What if paper was searchable?

What if paper was searchable? You press Ctrl+F, type what you're looking for, and the right notes you wrote appear.

Here's what's in this one:

• What's so special about paper that digital notes can't match
• Why I don't want to label and sort every card
• My simple daily routine for turning paper into searchable notes

Paper Gets a Second Chance

Nine years ago, I started my note-taking journey on paper, because I loved the idea of the Zettelkasten (a box of numbered index cards that link to each other). It didn't prove as useful as I'd hoped, so I moved to digital note systems.

But I've always missed the feeling of writing on paper, and of organizing my ideas in physical space.

Long story short, I'm finally implementing a system that combines the two.

Your Hand Thinks Better Than Your Keyboard

The way you get information out of your mind and onto paper is extremely powerful.

In one well-known study¹, people who took notes by hand understood the ideas better than people who typed them. Typing made it easy to copy down every word, while writing by hand forced them to put things in their own words.

But digital systems have an amazing power too: they make everything searchable.

Who Has Time to Label Every Card?

Imagine a box of index cards you want to look through. You don't want to be bothered to name and label every single card as part of a hierarchy, like the Zettelkasten system does, or to sort everything perfectly into boxes, where the whole system breaks if you revisit cards and mess with the order a lot.

So here's the whole idea in one line. The best of both worlds is writing on paper, then having a powerful way to digitally find anything you want.

What's in My Pocket

Right now, I'm using pocket index cards. I keep them in a pocket-size card holder with a pen. It has different sleeves, and here's how I use them:

1. Take a blank card from its sleeve and write.
2. Put the finished card in the other sleeve, with the rest of the day's cards.
3. At the end of the day, or even the next day, digitize them all in one quick go.
4. Keep them or toss them. I keep mine, but that's up to you.

Of course, turning the cards into searchable notes is a whole system of its own, and it's one I'm building for myself.

That's it. Paper for thinking, search for finding.

If you want to hear more about it, or there's something else you'd like me to talk about, leave a comment below and let me know. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Footnotes

1. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard", Psychological Science, 2014. ↩