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Happy Friday!

Disappearing notes

When I onboard new clients, they often ask me how to manage handwritten notes.

They take diligent notes during meetings, then never see those notes again. Or they go to conferences, attend workshops, write down a host of exciting ideas, then forget to refer to those ideas because they disappear in the back of a legal pad, stacked atop several other forsaken legal pads.

One possible solution is to use a laptop for notetaking, typing directly into an app that keeps your notes organized and accessible. But technology can be offputting in one-on-one meetings—clients are fine with handwritten notes, but feel alienated when you plop a laptop between you and them.

When writing by hand is preferable or necessary, how do you make sure those notes bring you value in the future, instead of disappearing into the void?

Rescuing your handwritten notes

Without an additional layer of processing, handwritten notes are destined to disappear.

There’s no way to tag a physical piece of paper by client, project, topic, or anything else that would be valuable when you’re trying to surface the information.

It’s possible, of course, to build an analog system that can track notes by their associated client, project, or topic. You could store the physical notes in dedicated file folders. But what about notes that need to exist in both Bob Smith’s client folder and the “Choose a new CRM system” project folder? Do you photocopy the physical notes and store them in both places?

You could, but it makes more sense to transfer the handwritten notes into a digital format. Unfortunately, though computers are pretty reliable at recognizing typeset text, they’re not great (yet?) at recognizing handwriting.

Which brings us to the core question: How do we bridge our difficult-to-access handwritten notes into an easy-to-access digital format, without wasting time retyping everything?

💡 Bridge handwritten notes into digital format using images and dictation 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

Index your images

Sometimes all you need is to properly index the handwritten note so you can find it.

In these cases, use an app like Genius Scan to quickly snap a picture. I have an action in Genius Scan that automatically sends my images or PDFs to my Dropbox “Inbox” folder, which I check daily. I can then create a link with Dropbox, or a tool like Hookmark, and add that link to Tana, along with tags and fields that connect the image to relevant people, projects, notes, or whatever else. (I can even drag the image directly into Tana and skip the link, if I want to.)

This method is quick, and when all you need is to be able to find the handwritten note and refer to it, that may be sufficient. If you only have a few handwritten notes per day, you can set aside five minutes at the end of every workday to transfer them.

But if you need to engage with the note a bit more actively—to further develop an idea you jotted down, for instance—images make the next step harder because the text is in an inaccessible form. The fastest and most reliable method to create text you can develop further is dictation.

Dictate your notes

Picture this. You’ve spent seven hours in conference workshops, taking diligent notes on your legal pad. You have three or four pages per workshop—and you attended five workshops.

Now it’s the end of the day, and you do not want these notes to disappear like your notes from your last conference. But you also can’t fathom taking a couple of hours to type them out.

Here’s your solution: take 20 minutes and dictate your notes into a transcription tool. You might use Otter or something similar. I rely mostly on built-in Mac transcription—especially since I can dictate into any app. I often dictate straight into Tana.

Using dictation to transfer notes on the same day that you took those notes carries two huge benefits. First, we are less “strict” with ourselves when we speak than when we write, which means the process is quick, and we’ll get a result that’s simple and informal like our written notes are.

And second, it’s a great first pass at synthesizing the notes. As we dictate what we wrote by hand, we’ll naturally recognize more connections—and articulate them—than we would if we returned to notes a week later, after we’ve forgotten a lot of the notes’ context.

How can Tana help?

This handwritten-to-digital workflow highlights the magic of Tools for Thought—and Tana is my TfT of choice.

For example, I have #meeting and #meeting-note supertags with fields specifying attendees, topic(s) discussed, related project(s), and other relevant meeting info like time, date, location, and such.

With the right settings and practices—auto-initialization of fields, appropriate defaults, etc.—I can immediately create a meeting note, attach the image of the handwritten page(s), dictate the gist of the note, and tag it with any additional information. It might take 30 seconds, or a minute or two if the notes are complex and I dictate more text.

Then, my queries attached to supertags for #clients, #collaborators, #projects, and #meetings make it easy access that information. Next time I’m meeting with the same person, or working on the same project, the information is surfaced for me automatically.

On paper, I’d have to photocopy that info and put it in multiple folders. In Tana, I enter it once, connect it to relevant information (much of which will populate automatically), and it will arrive where and when I need it.

What do I do next?

(1) Take 2 minutes and answer this question: What’s one thing I learned in this newsletter that I can put into practice right away?

By committing to a specific action, you make it much more likely you’ll do it.

(2) Build simple workflows for capturing images and dictation.

​Evernote, Dropbox, Genius Scan—all have strong scanning tools. And Otter, OpenAI’s Whisper API, and Mac’s built-in transcription are all reliable for dictation. Spend a few minutes this weekend choosing a tool to try and refining image and dictation capturing workflows, and it will pay dividends for ages to come!

If this was valuable for you:

Share the newsletter with someone you think would also get value from it! https://rjn.st/weekend-upgrade-newsletters​

Until next time, friends:

Don’t leave your valuable handwritten notes hanging in the void. Snap ‘em and talk about ‘em, and they’ll make your life much easier.

R.J.
​rjn.st/links​

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P.S. Two announcements!

(1) Early Bird enrollment for Cohort Eight of Applied Action-Powered Productivity is now open! The cohort starts April 21, and the 15% Early Bird discount ends on April 12. Learn more on the cohort landing page.

(2) I am honored to be named an official Tana Ambassador (announcement on Twitter)! Tana is my primary driver and the hub of my Second Brain. Although I use many tools (I’m writing this in Craft, for instance), Tana is what coordinates everything I do. I’m excited to share the magic of Tana as it continues to develop and grow!