
Paper is the real 'killer app' - happy-go-lucky
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170120-why-paper-is-the-real-killer-app
======
throwaway26960
The advantage of paper is that you can be more creative and use slow
thinking[1]. Just take a look at Newton's[2] or DaVinci's[3] notebooks, how
would they think so freely on a computer? Sure for a work task list, a
computer is fine, but I find a computer too limiting on my creativity for
myself. Added bonus: no ads, bugs, or distractions.

People that create apps create them to make money, not because they make you
more productive or help you be more creative.

[1][https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-
Kahneman/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-
Kahneman/dp/0374533555)

[2][https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton](https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton)

[3][http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=arundel_ms_263_...](http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=arundel_ms_263_f001r)

~~~
nomel
For me, the benefit comes from two limitations:

\- The slow and physical aspect allows you to think about and consider the
idea, as you're writing it.

\- The negative reinforcement, for that slow consideration, caused by from the
permanence of your mistakes or a tired hand.

But, I don't think paper has to be involved. I see it as an indication of a
lack of good stylus input in most devices.

I now use a large iPad Pro, with the stylus...err...Apple Pencil, and have no
desire to go back to paper. Having the pages backed up to the cloud, being
able to insert links and media when necessary, and being able to quickly
switch colors, is all too valuable.

If good stylus input gets cheaper, I don't, personally, see a justification
for paper.

~~~
futureisbright
I, too, possess an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, but I opted for the smaller
9.7" one. It was a mistake, the bigger one would have been better, but I love
it anyway. for note-taking. It's a godsend to be able to shuffle text around,
resize it, undo my errors etc. I wrote something on paper lately and
automatically searched for the undo button when I made a mistake and was
frustrated when I realized I have to use my eraser.

Anyway, which app are you using for your notes? I'm using OneNote ATM. I can't
describe what's missing, I'm just not feeling 100% satisfied.

~~~
singingboyo
I'm on a surface book, but have a similar issue. OneNote is the best I've
found, but my issues are a few things:

\- Something about how changing color works doesn't quite feel right.

\- I can't shuffle pages around, overlap them, etc.

\- I want either infinite page size, or fixed, not the weird 'expand when you
write near the edge' thing I have now.

I think I almost want a 'virtual desk' kind of thing that I can shuffle paper
around on, make things overlap, etc. All the stuff you can do with paper, with
the added benefit of being able to save stuff. Organization could be a serious
issue though.

~~~
Nition
Once upon a time, before even the first iPad was released, the Microsoft
Courier promised this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-
MdI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI)

------
pumblechook
I've found journaling on paper to be one of the best morning rituals for
calming anxiety. It really is amazing how just writing a few sentences creates
a sense of awareness of what's going on in your head.

I also tried bullet journaling as my 'system', but quickly abandoned it. It is
great if you're not a compulsive to-do list maker, but if you follow a GTD-
like system where you frequently capture, it becomes onerous to answer the
question 'what do I do next?' You either have to constantly flip through pages
to review your full list, or regularly copy your to-dos to a master list,
which becomes quite tedious, especially if you have a long list.

What works for me is using org mode as my to-do system, with paper for the
brainstorming and planning. I always start with paper, then once I have
clarity on what to do, I move it to org.

~~~
weavie
Interesting. I wonder how useful journaling would be to help combat insomnia.
I will give it a go next time I am lying in bed at 2am with my head buzzing..

~~~
rand_r
I've been successfully using journaling to fight insomnia for a few months
now. What I do is try to simply capture every thought that comes into my head
as fast as I can write.

At first, my hand can barely keep up with the torrent of thoughts being
produced by my mind, but after maybe 5-10 min it slows right down. At some
point I feel like I'm actually waiting for thoughts to come up so I can write.

Eventually, my mind goes quiet. It's much easier to fall asleep then.

~~~
themodelplumber
This helped me, too, when I was suffering from insomnia. 700 to 1,000 words
was the "sleep like a baby" target range for me. Also, the sooner I could
bring myself to write about the really difficult topics, the better.

~~~
Veen
I too find writing a helpful way to stop thoughts tumbling round in my head so
I can sleep. I think it has something to do with silencing the rehearsal loop.

[http://www.cognitiveatlas.org/concept/rehearsal_loop](http://www.cognitiveatlas.org/concept/rehearsal_loop)

Focusing on a quiet podcast has a similar effect.

------
ThomPete
I call this the tangibility factor.

When I worked at MetaDesign back in the late nineties and early zeros we had
something called RedBooks.

RedBooks were most of the work we had done for a specific client printed out
in tabloid size bound into a spiral back book and put on a large shelf system.

We also had a matriculate digital folder system with projects, searchable and
the same pages as PDF plus much more accessible from your computer.

Guess which one we used the most?

With the RedBooks it was very easy to pull out the book and look through it
for inspiration, talk about how we did this or that and so on and with the
book we only put in the things that where somehow relevant.

