For context, I just came across obsidian md mid school year. I’m almost done with the year too but the catch is everything i learnt this year will for sure come up in an extrance exam next year. I’m torn between whether I should transcribe my entire notes on phy and chem which i’m sure would help a lot later down the line or whether to start maintaining a vault from now on and add stuff to it as needed.
While I know it would be helpful, i don’t know if the time investment is worth it for a student like me. I originally was really struck by obsidian since i realize its potential to allow me to quickly go through chemistry and understand the notes much more deeply. But is it worth it for me to transcribe 1 and a half physical notebooks into digital notes?
For me, the value of a well kept set of notes is twofold. One: it can be helpful to locate a note on a particular topic and the context of that topic when I learnt first about it. Two: the very act of writing it down helps fixing the content in memory.
So: imagine yourself wanting to locate a note in both a set of notebooks and a set of files in a computer. That’s less elegant and more time consuming than locating a note in just one medium.
Then: how are you going to refer to your handwritten notes from the electronically kept ones? (and vice versa, should it occur to you to add to your old notes)?
Also, by the very act of copying and, perhaps, redacting your notes you will be able to remember much more of the topics.
In my opinion, it would be time well spent, if done intelligently.
depending on how “clean” your hand writing is you could try a “handwriting OCR tool” to automatically convert a note to text.
If that’s not practical you could take a picture of every physical note, then create a note in obsidian, embed the photo and give it a descriptive title and add a few links.
Then you can manually transcribe notes as you see fit.