¹ Other times, I shove a to-do list or daily agenda plan on the opposite page, and it just serves as a nice bit of decoration or inspiration.

The point is that I often don’t fill the whole page all at once. There are tons of blank pages. Lots of white space is okay. This isn’t school; no one is offering a completion grade. That said, I do like filling that white space…

You Can Make Visual Notes With Limited Artistic Skill

I went from completely hopeless with stick figures to sketching credible dogs in ink with this one simple trick that I picked up from Zsolt Viczián (the Obsidian<>Excalidraw developer). I commented that his new book Sketch Your Mind (affiliate link; my copy hasn’t arrived yet but I trust Zsolt to write a good one) interested me, but I was a hopeless artist. He shared this three minute video with me and it completely blew my mind:

Zsolt is talking about digital images, and this is an article about analog notes, but fundamentally the piece I was missing is “you are allowed to trace things, and AI image generation is excellent at creating something boutique to trace and adapt.”

I already use Midjourney for a variety of purposes, including making the featured images for my Substack notes (although relatively few people ever see them on the website, almost everyone reads via email). Midjourney’s moodboards are incredible at setting up a consistent visual style — the trick is refinement.

I ask for a certain type of visual — ink sketch in the style of a 17th century naturalist, for example — and then generate a bunch of examples. When it gets something close to what I like, I add it to the moodboard, and try again. It’s a bit recursive, but a useful way to hone in on the kind of visual I’m going for. For Zsolt, it’s cartoonish icons. Some folks like electronic drawings and using dedicated digital art apps, but it makes me feel clumsy. I like pen, and I mostly do ink sketches of things that are relatively simple to draw, like dogs, crowns, turtles and horses.

If you’ve got an iPad² or a printer, tracing is pretty straightforward. And the neat thing is, you learn a lot doing it, because it is absolutely possible to create a bad picture when tracing — the lines you can see through the paper are pretty blurry, and people draw different kinds of lines than even the most fastidious AI image generation model. I find that I use rougher — and fewer — lines than Midjourney’s creations, that I struggle with eyes, and that tree branches work better as loops than lines.

That dog took me less than five minutes, which is good because when I take visual notes, my purpose is not to become a good artist. It is to give myself some “zen” time to think while making the general purpose of my note stand out. It’s to fill space on a page where I ran out of things to say, so I feel like I am making progress filling up my notebook, which is very satisfying. It’s to have fun, to show my kids that I draw and color just like they do, and to develop my observational muscles.

Here was the original that Midjourney served up:

The prompt was: A lineart sketch vector of a labradoodle dog hiking the Appalachian trail --p 5vzo26m --ar 4:3

Maybe in a few years I’ll be in a position where I can quickly sketch things I see, with no tracing or help from an AI to simplify the lines, but I’m not there yet.

Before I learned this trick, I used stickers. Here’s one of my favorite notes, which I put together after a weekend getaway with my husband to a small town with a cute shop selling prints of Messier objects. We had a nice chat about it — he knew way more about it than I would have expected! — and I didn’t want to ruin the romantic getaway by hopping on a computer. So I grabbed a sticker to commemorate it, and wrote down what I learned. It’s a good memory.

Sometimes, it’s just nice to get away from the computer and work outside, with your feet in the grass and the sun on your page.

Realistically, I don’t think it matters much in an objective sense whether you make your notes in an app or on paper. Personal preference and personality plays a huge role here. If you’re the kind of person who can stand to have a to-do app open on your second monitor all day, or who learned how to draw on a tablet young, or live somewhere with crappy weather outside for most of the year, or doesn’t particularly value things being tidy and aesthetically pleasing, I suspect you will develop different habits than me.

But hopefully, seeing what I do and why I do it is helpful when it comes to deciding whether analog notes are worth adding (back?) to your life.

1. Stay tuned for my piece on novelty, which is slowly emerging because of precisely this process.

2. I was genuinely surprised how easy it is to use an iPad as a lightbox for tracing, which I haven’t done since I was helping out in an art classroom ten years ago. It works better in a dark room, but as silly as it is to admit, in some ways this is the most fun I’ve had with my iPad since I bought it.