The computer folders on the other hand had everything because, yeah well why
not. But what they had in quantity it lacked in human relatable tangibility.

Computers are great when the amount of information become so waste that it's
impossible to manually search through it all or if you need to share a lot of
your things with other people.

It turns out that for all the great things computers can help us do it still
haven't solved tangibility.

~~~
agumonkey
I thought about that a lot, since I grew up in love about computers and
believed they would be the solution for everything; even books.

But as many said, "digital" mostly made us realize they were other things than
the "pure" content.

I believe our brain just crave as much sensations as possible, and writing,
flipping pages, seeing a device move[1], touching, watching, etc ... basically
the task of dealing with the physical world is not entirely a cost but a
pleasure in itself.

On the other hand(sic) computers send you a massive amount of symbolic
informations (think text search in folders, it's "faster" than any physical
archive), that tickle another part of your brain but not all of it, also, I
think that our brain doesn't actually like too much of these because it
evolved to abstract flows into new concepts. And these concepts are either a
bit hard or simply not exposed to the users (think relational queries).
There's a detrimental mismatch.

[1] I booted a PIII desktop last year, to extract files from a TRAVAN backup
tape. I cannot describe the pleasure I had watching that HP Colorado tape wake
up and move. No matter how "slow" it was compared to anything today. It was so
cool. Even the slick sound of tape moving ..

~~~
jessedhillon
I was trying to explain this to someone ~10 years younger than me the other
day. I was telling them about how, when I was in high school (late 90s) I had
a portable minidisc player/recorder. In so many ways, listening to music on
that device was better than listening to it on Spotfiy + smartphone, even
despite the obvious advantages.

Something about holding music in your hands, feeling a drive seek the next
track, pressing physical buttons to control playback -- it all feels terrific,
and I didn't realize until this conversation that there's a whole generation
who hasn't experienced that.

BTW those minidisc players still go for $200-400 on ebay!

~~~
agumonkey
MD were such a beautiful thing. I still wonder what would have been if Sony
decided to drop it as an open storage medium. Considering it was released in
1992 ... could you imagine.

There's something I recently felt deep and weird about. The society is a
double rotating system. We live, we want to solve problems, the solutions
become a new ground replacing the past, not solving it.

When I look at old tech (big hifi tuner, vu meters, etc), I still deeply love
it. The electro mechanical beauty is still there. Same for video games, or old
software (I love win3.1 and 95 to bits, if I could patch the flawed core
without changing the UX of that period I'd do it...). Without the commercial
need to appeal money that fueled future versions like XP or Vista.

I saw things like the pico8 project, which gives a somehow modern hardware but
with 8bit mindset: low res, 256 colors. People made damn beautiful games out
of it. Really cool animations, gameplay, design. No need for a PS4 pro. My new
pleasure is tweaking old platforms to give them "modern" day usage. Like
retrofitting BT in a car radio. Or modding an old HP calc (longer battery,
usb).

~~~
megablast
> MD were such a beautiful thing. I still wonder what would have been if Sony
> decided to drop it as an open storage medium. Considering it was released in
> 1992 ... could you imagine.

Sony messed it up when they bought a movie and music studio, and started to
hobble their own devices. The MD was awesome, worked for 40 hours on one
battery, could to digital recording and replaying.

Damn you sony.

~~~
agumonkey
The content side of things made them weird, but I can't really blame them not
to foresee the use of a 140MB optical disk when the average consumer used
floppy disks. It might be two different parts of their brains.

------
KIFulgore
I recently re-subscribed to a real-life, old-fashioned newspaper. I like the
digital edition, but prefer the paper version. The resolution is amazing and
you can't beat the loading times, and I never run into browser incompatibility
issues. There are still too many ads, but they don't pop up and dance.

~~~
vog
The only issue is that Ctrl+F doesn't work properly on paper, neither within a
single newspaper, not across last year's newspapers.

~~~
adtac
I think I got a solution - every article is accompanied by a QR code that you
can scan to open a searchable version of the exact same text. Just a couple of
seconds away and you don't lose the papery-feel either.

~~~
bitwize
We could provide a device -- say, in a nice friendly shape like a cat -- that
can read these codes and open up the relevant text on their PC or iPad or
whatever! What could possibly go wrong?

~~~
__jal
Man, brilliant! The VCs and media companies won't be capable of leaving you
alone!

...I think I still have one of those in a junk-box somewhere.

------
dvcrn
I recently adapted bulletjournaling (from OmniFocus) and absolutely love it.
Writing my journal is very relaxing and became a daily ritual of mine. Once a
week i escape with my notebook to a cafe (without any tech gadgets) and review
my entire system, cut out some tasks that are no longer relevant and plan for
the next week.

Paper also allowed me to confront imperfections and mistakes more directly. I
made a ton of writing mistakes that drove my crazy first and made me want to
buy a new note first since I was so used to having my OmniFocus in perfect
shape. It's really refreshing!

Plus It's interesting to see what a engineering brain can do with pen and
paper. Most of the "modules" I use in my bulletjournal like my monthly and
weekly spreads were from scratch created to fit perfectly on my needs.

Oh and boy does good paper feel nice!

