For years I typed everything. Every meeting, every 1:1, every design conversation. I had a Notion workspace with hundreds of pages, tagged and interlinked and fully searchable. I almost never went back to any of it.
I kept thinking the problem was the tool. I switched from Notion to Obsidian. From Obsidian to Roam. From Roam to a plain text system someone had described in a blog post with a lot of conviction. None of it helped.
The problem wasn't the tool. The problem was that typing is too easy. When you can type as fast as people speak, you stop making decisions about what matters. You just transcribe. And transcription feels like understanding but isn't.
When I started taking notes on paper — or better, at the board after a meeting — I had to decide. I couldn't write everything down. I had to ask: what actually matters here? What changed? What do I need to remember? That process of deciding is itself a form of understanding, and the laptop was letting me skip it.
Now I have a different system. During meetings I have a small notepad and I write almost nothing — just key words, names, things I want to come back to. After the meeting I go to the board and reconstruct the important parts from memory. What I can't reconstruct probably wasn't important. What I reconstruct usually turns out to be exactly the three or four things that mattered.
The notes I take this way are shorter and less complete than what I used to produce. They're also vastly more useful. I actually look at them. They actually change what I do. I don't miss the pages I'm no longer generating.