The power of an old-fashioned notebook and pen in the digital age

I am writing this on a $2000 laptop, with three monitors, a mechanical keyboard, and enough computing power to simulate a small universe. And yet, when I am properly stuck on something, the tool I reach for is a $3 notebook and a pen I stole from a hotel.

There is probably a lesson in there somewhere.

I have tried to talk myself out of this. Surely a note-taking app with sync, search and backlinks is strictly better? On paper (sorry), it is. In practice, I keep coming back to actual paper, so I wanted to figure out why.

The keyboard has opinions

A keyboard is a pretty narrow pipe for a thought. Every key produces one character, in one size, on one line, going in one direction. You cannot draw an arrow from this sentence to an idea three paragraphs up, make a word bigger because it feels important, or scribble a box around something and write "???" next to it.

With a pen, all of that comes for free. Your writing gets bigger when you are excited and cramped when you are unsure. Ideas branch off sideways, wander into the margin, and get circled, crossed out and rescued. By the end, the page looks like how the thinking actually went, which is rarely in a straight line.

Digital tools also come with structure baked in. Every app has an opinion about how you should organise yourself, with headings here, bullets there, and tags, folders and nested pages everywhere else. Even a blank document starts with margins and a font. Paper does not care about any of that. You can start in the middle, write sideways, or connect two ideas with a line that turns into a doodle of a dragon halfway through, and nobody is stopping you or suggesting a template.

When the tool does not impose a structure, you end up finding your own. I think that structure, the one that comes out of your own thinking, is usually the more useful one.

Slow is a feature

We celebrate speed in everything digital: type faster, delete faster, rearrange faster. While writing by hand is slow, I have started to think that is the point.

Since there is no clean delete with a pen, you have to stay with each sentence a little longer before you commit to it. That small cost makes you choosier. On a keyboard I will type five half-baked versions of a sentence and keep none of them, whereas in a notebook I tend to think first and write once.

There is research on this too. Studies comparing longhand notes to laptop notes have found that people writing by hand tend to summarise and rephrase, while people typing tend to transcribe word for word. I am not going to pretend I have read all of it, and I am sure there are counterarguments. But it matches what I see when I compare my own scribbles to my own typed notes, where the first is usually me thinking and the second is often just me recording.

Remembering where you wrote it

The other odd thing about a notebook is that I remember ideas by where they are on the page: the top of a left page, squeezed into a margin next to a coffee stain, or spread across two pages with arrows everywhere.

You don't search a notebook, you flip through it, and while flipping through it you run into things you weren't looking for, which is half the fun. A search box only gives you what you already knew to ask for.

I am not saying digital notes are bad. I use them all the time for things I need to find, share or copy-paste into a terminal. But when I am trying to figure something out, as opposed to storing it, paper keeps winning.

Try this

Get a notebook. Any notebook will do, and the cheaper the better, so that you are not scared of ruining it. Then the next time you are stuck on a problem, close the laptop and just write. Skip the journal entry and the to-do list, and write whatever comes out about the problem: draw boxes, draw arrows, write the same question three different ways, and use the whole page while ignoring the lines.

It will look messy, and that is fine, because nobody is reviewing it.

What you will probably find is a messier, slower kind of thinking that is also a lot more your own. In a world of templates and frameworks and best practices, a blank page is still one of the few places where nobody has decided the shape of your thoughts for you.

P.S. Yes, I am aware this is a post about paper that you are reading on a screen. I never said I was consistent. Now if you'll excuse me, I need a new pen. The hotel one is running out of ink.