I write longhand quite a lot, whether it’s todo lists and midnight idea capture, journalling, or drafting essays. I also have a history of wrist problems and repetitive strain injuries. And, I like efficiency.

Over the years, I have organically grown a set of symbols and abbreviations. My notes have become increasingly cryptic. And I like it, because it saves a lot of time.

My basic shorthand is not maximally information dense, or a whole language like steno, but it gets the job done.

It began when I started dropping the personal pronouns. And then every other word that wasn’t required for me to understand my own notes. Eventually, I regressed to pictograms.

An eyeball icon means “look up” the thing that follows. (or, if not on a todo list, “had epiphany”)

A star means important. A detached exclamation mark also means important. Circling the item brings attention to an important/time-sensitive item nestled in with crossed-off todos.

A right arrow means “went to”, which could be “[FRIEND’s INITITIAL] → [CITY ABBREVIATION]” (literally traveled to), or “[UNIQUE_FRAGMENT_OF_ARTICLE_TITLE] → AD” (published on), or [MEDIA} → [FRIEND’s INITIAL]” (send book/essay/song/website to this person).

DL means “download”

rm means “delete”

mv means move (notice the Unix influence)

| means “or” (notice that the Unix influence suddenly disappeared)

~ means “approximately” (notice that the Unix influence still isn’t home)

-$[amount] [item] [date] scribbled among other notes, with no context, is a cash transaction to be added to my ledger

A combination of a > and a checkmark means “I worked on it but it’s not done” (some of the symbols derive from the Bullet Journal system)

A feather means “wrote” / “worked on first draft”.

A filled-in circle means “recorded”

+= means add/append to

!thing means negation “not thing” (!pwr means the power was out)

!= means not equal ≠, because I’m a programmer not a mathematician

:) means went well / was fun / was a highlight

:| means not fun, survived it

… following a keyword means “it’s a long story”

A box with antenna means “watched a movie”

A musical note means “played music / rehearsed”

Square brackets, unless part of markdown link, means “consider removing this part of the sentence when editing”.

And many more…

The list is long, and specific to the notes I tend to make. You might be thinking, ya, whatever, I don’t need to draw rabbit ears to remind myself I watched a movie. True!

But if you read through the ephemeral notes you make in the course of your life and work, you might find that most of the time spent dragging pen across paper is recording uncompressed data that could fit into a few choice symbols. And then you’re like, 💩, should have👂to what that 👨 📝 on the 🌐.