Digitally, I use a variation on BuJo rapid logging, implemented in Markdown with plaintext. BuJo itself has become essentially scrapbooking for task management, but the basic idea of logging in bullet lists makes a lot of sense.
Markdown has three legal bullets for UL lists, which along with some sigils after the bullet/space is plenty for complex logging one line at a time. Here's the "key" at the top of each of my journals:
### Friday :: November 8, 2019
#### Highlights
- This cool thing that happened!
#### Planned
* Some event
- Meeting notes
+ Action Item
* Some planned task I copied from OmniFocus
#### Journal
+ ^ Follow up on so and so issue
+ ^ Make sure stakeholders aligned
- Reached out to Coworker
+ $ Wait for followup
+ $ Schedule lunch for Tuesday
- ! Some great idea
- DJSON awesome for nested JSON
- To extract from logs, wrap with [""]
I use Keyboard Maestro macros to quickly create the header skeletons from templates as needed and I fill in "Planned" during my daily prep. From there it's just appending to the bottom. I also have Alfred workflows and other scripts that know how to append a bullet line to the journal file, which helps a lot for logging notes from anywhere.
Periodically, I search for "+<tab>" in the text file, and it finds all the new tasks I haven't marked with sigils in the gutter row. That lets me quickly move them into OmniFocus for longer-term tracking. Someday I'll script it.
For you, if you really only want notes, even simpler. It's just a day header and appending a bunch of - bullets!
But there'll always be times when it comes down to paper. When all that fails, I have a nice-looking aged-brass Fisher space pen in my front pocket and a Moleskine Cahier (the cheap cardboard ones) in my back pocket. If there's something important to catch unexpectedly the last thing I want to do is fumble with my phone. The notebook is by far the quickest option.
There are some really nice leather wallets for Cahier/Field Guide-sized notebooks, and it actually helps balance my sitting posture by having wallets in both sides. Here's an example of one wallet I bought--I bought both a Horween and Chromexcel version from this seller and they're both high quality.
Markdown has three legal bullets for UL lists, which along with some sigils after the bullet/space is plenty for complex logging one line at a time. Here's the "key" at the top of each of my journals:
Sample log for a day looks like: I use Keyboard Maestro macros to quickly create the header skeletons from templates as needed and I fill in "Planned" during my daily prep. From there it's just appending to the bottom. I also have Alfred workflows and other scripts that know how to append a bullet line to the journal file, which helps a lot for logging notes from anywhere.Periodically, I search for "+<tab>" in the text file, and it finds all the new tasks I haven't marked with sigils in the gutter row. That lets me quickly move them into OmniFocus for longer-term tracking. Someday I'll script it.
For you, if you really only want notes, even simpler. It's just a day header and appending a bunch of - bullets!
But there'll always be times when it comes down to paper. When all that fails, I have a nice-looking aged-brass Fisher space pen in my front pocket and a Moleskine Cahier (the cheap cardboard ones) in my back pocket. If there's something important to catch unexpectedly the last thing I want to do is fumble with my phone. The notebook is by far the quickest option.
There are some really nice leather wallets for Cahier/Field Guide-sized notebooks, and it actually helps balance my sitting posture by having wallets in both sides. Here's an example of one wallet I bought--I bought both a Horween and Chromexcel version from this seller and they're both high quality.
https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Horween-Leather-Moleskine-ref...
If you make it nice enough to carry around, it quits feeling like a chore to do so.