There was an interesting article a few weeks ago in the New York Times, about electronic tools for note-taking: Bringing Order to the Chaos of Notes:

MODERN life is a mess of notes, a tangle of countless scraps of information that we accumulate during our waking hours. In the morning, you attend a meeting with the boss and jot down everything she says. Later, you get a call from the vet and transcribe results from your dog’s lab tests. At lunch, a friend gives you the name of a Mexican place he says you’ve got to try. And then there are the to-do lists, grocery lists, recipes and all those brilliant ideas for screenplays you get while taking a shower.

The piles of notes are even more ungainly if you’re in a profession that demands constant transcription — if you’re a student, lawyer, journalist or executive assistant, a job in which every utterance should be recorded, archived and made searchable.

The puzzle is where to write all this stuff down. Computers have revolutionized how we manage information, but for many years they’ve offered meager help for that most pedestrian of paper-based tasks — saving all the ephemeral data that streams into your life.

Most people reading this blog are probably quite happy to solve this problem by buying more notebooks to stick those paper bits in! But if you are interested in using electronic solutions too, here are some programs mentioned in the article.

Evernote
OneNote
NoteBook
Yojimbo
Together

The writer does acknowledge that pen and paper still win sometimes:

…physical notebooks have their advantages. They’re highly portable and extremely flexible; they let you draw, scribble in shorthand and you can curl up the corner of a page to remember something important.

But pen and paper have their limitations. You can’t search paper, and you can’t easily organize a stack of notes into a meaningful collection without retyping them first. Most important, pen and paper don’t last. Notebooks are hard to keep safe and secure, and if you move apartments or offices, you’re bound to lose something important. Paper notes have a habit of going through the wash and coming out as papier-mâché.

Your electronic data, meanwhile, is replicated on the Web and on all your machines, and will probably be safe for years. This can make all the difference: With computerized notes, your daily musings are permanent. In time, they could add up to something grand.

Like most people, I’ve found that a combination of electronic and paper makes the most sense for me. I love keeping my calendar and contacts in Outlook, and I use it for to-dos and many notes related to my work and personal life also. But I still keep a paper journal and use my notebook to jot down personal to-dos, ideas, lists, doodles, etc., and I can’t imagine any electronic invention that would change that.