In the exact same boat. Strongly prefer writing notes for many reasons but no easy search really sucks. I currently use Notion mainly as a personal wiki and to-do tracker. Each day gets a new page where I jot down notes and tasks in a loosely structured format. I have found Notion's search to be very useful when trying to remember how or why I did something months ago. However, I still keep a physical, unruled, bound sketchbook for when I want to draw out class relationships, diagrams, etc - i.e anything that is much easier to describe on paper than with text alone. I usually don't need to actually "use" these diagrams - they're more a tool for working out and untangling an issue that eventually gets translated into code. Even with "paper-like" iPad screen protectors, I still strongly prefer writing on paper. So I have not found a way I like to combine Notion and physical writing yet.
But this post has me thinking about separation of concerns. Maybe I should stick to using Notion for anything that I want to search later and use the notebook for the aforementioned drafting and as a work-specific journal. While I haven't tried it much, I believe there's value in "brain-dumping" your day in a simple fashion similar to a diary. A therapist may advise you to deeply introspect on your overall state for that day, which I do think is a valuable tool, but may cause some inertia as a hard requirement for a "work-specific diary". Writing daily events in a simple fashion alongside some optionally additional, also simple, notes could help sort of "flush your mental buffer" of grand-scheme unimportant day-to-day information and help remember more important information. Sort of in the vein of Sherlock Holmes concept of his "mental attic" in the sense that you want to take care of removing/prevent clutter and instead keep track of what's useful to you.
But this post has me thinking about separation of concerns. Maybe I should stick to using Notion for anything that I want to search later and use the notebook for the aforementioned drafting and as a work-specific journal. While I haven't tried it much, I believe there's value in "brain-dumping" your day in a simple fashion similar to a diary. A therapist may advise you to deeply introspect on your overall state for that day, which I do think is a valuable tool, but may cause some inertia as a hard requirement for a "work-specific diary". Writing daily events in a simple fashion alongside some optionally additional, also simple, notes could help sort of "flush your mental buffer" of grand-scheme unimportant day-to-day information and help remember more important information. Sort of in the vein of Sherlock Holmes concept of his "mental attic" in the sense that you want to take care of removing/prevent clutter and instead keep track of what's useful to you.