~~~
Accacin
I also use the Bullet Journal "system" and it's really nice and I enjoy
writing what I need to do for the day. However, unlike you I haven't really
extended it and use only the basics which seems to work fine for me.

~~~
dvcrn
That's great! Simpler solutions are most of the times better.

I needed to squish start dates and deadlines, task scheduling, 'waiting on' \+
'someday' lists, project pages, weekly overviews and better migrations into
mine which took a good amount of trial and error to find something that sticks
and is intuitive.

On the other hand, I am trying to literally plan everything in my journal. I
don't want to rely on any other app and thus need to come up with modules that
make it possible to get rid of app dependencies completely.

------
PetitPrince
I use an erasable notebook [1] for my scribbling. I find it quite good for
sketching a quick diagram /prototyping, short-term todos, mindmapping and
brainstorming. I don't think it's good for long term journaling (a proper
notebook would be better).

Having an erasable pen solves my problem of making tons of stupid spelling
mistakes, being guilty of wasting paper and losing them in a giant pile of
worthless annotation. For me it's more helpful to have some of my working
ideas physically in front of me instead of hidden behind another window or
virtual desktop.

My particular brand of erasable notebook (Whynote) also have detachable
sheets, so I'm not bound to the linearity of a conventional notebook (I not
super fan of constantly having to turn pages).

[1] [http://www.whynote.ch](http://www.whynote.ch) or
[http://www.wipebook.com](http://www.wipebook.com) or
[http://www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk/category/magic-
notebook](http://www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk/category/magic-notebook)

~~~
victorhooi
How do you find the Whynote versus Wipebooks?

Is there a reason you went for Whynote over the others?

(I have a Wipebook - but sometimes I forget to erase it immediately, and it
gets hard to erase if you leave it too long. Also, the pages aren't the most
durable, especially to any liquid. The Whynote doesn't appear available in
larger sizes though - e.g. A4, Letter).

~~~
zapu
Are there any other unexpected caveats there? Like, I don't know, do your
fingers get dirty because of small particles of the ink that didn't stick,
which add up over time (think whiteboard markers but on smaller scale)?

Because this really looks too good to be true, at least for me. Maybe I should
order and see myself...

~~~
PetitPrince
* The correctable pens (fine point) can dry up pretty if uncapped. I had some case where my pen where partly dried and would randomly not write. In some case I had the feeling that a particular area of the notebook wouldn't let me write where in fact it was only a dry pen. You can "undry" the pen - see [1] - but the process is not as smooth and elegant as the video would suggest. I think it's less a problem with medium point pens; but I don't like writing stuff with those medium pens - too large to my taste.

[1] : [https://youtu.be/y_PWw7G1jfg?t=51s](https://youtu.be/y_PWw7G1jfg?t=51s)

* While we're at it, the pens tends to die much quicker than a conventional ballpoint pen (2-3 month of solid use ? I don't really know). But then, I think I write more with this notebook than I ever wrote with a conventional pen, so my estimation is probably flawed.

* I think I had dirty fingers only once because of the pens, but then that tend to also happens with gel pens. Maybe there's something wrong with the way I'm transporting or holding them ?

* When you erase a whole page (probably with some water - the ink is water soluble - and a microfiber tower) and it is not properly and thoroughly dried, it can stick to the opposite page. But that sort of thing tends to happens to a lot of plastic sheets, and the leave are thick enough to not be a problem. It's only a minor papercut (... sorry, this pun was terrible).

* The spine is not supper-dupper rugged and I recently lost one spiral (one year after I bought it). But the perks of having reorganisable and easily scannable pages are worth it.

* I would really like dotted pages instead of lined pages but this is not available at the moment.

* OneNote OCR doesn't transcribe the scanned page as magically as what it can do with a tablet PC stylus (it's probably looking at the stroke themselve, something that is lost when you scan a page)

~~~
zapu
Thank you very much for the answer!

So the pens that Whynote sells are just branded Staedtler 305, is that right?
Not having to ship the pens from abroad and being able to buy them locally
would sell the product for me.

~~~
PetitPrince
> So the pens that Whynote sells are just branded Staedtler 305

Exactly.

------
otalp
I never liked all the multitude of list making apps - Evernote, Todoist,
Omnifocus, etc.

I prefer org-mode[1] on emacs. It's simple, flexible, distraction free and for
some reason reminds me of writing on paper. You get the simplicity, while also
making it as powerful as you want.

