There are two types of people in this world; those who say they're going to write stuff down and those who write stuff down. hhh
I went to grad school with a crazy Finn who counseled new students to write everything down. If you see something interesting, write it down right then and there, because you may find you'll never be able to find it again.
After he gave me this speech in front of my major professor, a giant in the field with countless publications, my prof turned to me and said "And THAT is why Kari has been working on his dissertation for 12 years. I recommend focusing on writing down what you need, not what you think you might need unless you have a trust fund to keep you for 12 years of dissertation writing."
When working in the archives, they had stacks and stacks of cards people had used to request documents which were blank on the back. I took all my notes on those for 2.5 years. That system had a few advantages
- you don't lose two years of work if someone steps on your notes in the bus
- you don't lose two years of work if you forget the day's notes at the archives and someone steals them, which they don't do anyway because they're just old request cards.
- you can shuffle and rearrange them. I grouped notes into chapter, then sub chapters, then read through them over a few times and set them in the order the section would take, then started writing.
All forms of paper notes have two huge drawbacks that I just can't abide
- they take up physical space
- they are not searchable with regular expressions