No matter how wired and mobile-techie you are, if your job requires you to capture, process and make decisions using a lot of information every day, there will be times when you have to write some of that information down on paper rather than in some digital format that would make it easily useful later.

I’ve been dealing with that particular problem for a while. Taking and keeping notes on my laptop makes everything searchable and easy to create reminders of deadlines or appointments, while also ensuring that I can find most of what I need as long as I back it up often enough.

Taking notes on paper is unavoidable, but adds another whole set of chores -- either retyping the notes or scanning and OCRing them in the hope you don’t miss something critical.

The Iomega Mobile Digital Scribe looked as if it would be an ideal solution. It records your pen strokes, syncs with your laptop easily, and doesn’t require the expensive special paper most pens of this kind do. But in practice, it didn’t work out so well.  

On the other hand, Livescribe -- a really smart smartpen that records both pen strokes and audio, and can run apps on the pen itself -- looked like an overengineered, expensive and potentially intrusive product. People don’t always react well when they realize they’re being recorded, especially by a stranger.

Barring that, though, Livescribe turned out to be a pretty effective little tool -- simple and mostly intuitive to control, able to capture images of notes, record audio only on command, and able to bring along custom dictionaries or other files you could read on the pen’s tiny display window while taking notes sans PC.

Like other smartpens, Livescribe does require special paper, but the desktop app that comes along with the pen has templates that make it easy to print it yourself. That makes it harder to use throw-away notebooks and forces you to keep track of individual sheets of paper. Eliminating the need to buy expensive, special prints more than makes up for that.

The commands on the paper are simpler than I expected as well. The pen records every penstroke while you’re writing, so there’s no need to turn it on. The audio recording comes on when you touch the Record spot on the paper.

The best thing about the audio: it syncs with the notes file so you can look at your notes and listen to the audio without having to search through the audio file. Microsoft’s OneNote is the only one of the digital note-taking software I’ve seen that syncs audio and text; that single feature almost makes up for OneNote’s proprietary storage format, weak search capability, and idiosyncratic UI.

In a pen, it’s a huge benefit. Most students catch about 10 percent to 20 percent of the information in a lecture on paper notes, according to Livescribe spokespeople. Audio boosts that as much as 400 percent.