I am always on a quest to connect the pen and paper tools I love to my digital life. Unlike with apps, paper never holds me back when it comes to expression. I can write, draw, and even collage on it with little effort.

Yet, I do much of my work digitally. I use the Workflowy app for everything, from saving notes from websites and books to writing projects. Despite having an app as flexible as Workflowy by my side, I want to bring my paper notes and my digital notes together in a satisfying way.

So here's how I'm creating a bridge between my analog and digital notes.



Home is where the majority of my notes are

 

Knowing where home is for my notes gives me a picture of what I need to do with my paper notes to connect them to my digital life.

For example, with Workflowy I make connections between notes using links and hashtags. Since the home for the majority of my digital notes is non-linear, I would want digital storage for my analog notes to work in a similar way.

With that in mind, I decided to go with Trello. I can upload pictures of my paper notes, and I can also create links between them. Also with Trello, it's easy to create links from my scanned digital notes to paste into Workflowy.

This connects all my digital and analog notes.

Digitizing analog

 

Now that I have a structure in mind, I need to digitize what I got. Currently, my favorite apps for scanning are Notebloc and the Post-it Notes app.

I've also started using Rocketbook. For the left-handed out there, the reusable Rocketbook notes can smear, so you have to be careful when writing in it. Downloading and using their free printables is a good work-around.

By the way, both Rocketbook and the Post-it Notes app allows you to send scans of notes straight to Trello.

Thinking backwards

 

Some people have most of their notes in notebooks. If that's you, you may want to consider creating matching digital notebooks in apps like Evernote or Onenote. Then when you finally fill a notebook, you can go through it, find your most meaningful passages, scan them, and save them to the matching digital notebook.

The key to creating that bridge between analog notes and digital ones is knowing the home of most of your notes and then figuring out a way to connect the outliers.

So if you've struggled with bringing together digital and analog as I have, I hope this helps!