I absolutely love this! I, too, use one paper notebook at a time (usually a Leuchtturm for the page numbers) and aspire to typing up a digital summary of each analog page. I fall short of this goal most of the time, resulting in a tremendous backlog of notes that usually only bothers me when I remember having written about something before and I can’t find it after searching high and low in my Vault.
I number my notebooks (Volume I, Volume II, etc.) so I imagine I could adopt a similar approach to your table of contents to at least point me in the right direction. I used to do a rote transcription of each page, but that is so tedious that I began to loathe the practice even though I love the result of having a complete searchable/indexable library of thought.
I’ll give this a try, since I also have a couple decades’ worth of journal entries that I have painstakingly imported at one time or another. Thank you for the inspiration!
I find that the approach of having a few pages at the front of the notebook for TOC gives me just enough overview – and is MUCH quicker than transcribing the whole page – that it is enough for me to find the notebook and page# with “that meeting I had last year with so&so”. Then I find the physical notebook, turn to the page, and voila!. It is sort of like a card catalog that directs you to the right library book.
Note: I sprung for a Obsidian Publish account a couple months ago and started publishing (literally) random pages once weekly on Sundays. It’s a way to get me going and gradually publish more. It’s at publish.obsidian.md/drdaviss.
I find that analog tools are best for core deep work. I like to go offline with some scratch papers to work out a proof. Analog is good for messy, original thinking.
Obsidian is great for long-term storage and instant retrieval. Digital medium also forces me to clarify my thinking. It’s also faster to take notes directly if applicable.
Analog (paper, e-ink tablet, whiteboard):
Working out proofs or solving problems
Distraction-free paper reading
Messy notes & annotations, early thinking
Communicating visual or mathematical ideas
Analog notes are entirely ephemeral
Digital (Obsidian, etc.):
Log important results (like a digital lab notebook)
There are a couple of ways to get things from your journal into a vault, but I somewhat agree with what you are saying.
I think for some people, the physical joy of writing is special to them, but those peoples workflows and writing methods may differ from people who daily drive obsidian.
I use one of several notebooks to take notes if I’m away from my personal computer.
i have one notebook i take to school, one notebook i take to church for Bible study, and a pocket notebook that i always have that i use for thoughts and taking notes on sermons.
i usually put a bullet at the bottom of each page and once all the notes have been imported into obsidian i cross the bullet out.
Obsidian replaced Roam + Notion for PKM. Remarkable is fantastic as a e-notebook for journaling and physically handwriting notes + ideas, discussed here