1-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM)

~~~
eddieroger
org-mode has been my 2017 resolution, and in the 23 days I've been using it,
I'm sold. I love prose and writing, and this scratches that itch pretty
effectively while also giving me really powerful things that I need to be
organized, like structure to my notes and tag searches. It's also as in or out
of the way as I want it to be, which is great - I get to define the structure
of how it works, and have largely through my emacs config. My last remaining
hangup is capture when not in front of a full computer, but I'm sure that's a
problem just in need of some time and automation, and admittedly my life would
be easier if I'd give in and store my orgfiles in Dropbox, but being less
dependent on cloud services I don't control is my sub-resolution, so I'm
resisting this one as long as I can.

~~~
peatmoss
I capture on paper. If I'm at a meeting or something, I simply write to paper,
then transcribe my daily notes to org-mode at the end of the day. I don't
particularly worry about structure when spooling to paper.

Sometimes I'll capture to paper even if I'm sitting in front of my computer.
If I've got something complex to reason through, I like the free-form nature
of paper. I pretend it's an auxiliary scratch buffer whose contents I will
reason about later.

My paper notebook, therefore becomes pretty nonsensical, because it isn't the
system of record. I carry it as a notebook because I can always go back a day
or two if I got lazy and didn't transcribe the previous day. Also a paper
notebook puts on a better show for society as compared to just having a few
sheets of printer paper along for the ride at meetings (though that works
too). Periodically, I rip previous pages out (if spiral bound--they tear
cleanly) and shred them just to restore that fresh notebook feeling.

~~~
peatmoss
I'll add that I've used Mobile-org and even tried Evernote on mobile. I cannot
for the life of me figure out how people use mobile note-taking apps. Even
with a bluetooth keyboard the UX is so slow / inflexible compared to paper.

I've seen people apparently use them to reasonable effect though, so I'm going
to assume that people capable of note-taking on mobile are just a more evolved
kind of human than I am :-)

~~~
abakker
As someone who writes for a living, I can appreciate mobile note taking.
Flexibility of the app is not really the important part - I frequently use
apple's notes app. But, in those cases what I'm really doing is "pre-writing"
not note taking. I'm not capturing ideas, I'm already interpreting them before
I write them down, adding structure as I go.

In paper, I tend to really note-take. I like note-taking on paper for things I
don't really understand yet. I prefer pre-writing in an app for situations
where my understanding of the topic is good, and I want to skip steps (e.g.
writing a blog post about a presentation, where the topic is already familiar)

Now, in fairness, I have recently started using SimpleMind for mind-mapping
real-time. I find it does a good job at doing both things. It helps me build a
narrative structure in one branch, while capturing notes in others. It also
gives me a lot of nice flexibility on-screen to rearrange branches, relocate
topics and do other general house-keeping.

------
jpswade
"I was shocked to realize how dependent I’ve grown on three simple features
that just aren’t available in the analog world: search, sort and filter"

[https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/ui-patterns-for-
mob...](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/ui-patterns-for-mobile-apps-
search-sort-filter/)

~~~
falcolas
They are - you simply have to do the extra bit of indexing work yourself.

Create a high level topic for each note, and put that in the front of the
notebook, with a page number. Once you're beyond one book, keep a separate
index book and update it periodically with a book/page number from the indexes
in the individual books.

If you find yourself referring to a particular topic frequently, take some
time and re-write the entry. That way you can correlate several writings on
the topic, and add both a better framing and lessons learned.

It's a bit of extra work, but it's worth it.

~~~
bluGill
I would argue that anything you refer back to even once should be translated
into digital. Note I said translated, not transcribed. When converting to
digital you should fix things: check the facts, make the diagrams pretty, fix
the grammar.

Paper is great for a rough draft. Rewriting your rough draft to the final is
always good practice.

~~~
jdc0589
agreed. the main thing i use pencil & paper for is sketching out designs for
some physical stuff I make. I always start on paper, but if it's a design I'm
actually going to use more than once, it gets drawn up on the computer.

------
jventura
I've never had much success with digital todo lists, so I've never stoped
using pen and paper to schedule what I have to do.

On my current system I have a math notebook (A5 format) where I dump
everything I have to do on the left (or right) non-writable areas of the page,
and then everyday I write what I have to do for the next day on the writable
area. I try to add for each day at least one of those items on the left/right
side, and each day I try not to add more than 2/3 items per day.

The reason that this works for me is that I try to have a very simple life,
fulfill my daily obligations, and try to have as much free time as I can get.
I do not need automatic systems to search my pending tasks way back in time
because if those tasks don't "migrate" to the current page of the notebook,
it's because they are not much relevant.

