What Are Rich Notes?

Tuesday, 9.29pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. – Carl Jung

19 November 2025 UPDATE – the post below is from 2024. If you are looking for an updated introduction to Rich Notes, this video may help.

Enjoy the rest of the post…

In 2018 I started to do a thing that changed the way I practiced consulting. I shared my screen in meetings and took handwritten notes using drawing software, writing on a graphics tablet with a stylus. This is what I am going to talk about at the EURO conference.

I call this thing Rich Notes and it describes nonlinear digital notes that I take during meetings to record and structure conversations. You can see an example in the picture and there are quite a few distinctive features that I won’t go into right now.

I have been obsessed with writing for as long as I can remember. I collected pens, pencils and paper. I tried different handwriting styles and experimented with calligraphy. I studied graphology. And I wrote, pages and pages. Study notes, journals, meeting notes. I kept logbooks, looseleaf notes, project notes. Writing has been the most useful method I’ve found to deal with life.

The act of getting words down has let me grapple with ideas. Stapling words to the page lets me chase other ideas down and wrestle them to the floor. Our brains are meant, as David Allen writes, for having ideas, not holding them. My philosophy for years has been that if it isn’t written down, it doesn’t exist.

Writing things down during meetings shows you’re paying attention. Or doodling. I once sat through a meeting where all I wrote down “I’m bored. So bored. I’m so bored.” in shorthand again and again. Luckily that doesn’t happen too often.

How we write is affected by the medium we use. I first wrote these words on an Amazon basics yellow legal pad with a Montblanc Mozart fountain pen using black ink, after passing over a Bic ballpoint and a Parker. Some people like such details. For others, it’s just strange. On the page my writing marches, like a line of drunk ants, to the right and down, line after line.

Taking digital notes is different. Writing on a computer screen with an infinite page is like throwing pasta at the wall and seeing where it sticks. It could go anywhere. Paper encourages linear writing, a wall encourages non-linear writing. The latter can hold many points of view while the former is better suited to one person working on their own. But that’s not a rule, you could do things the other way too – but it’s just easier to lean into whatever is easiest in the medium you’re working in. I focus on sharing my screen and taking notes to structure the conversation so we can have a productive discussion.

In this age of generative AI and SaaS why would writing by hand have any use? One reason is that it’s different – it’s still a uniquely human thing to do. The instrument being used is another human and I think we just connect instantly with handmade marks. When I pick my stylus and take notes on a digital screen I tap into thousands of years of human society, reaching back to a flickering fire in a Lascaux cave scratching a story on a wall with a burnt stick, or a Walbiri group in Australia scratching a story in the sand.

Rich Notes are an ancient art, as old as they come, and perhaps that’s why they work for me.

What I’m trying to do with my colleagues is understand more about them, what they are, and how they might work for others.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh