This post will explain why I think typing is vastly superior to handwriting (spoiler: it’s faster, more editable and searchable) and include some practical tips that I used for my digital notes (which include a simple method called “beauty and the draft”).

Why I type out my notes

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Portable, Durable, and Accessible

I group these 3 benefits together because they are generic and come with all kinds of digital activities, not just note-taking. Taking digital notes is portable because it involves a single device (a laptop, or if you’re fancy, an iPad) and not multiple physical notebooks which can be burdensome. Digital notes are also likely to last for as long as you need them to be, unlike paper which can be damaged or lost. And lastly, if you take notes on some online apps (Notion, OneNote,…) then you can access them anywhere, anytime.

Speed

You only need to be moderately comfortable with the keyboard for typing to be significantly faster than writing out words. I can type at ~80wpm in English and >100wpm in Vietnamese, which is about twice as fast as writing by hand. Ali Abdaal shares more about the benefits of typing fast and how to do it in his video: How I Type REALLY Fast.

Edit

Sometimes it’s difficult to take perfectly complete or accurate notes. This is especially true for me where the lecturer or whoever’s speaking was talking too fast. What usually happened was: I took some raw (very raw) notes with no structure, tons of mistakes and lots of blanks to fill in later when I had the time. Digital notes make it super easy to re-structure or add things later, whereas it’s almost impossible for handwritten notes.

Search

This is perhaps the single most powerful feature of taking notes on a computer: you can search for your old notes with ridiculous ease. Every notes I’ve ever typed can be accessed within a few seconds: press a shortcut combo (for Notion it’s Ctrl + P), type in a few keywords and voila. This might sound a bit trivial, but for someone who keeps revisiting his old notes all the time like myself, this feature is just indispensable.

Whenever I need to revisit some old notes, they’re readily at my fingertips.

 

How I do it

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Beauty and the draft

I separate my note-taking into 2 wildly different modes based on the purpose at hand, which I call beauty and the draft.

The “beauty” notes are what you see people show off on the internet: the beautifully annotated and systematically structured notes which are just a joy to look at. I would take these notes on a sophisticated tool with powerful formatting options (for me it’s Notion) and spend some time to polish them up. (I see many people make the mistakes of wasting too much time to make a beauty whereas a simple draft is what they actually need).

The “draft” notes are used to capture my raw and fleeting thoughts, or on occasions where things need to be jotted down very quickly. Because they need to be written fast, I prefer the draft to be done on a very simple tool where I can make a new note in an instance (candidates include Google Keep on Android, Apple Notes on iPhone, and Slack on my work laptop). These drafts only need to capture the essentials, they don’t need to be perfect and or have fancy formatting.

A draft of this very article, which started as a note on my phone as I was walking into the elevator.

About hard things

There are stuff that are just inherently more convenient to write on paper than on a keyboard. Two of the things that I most often have trouble with are: math expressions and diagrams. If you happen to encounter these in your note-taking journey, the first thing that I personally suggest is: familiarize yourself with specialized tools to produce these things. For example, Notion supports LaTex, which is a kind of software that turn bare texts into formatted math expressions (MS Word and OneNote also have a similar feature). Meanwhile, draw.io makes it fairly easy to get started on making diagrams.

Notion’s LaTex in action. Type /equation and try it out.

 

Bring a notebook… just in case

For everything good I’ve said about digital notes, I constantly have a trusty A5 notebook by my side at the office. As said above, there are cases where it’s easier to write with a pen, and I can always take a picture and add them to my digital notes if need be. And for some reason, my thoughts just flow more smoothly and freely when my hand is moving across a surface compared to typing on a keyboard.