~~~
mlok
Your migrating tasks remind me of the Autofocus system :
[https://lifehacker.com/5151111/autofocus-is-a-single-
paper-b...](https://lifehacker.com/5151111/autofocus-is-a-single-paper-based-
list-organization-system)

------
CodeSheikh
Might be a bit off-topic, but here it goes. This article gave me reassurance
how I resisted using e-readers and stuck to the notion of using an actual
book. Waste of paper? Yes. But then we are wasting papers in many other ways
as well (another debate). Plus books hardly get recycled and they often get
passed on (used bookstores). Also, my another issue with Kindle-esque books or
even buying paperbacks from Amazon is that now I always rely on reviews before
purchasing my new book. I remember when I was young and in school, I would
just go and browse through books in my school library and pick whatever
interests me.

~~~
BeetleB
As someone who grew up on paper books, but at one time bought an e-reader, my
2 cents:

Ereaders will likely never be as good as the best paper books. _However_ ,
they can be better than _many_ printed books. I've owned printed books with
poor bindings, poor typesettings, poor quality paper. The ereader was
definitely better than those.

On the whole spectrum of quality of published (paper) books, I would rank my
ereader to be right smack in the middle.

Then there's the obvious: Ereaders are much more practical on a plane, etc. My
first one was 5 inches (which is small - would not recommend). It fit in my
jacket pocket. Any time I was stuck somewhere (e.g. mechanic waiting for my
car), it was quite convenient to take it out and read on it.

Finally, years ago I had nasty tendonitis in my arms. Holding a heavy
hardbound book and reading was painful. The ereader was my constant companion
through those months of pain.

Obviously, I still read printed books, but to me, on the whole, the two are
roughly equal.

~~~
znpy
> On the whole spectrum of quality of published (paper) books

Well, not until someone proposes a 10-11" e-reader that doesn't cost half my
salary.

The biggest disappointment with my e-reader is that reading PDFs is awful on
that ridiculous display.

We might have nice, readable fonts and pictures, with zoom too, and instead...

~~~
BeetleB
>The biggest disappointment with my e-reader is that reading PDFs is awful on
that ridiculous display.

Ereaders suck for PDFs. To some extent, that's because the PDF format sucks.
PDF forces a number of words per line, lines per page, etc. Essentially, PDFs
force a certain page size on you. If you compare with physical books, that's
not the case. When Stephen King writes a novel, it can be printed as a small
paperback or a large print book.

Epubs is the way to go with ereaders.

As for the size of ereaders, it's a tradeoff. 6 inches has its shortcomings
(frequent page turns), but they have their pluses (very easy to carry).

Sony used to make 9" readers, and I occasionally find used ones for very cheap
at Goodwill (under $10).

The Kobo Auro One is almost 8" (about $250).

But yeah, if you want to read PDFs, ebook readers are not the way to go. Use a
tablet instead (with all its screen fatigue, etc).

~~~
RandomOpinion
> _Essentially, PDFs force a certain page size on you. ..._

Not necessarily. Sony's early readers had automatic reflowing of text if you
chose a larger font size. It worked really well for fiction or any other type
of text without pictures/diagrams.

For modern e-readers, converters like the free Calibre software
([https://calibre-ebook.com](https://calibre-ebook.com)), will allow resizing
& reflow of text in PDFs to a size more usable for any device.

> _Sony used to make 9 " readers ..._

There are refurbished Sony PRS-900 units available (e.g. eBay) for around $50
and, unlike most e-readers, they have user-replaceable batteries.

~~~
BeetleB
>Not necessarily. Sony's early readers had automatic reflowing of text if you
chose a larger font size. It worked really well for fiction or any other type
of text without pictures/diagrams.

My first ereader was Sony's PRS-350. It had automatic reflowing, but it did a
poor job on many PDF's. It did not take care of line breaks - so if I
increased the font size, each line was 1.5 lines long (i.e. the original PDF's
line would be 1.5 lines on the ereader - it would still respect the line
break).

I haven't tried the conversions in recent versions of Calibre. I did try it
for PDFs over 5 years ago, and the results were less than satisfactory. I
pretty much decided not to use small ereaders for PDFs.

------
bleair
Paper has donwisdes (can get wet, takes longer to photocopy to give to others)
but it wins because of how it works with my noise/lossy mind.

There are elements of a physical thing (location on page, rough location
within notebook, did I end up skrunching additional ideas and notes on the
side, etc.). These things aren't as exact as search/ctl-f but these extra
associations help my ability to recall.

The other win with paper for me is that with a computer my brain keeps wanting
to switch from writing mode to editing mode - as in "oh, that reads poorly,
let me rewrite that, wait let me move this around". With paper, unless I
actively choose to re-write an entire page or section my brain is less
distracted (I'm easily distracted though - squirrel! :)

------
SonicSoul
seems a lot of people in comments are missing the point. of course there is no
search/filter/undo (actually undo exists). It doesn't win in every cateogry.
What it does offer is force your brain to work more and therefore create a
better mental map. It forces your brain to choose the actual things you can do
instead of jotting down 1000 things you'll never look at again.

For example, I've used evernote and a notebook to write down ideas each
morning. after few weeks i was a lot more intimately familiar with ideas in my
notebook because each page had unique character thanks to how my brain worked
that day and the kinds of drawings that were added. It is also super easy to
flip through pages to skim over other ideas, and thanks to unique shape of
writing often i wouldn't need to read the text to know what that page is
about.

it's not a silver bullet and if you need to keep track of a ton of things of
course it will get tedious, but I believe most people keep track of more
things than they actually are capable of executing. And paper sort of forces
you to simplify and focus on fewer things which IMO is a good thing

------
mattferderer
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Does anyone have a workflow for
using paper to take notes & then transferring them to an online notebook
(OneNote, Evernote, etc)?

My current process is read a chapter, then take hand written notes trying to
recall what I just read. A day or more later I revisit material by putting
notes into a OneNote or Evernote. I've been weighing pros & cons of this vs
doing freehand using something like a Windows Surface & OneNote.

Hand written notes, revisiting & recalling information is strongly recommended
by Professor Barbara Oakley who's a rather popular teacher of learning and
memory topics.

