Old man checking in. I use the TOPS Steno Pad and PaperMate Gel Ink pens. Light weight, damage resistant, and no power required.
Still works a treat. There's something about writing information down on paper that makes it store in my memory differently. I read volumes of digital text on my monitor every day, but I write very little into the steno book, so almost everything I write gets stored very deeply in my memory and is very easy to recall even when I don't have the original.
I sketch all of my ideas on yellow legal pads for the same reason. It's my playground. Mostly diagrams and code snippets. Playing around with the names of things.
For my "TODO/notes," though, I still use a plain text file in gedit. No timestamps, no nothing. When I want to remember how to build Envoy with bazelisk, I search for "bazelisk" and see the most recent, oldest, and all intermediate attempts with my notes (e.g. "runs out of memory, but if you're not building the tests, you can get away with 6 cores"). I've gotten into the habit of "tagging" potentially useful information with words that I might search for later.
Need to save an error message for possible later reference? notes.txt. Meeting notes? notes.txt. TODO? notes.txt. Rough draft of slack message? notes.txt. You get the idea.
Still works a treat. There's something about writing information down on paper that makes it store in my memory differently. I read volumes of digital text on my monitor every day, but I write very little into the steno book, so almost everything I write gets stored very deeply in my memory and is very easy to recall even when I don't have the original.