How do you take notes on things?

Mon 21 Sep 2026

I read note taking: analog and digital from lucky instar so I thought it’d be fun to write about taking notes. The question is: How do you take notes on things?

Physical Notes

The answer is it depends on what I need the notes for! For personal interests like books it’s always a legal pad and a pen. Before that I used a small Moleskine notebook but it’s cumbersome to lay flat on my desk and write on the left-hand pages, so I switched to legal pads and that’s what I use now. When I was in school I also took notes by hand during class. I always told myself one day I’d transcribe them for studying but that never happened. For assigned readings it was always easier to print out the pages and write in the margins.

On the legal pads today I write down unfamiliar words or interesting phrases. For example, this spring I was interested in collecting descriptions of sunsets, mostly inspired by my evening walks in the city before it started getting too hot. I also like jotting down authors I want to come back to or references that I don’t understand so I can research them later when I’m at the computer and that way I don’t break away from reading mid-chapter.

I like bringing legal pads for client meetings too, as it’s very easy to sketch out diagrams and hand it over if they want to add notes or comments. Most of my meetings are one-on-one, so it’s a good way to create a collaborative space that can change as the conversation evolves.

Digital Notes

Every day for the past six years I’ve kept a digital journal too. In it I save good quotes or code snippets and even write guides for myself so I can repeat a process when I’m working on a project.

It started off as a series of plaintext notes that slowly evolved into a Jekyll site and now it’s a dedicated Org mode file for every year once I began using Emacs. This has been the method that’s worked best for me. I don’t use any features from Org mode, it’s just paragraph after paragraph with top-level headings for every day. I don’t have categories or folders or tags or anything like that because it becomes extra work to make sure things are filed correctly, so I rely on M-x occur to find whatever I’m looking for.

The one variable in this method is the font! This week I’ve been testing out Maple Mono after learning about it from Anh’s weeknotes. Sometimes I switch to Helvetica Neue if my eyes are tired but more often than not I enjoy drafting in a monospaced font because it gives me that sense of malleability.

I like how Nicolas phrased it at The Jolly Teapot:

A draft set in a monospaced font feels like it can be further edited and chewed on furthermore, like a raw material, like code. It feels like a work in progress.

To me a serif or sans-serif font indicates final draft. And I need a visual signal for writing being “done” otherwise I’d keep editing it…