~~~
cableshaft
I haven't tried it, but Molekine has an Evernote Sketch book that's designed
specifically so you can take a picture of the page and upload it instantly
into Evernote, you might find that useful. I also know they have a notebook
you can buy that when you're done with it, you can mail it to them (for free,
built into the price I think), and they'll digitize it for you, and either
send back your paper copy or recycle it.

[http://www.moleskine.com/en/collections/model/product/everno...](http://www.moleskine.com/en/collections/model/product/evernote-
sketchbook-with-smart-stickers-large)

~~~
mattferderer
Wow, that's pretty cheap. $11.53 + 15% off + 3 months of Evernote Premium
right now. I haven't considered taking pictures of my notes, though I've heard
of others doing.

Thinking about it, it's probably worth having an image of my notes in my
digital notebook as well as typed & cleaned up notes.

------
yrio
For writing text, I prefer to type on a computer because I can easily
rearrange / edit things. You can't do that on paper.

I prefer paper for drawing though (diagrams / flowchart / etc). Has anyone
tried using drawing tablet like Wacom? How does it feel compared to drawing on
paper?

~~~
ghaff
Traditional Wacom tablets are IMO awful. Some people do get used to them but
not having direct feedback of what you've written just doesn't work naturally.

A tablet, especially one like the iPad Pro with the Pencil is much better but
still doesn't work as well as just sketching on a piece of paper for me. I
assume if I applied myself to using a tablet more though, I'd get used to it.
Clearly people with a lot more drawing ability than myself can do great work
on tablets.

~~~
jrapdx3
Yeah, Wacom tablets were/are great and terrible at the same time. I've used
them on and off for a long time, and they really are great for drawing, but
there's a learning curve to be sure. Actually I liked the older Wacoms better
than some new ones I've tries out. The ancient "cursor" device was mouse-like,
but used in absolute mode was great for some tasks where keeping it in the
same place enabled keeping the pointer on the screen in a predictable spot.

Actually the newer touch/stylus screens on tablets like the MS Surface models
I've used are harder for me to use with the stylus. Manipulating the stylus is
harder due to parallax and the fact that the tool and hand covers up part of
the screen. Just doesn't seem as "natural" to me as the old drawing tablet.

~~~
ghaff
Preferences definitely vary. Our graphic artist at a former employer had a
Wacom tablet but she drew everything on paper first and then just basically
used the tablet to digitize it. I've never found anything I really loved but,
then, I'm pretty bad drawing and writing on paper too :-)

~~~
jrapdx3
Yes, it's sure hard to beat the sensory and esthetic experience of putting
pencil to paper. No digital method can come close to it.

OTOH drawing on the computer has a whole new set of features to offer that are
completely novel and can't be accomplished in other ways, certainly not
easily.

So like in most things, different "tooling" involves tradeoffs, no single
solution ever covers it all. We usually have reasons to go one way or the
other. In any case, not tool can make up for dearth of talent, how well I know
the truth of that statement!

------
djhworld
I carry a small "Field Notes" pocket notebook in my back pocket, it's useful
for jotting small notes down and reminders.

Each day I review what I've written and and input anything important into
digital applications

~~~
davegauer
Wow, my system is just like yours. The key is the daily review and
transcription to a digital format (in my case, a big textfile with a rigid
date format for everything, Google Calendar for appointments, Habitica for
TODOs).

Like bullet journaling, the review ensures that I actually see what I've
written. The searchable digital copy can be hugely helpful later. It also adds
the possibility of recording daily metrics to be parsed and made into charts.

It's truly the best of both worlds: paper to record, digital to archive.

(I'm about to hit 50 Field Notes in just under five years of doing this. I
plan to do a write-up of my system now that I have a pretty good idea of what
does and does not work for me.)

~~~
Touche
I'd be interested in reading about your system.

What I like about Field Notes is that I can quickly write down thoughts and
come back to them later --- if I want. It isn't rigorous which I think is
_key_ to productivity. The problem with todo apps is they become jobs that you
need to complete.

With paper notes there's no pressure to complete anything. Sure, I keep a todo
list in my field notes, and every day I create a new list, some of which
carries over from the previous day and some does not. I don't feel pressure to
complete anything, and paper is what makes that possible (nothing is
_permanent_ , just a checkmark in time).

