After I wrote the post on Aqeel Akber’s Perfect Email Setup, I browsed around his site a bit and found this other interesting post from 2016 on going paperless. I’ve written a bit on that subject in the last few years ever since I started making a conscious effort to avoid using pens, pencils, and paper as much as I could. I’ve been successful in my attempt to the point that except for a few common exceptions—the occasional check, signing of credit card receipts, making a mathematical calculation, and the like—I virtually never pick up a pen or pencil anymore.
Although we both start with Org mode, Akber’s solution is interesting to me because it differs from mine in some respects. He likes to store his data according to type in separate directories and files. That’s the natural thing to do especially for those of us brought up on the command line. The thing is, it’s hard, in many cases, to decide where a piece of data should be stored and can correspondingly make it harder to find later. And there’s really no reason to do it. Search on modern computers is fast and will find the data no matter where it’s stored. Ironically, Akber himself demonstrates this in a short video demonstrating how he searches for data. He just uses an Org mode search that doesn’t depend at all on which Org file the data is stored in.
He also likes to have a separate file for each day in his notebooks/logs. Using Org mode’s datetree capture makes this—and all the machinery he added to support it—completely unnecessary. I simply use the appropriate capture template and Org will add the entry in the proper place—creating a new headline for the day, if necessary—without my doing anything special.
Still, it’s fair to say that our methods are more alike than different. We both use Org as the basis of our note and record keeping and value the fact that the data is plain text. We differ in that he likes to encode his data taxonomy in the file system while I prefer to dump everything in just a few files and let search worry about finding them. If you’re looking for a way to go paperless yourself, be sure to take a look at Akber’s post. It’s a nice example of one way of approaching the problem.