The end of analog note-taking

How Quip, Adonit, and GoodNotes solved one of my oldest conundrums

Taking copious notes has been a habit of mine for decades. It was drilled into me by a favorite high school teacher who, aggravated by students continually misplacing their writing instruments, would often bellow: “Elephants have memories; people have pencils!” His old-fashioned snootiness, which I somehow found endearing, was so obvious that you could almost hear the implied semicolon. I followed his instructions undoubtingly.

A trained note-taker in high school, I entered the research laboratory with equal zeal and started to purchase those quadrille notebooks with fancy leather covers. I picked the fancy cover for two reasons. First, it was impregnable to acetone and other common solvents. Second, I was certain that, should any of my scribblings amount to a true scientific discovery, my original journal would look justifiably “significant” in a museum. I didn’t spill much acetone, or discover anything particularly groundbreaking, but I was nonetheless very satisfied with my serious looking notebooks.

I tried making the jump from analog note-taking to digital at Harvard Business School in 2007. I saved up some money from my paltry research assistant salary to buy a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC. The killer use case was annotating PDFs of those 1,000+ cases I was supposed to read over the next 2 years. To my great disappointment, however, I showed up for the first week of classes to discover that computers were not allowed during most lectures, for fear of distraction.

It was just as well. The software on the ThinkPad was painfully slow and prone to crashing, especially when the screen orientation flipped from PC to Tablet mode. The custom stylus was unresponsive and a pain to use. Because multi-touch screens were so new, the scrolling functionality was also quite poor. I instead relied upon a 4-direction scroll wheel to navigate the page, which required two-handed coordination that did not feel to me like natural writing. As a result, I put digital note-taking on the back burner and returned to analog.

I changed habits again when I joined Highland Capital Partners in 2009. A venture capitalist, I would meet 5-6 new companies per day and needed a high volume solution. Moleskines had become my weapon of choice for their beauty and graspable form factor, but I would increasingly forget them as I switched bags. I plowed through these notebooks and had trouble remembering when I met a particular company, or which book I used in the meeting. One of my partners made an actual index in his notebooks, but to me that was too much work with too little reward.

The iPad seemed like a great solution when it arrived in 2010. I initially used the native Notes app because it was fast, but then graduated to Evernote when I realized my notes would be backed up to the cloud. I had two big problems with this method, however. First, Evernote was slow and clunky in 2010. It wasn’t built for the types of quick stream-of-consciousness notes that I needed to create.

Second, the iPad itself felt weird in those meetings. I was still learning to type on a glass screen, and that required breaking eye contact frequently. When an entrepreneur is pitching you his life’s work, you want to look him in the eye. It feels rude not to. Moreover, I still got the suspicion that people thought I was checking my email in these meetings — a fear I would often allay by saying, “By the way, I want you to know I’m just taking notes here, not checking email.” All said, Evernote/iPad didn’t feel like an organic note-taking experience, so I went back to paper again.

Not much changed for me until this year, thanks to two amazing new products, which after more than a decade have broken me of my analog note-taking habits. The first of these is Quip, which I’m using to write this post.

Quip is simply the best content creation experience out there for typed notes. I judge this along several criteria:

1. Speed. The time between a thought and its digital instantiation is the lowest I’ve seen. That’s because of certain UI choices that value simplicity over extraneous menus and navigational elements, but it’s also because of a significant investment in technology (best described in this Quora post for Quip’s web client).
2. Sensible defaults. My documents are partitioned into headers (h1, h2, h3), lists (ordered, unordered), plain text, and objects (images, tables, etc). Spacing, page breaks, and lots of other formatting decisions are made for me. I don’t have infinite choice, but for 95% of what I want to write it looks damn good out of the box. And I don’t need to waste mental overhead thinking about formatting, which is a big plus. For anyone who used the LaTeX markup language to write academic papers, this feeling of “it just looks good and works” should be familiar.
3. Cross-platform. Quip works equally well on iPad, iPhone, and web. The clients are sleek and responsive, unlike Google Docs for instance, which feels like it was built for the web first. In addition, syncing is entirely seamless and in the background. There is no “save” button. I have never come across a conflict issue that wasn’t resolved sensibly and have never lost data.
4. All the other great stuff. Document creation is the tip of the iceberg. Quip is also ideal for communication with teams around documents. My team at Highland has written job recs, product specs, and investment memos in Quip and has seen drastic reductions in version confusion and email back-and-forth as a result. It is now the default way I prepare internal documentation.

All that said, I still don’t use Quip to take live notes in meetings. Typing on my iPad while someone is talking to me still doesn’t feel natural. For that, I found a hardware/software combo that works for me — the Adonit Jot Script stylus and the GoodNotes app. While far from perfect, the Jot Script is the first stylus I’ve seen that feels and writes like a ballpoint pen. I’ve tried a number of commodity styluses, which fail to impress, as well as the Pencil by FiftyThree, which is elegant but better for artists than feverish note takers.

The game changer with the Jot Script is its use of Bluetooth Low Energy to enable palm rejection, which means that I can finally write on my iPad as I would a sheet of paper. The implementation of the Adonit SDK in GoodNotes, moreover, is the best I’ve seen across multiple apps, including the Evernote Penultimate app (ironically a co-brand partner with the Jot Script). If you’re thinking about buying a stylus, I’d encourage you to watch this video which reviews an older version of GoodNotes with the Jot Script and discusses pros/cons. The GoodNotes app itself has some great features too, including backup to your choice of cloud services, bookmarks, different paper choices (it’s great that I compose music and take business notes in the same app!), optional snap-to-grid, pinch-to-zoom, etc.

Thanks to Quip, Adonit, and GoodNotes, I have finally put away my pencil. I hope this post inspires others to upgrade their note-taking behaviors, and I look forward to seeing how these products continue to improve.