~~~
djhworld
> The problem with todo apps is they become jobs that you need to complete.

Yep. I read this the other day
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/why-
time-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/why-time-
management-is-ruining-our-lives) and somewhat agree !

------
tambourine_man
I hate paper. No searching and highly losable. I'm also way faster on a
keyboard than with a pen/pencil.

In fact, I had to fax a hand written letter (yeah, don't ask) the other day
and realized I'm now almost illiterate with this thing. I could draw very well
as a kid, but my handwriting was always pitiful. But after years of neglect,
the thing was illegible. I pity the poor person that would have to decifer the
hieroglyphs.

In sum, good riddance paper.

~~~
josefresco
"I'm also way faster on a keyboard"

This is sort of the point of pen/paper - slows you down, makes you more
contemplative. Plus, with a little practice I'm sure your handwriting would
improve.

~~~
tambourine_man
I practiced through my whole childhood and teens in school, it probably only
got worse over the years as I managed to write faster with less care.

------
mark_l_watson
Great article. One of the brightest tech colleagues I ever worked with used a
moleskin notebook, always kept it with him.

I bought a moleskin notebook for myself, but then my granddaughter started
drawing in it, and I wanted to leave it as she left it. After reading this
article I am going to buy another.

I have always used yellow pads to brainstorm for new projects, but I later
toss my notes and drawings. Using permanent notebooks seems like a better
idea.

~~~
djhworld
Personally I'd recommend not buying a moleskine, the quality of the paper
seems to have dramatically gone down the hill over the years to the point
where you're getting ink bleeding through the paper.

I'm a big fan of the Rhodia notebooks with Clairefontaine paper :)

~~~
groby_b
They're nice for journaling. If you need to organize things a bit more, I'd
recommend Leuchtturm 1917. Very high quality paper, dotted, line numbers,
comes with an index. It's really quite lovely.

Both run circles around moleskine, which by now mostly coasts on the name.

------
karmajunkie
I have started two new note taking practices recently: learning shorthand and
sketchnotes. Sketchnotes I've seen fairly frequently around here, but not much
mention of shorthand.

My goal with both is that A) I hate taking notes on a computer; B) I'm trying
to increase retention, which I'm finding the sketchnotes definitely helps
with; C) I need a better way of keeping up in meetings, and writing longhand
just isn't cutting it. I'm not far enough along with the shorthand, but I'm
curious if anybody else around here uses it.

Shorthand method: [https://www.amazon.com/GREGG-Shorthand-Manual-
Simplified/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/GREGG-Shorthand-Manual-
Simplified/dp/0070245487/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485184869&sr=8-1&keywords=gregg+shorthand)

Sketchnoting: [https://www.amazon.com/Sketchnote-Handbook-illustrated-
visua...](https://www.amazon.com/Sketchnote-Handbook-illustrated-visual-
taking/dp/0321857895/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485184910&sr=8-1&keywords=sketchnotes)

------
eb0la
I really like paper systems like David Seah Printable Ceo:
[http://davidseah.com/node/the-resourcetime-
tracker/](http://davidseah.com/node/the-resourcetime-tracker/)

Really good for project status and 100% paper-based.

------
JulianMorrison
"Paper" used to mean endless soul-destroying reams of office printout, or
before that, typed memos. And thank goodness, that seems to be receding.

The new "paper" isn't really the same thing. Like handwriting, woodblock
printing, and the making of books from hand-inked parchment, it is receding
into a handicraft.

~~~
keithpeter
Yes, but in the era before the reams of printout, we had notebooks produced by
local stationery printers in styles that varied shop to shop. I miss that
local choice and small scale production.

UK: anyone remember the hard backed board notebooks with marbled covers and
canvas spines in around 10 by 8 inch format?

~~~
refset
> anyone remember the hard backed board notebooks with marbled covers and
> canvas spine

Yes! Although my only encounter with them was when they were handed out for
use as "lab books" during university. They certainly felt like a night-and-day
upgrade over whatever was given out in school classrooms. Tuition fees well
invested...

------
iamatworknow
There definitely is an appeal to the analog and the idea of slowing down to be
more creative and productive.

Photography is a hobby of mine. I own a Nikon D500, which is one of Nikon's
flagship professional DSLR cameras. It can shoot at 10 frames per second with
a buffer of 200 shots. The storage cards hold thousands of images. All of this
is great when you're shooting high-speed action where every shot in a short
time frame counts, but it also means there's very little risk in each shot. So
if you take 900 pictures and only 9 are keepers it's no big deal. I shoot in
RAW mode so any type of color and lighting adjustments can be made in post,
and the resolution's high enough that I can crop for a good composition after
the fact.

