I write lots of notes. I had 10 year’s worth of notebooks in a bookcase in our house. My wife would often ask me to please throw away some old notebooks. I should have shown her this piece about the potential value of old notebooks.
My handwriting is terrible. A lecturer once told me he had never seen such bad handwriting in his 10 years of lecturing. My handwriting looks like that of a doctor who has been sampling his own prescriptions. I used to have to transcribe my notes to save to client files or to send to my assistant, who had a tough time reading my handwriting. I often found I couldn’t decipher what I had written. In early 2020 a colleague showed me how he uses his iPad and an app called Nebo to take all his meeting notes. The app will recognise handwriting and convert it to text. I thought this might save me having to transcribe my notes for my assistant every day.
I bought an iPad and the Nebo app just before lock down in early 2020.
This has made my job so much easier. I write all my notes on my iPad and later edit and convert them to text. I can then copy from notes and email instructions to my assistant. Now I just have to get Nebo to recognise my scrawl and convert it to text.
I wrote the first draft of this post using the Apple pencil on my iPad. Here is a screenshot.
Marvel at that handwriting. I was once asked to write Christmas cards for clients. My very best handwriting was rejected so from then on I would get on with my work while my colleagues wrote my Christmas cards. There is some upside to bad handwriting.
It took 11:58 minutes to convert to text. If I take care to write more neatly it is far quicker. I no longer have to scan all my notes in order to access them whenever I need them. I spent some of my spare time during lockdown scanning my notebooks and saving them to Evernote. The only problem is Evernote can’t read my scrawl and I can’t edit it.
This week I had another breakthrough. I adjusted the thickness of the text that appears when I put the apple pen to digital paper. Hey presto! Nebo’s ability to recognise my scrawl just improved dramatically. I now only have to rewrite every third word.
At least my wife isn’t still imploring me to get rid of shelves full of notebooks