I’ve struggled for years with how to best take notes and, in the process, I’ve used the worst possible system: a mish-mash of everything. But, I feel like my latest combo isn’t all bad and might have some staying power. I use a medium, graph-ruled Moleskine with a Lamy Safari fountain pen for taking notes during meetings and sketching. On my Mac I use Notational Velocity and synchronize it with both a SimpleNote account and a folder on my Dropbox account. (By synchronizing with Dropbox, the notes are searchable using the Mac Spotlight, or any other indexing system you use.) I use the mNote application on my Android phone to access & edit these notes via it’s SimpleNote sync feature. Similar SimpleNote clients are available on the iPhone.

All-and-all it’s an okay system. Most recently I used Evernote, but I found I just didn’t enjoy using it: it feels bloated and I didn’t use the fancy OCR stuff. I just want plainttext note taking. I also tried using Gmail, but the signal-to-noise ratio makes it difficult to find notes after you’ve taken them. That is, there is so much other email in your account your self-notes get lost in the shuffle, despite auto-filtering/tagging/whatever.