But recently I've decided to get into plain old fashioned 35mm film
photography. The equipment is all still relatively inexpensive, but the film
costs $5-10 per roll of 24 or 36 exposures. Then you either have to send the
film out to be developed, which can take days or weeks (since there are very
few places that do it in house anymore), or you can develop it yourself (as I
have started to do) which involves an hour long process mixing chemicals,
making sure everything's the right temperature, shaking and stirring, drying
and cutting, then finally scanning the processed film. Each shot has more
risk, and so you take more time and compose more carefully, which makes the
end result that much better. I've found it to be incredibly enjoyable and
rewarding.

~~~
ar15saveslives
You can buy a 1Gb SD card for every photo session, and throw it to garbage
after it's full. Don't lie to yourself, you just like film and paper itself,
and all that stuff and smells around the process. :-) (me too)

~~~
iamatworknow
Ah, ya got me! I just love that grain, but I haven't started printing yet.
Unfortunately my darkroom (read: bathroom) isn't quite big enough for that --
a larger bathroom will be a must in my next apartment.

------
0xCMP
In a world moving to mobile and the web I think the problem is there is no
solution as powerful as org-mode. Almost every time I see a link like this I
see (and think+agree) that org-mode is amazing and solves this. Great.

Except you need to use Emacs. And it's NOT user friendly. Evernote is mucher
easier. Todoist is much more integrated. etc. But those things are _actually
worse_ than org-mode.

We need a sort of org-mode for the web.

------
Karunamon
Every now and then, it seems a thread of luddism creeps through the geek
psyche - and here we see it again. For all the benefits being talked up by the
authors and the posters here, a few things are being overlooked:

* Paper isn't searchable. Say whatever you want about how it lets you clear your mind, but what use is all this information you're taking down if you can't easily locate it later?

* Paper media doesn't have adblock. If you want to talk about distraction...

* Paper media can't be reformatted to make the fine print less fine, or to fix an awful font choice or layout, etc.

* Paper is a pain to handle. Any serious amount of writing is going to require desks, filing cabinets, and so forth, more physical _stuff_ to organize other physical _stuff_ , when an _entire lifetime_ of plaintext notes could fit on a MicroSD card of modest capacity.

* Paper isn't safe. The aforementioned MicroSD card can be trivially backed up an indefinite number of times and rendered immune to fire, theft, kids, angry exes, acts of God, acts of Cthulu, and pets. And not to mention, encryption. While you can, technically, RSA encrypt your paperwork by hand[1], it's almost certainly not an efficient use of your time.

I've no doubt that these hard copy systems work for the people that say it
works, but I can't help but imagine there's a certain irrational rejection of
technology happening, borne out of a refusal to leave the comfort zone when
even something ridiculously easy like Simplenote or Notational Velocity would
provide actual efficiency gains.

1:
[http://sergematovic.tripod.com/rsa1.html](http://sergematovic.tripod.com/rsa1.html)

~~~
TheOneTrueKyle
Thoughts are more than just letters and punctuations. I can't write down the
majority of things in my head with just letters and punctuation.

Seems like language is getting in the way of writing down thoughts when you
are relying on a screen and a qwerty keyboard as your only choice of input.

------
jordache
Ha ironically I thought they were talking about 53's Paper app

~~~
james_pm
I figured it was Dropbox Paper...which is a killer app, although nothing close
to being "the" killer app.

------
SeanDav
It can be much better to write down notes, rather than typing. The reason, is
that writing is slow and therefore forces one to analyse and summarize at
origin, rather than just blasting it out, almost verbatim by typing.

~~~
Tjwilson92
I (largely) agree with your point, that doing things by hand limits your
capacity to record lots of things, and brings the mind-set of "I can only
write down so much, how can I distil it?"

There's decreasingly less time pressure on learners - in and out of formal
education. Note-taking from written sources, or recordings (video or audio)
means there's less rush to take notes right there and then.

The processes of analysis and comprehension are slow, and so probably aren't
best considered at one event, e.g. taking notes. The average person isn't
writing something down once, then fully understanding it, no matter how slowly
they write. Even improved retention requires revisiting material, and
comprehension or synthesis require application and evaluation of the material.

------
lawless123
I always find it far easier when working on personal software projects to
sketch out ideas on a notepad.

From drawings to pseudocode it all seems far easier.

~~~
FroshKiller
When I get assigned a new feature to implement, I take the spec and write out
my plan for implementation in longhand on paper. It makes me spend more time
considering every aspect.

------
pka
Often, when I need to get familiar with a particularly tricky piece of code, I
print it out and start annotating the printout, drawing arrows between
dependent functions, visualizing data structures, algorithms and data flow,
simplifying fragments in the margins, highlighting important stuff with
different colors.

For fragments of code where search is not needed this is just such a superior
experience. I dream of some day being able to do the same in a code editor
with i.e. diagrams in comments or graphical annotations right there in the
code.

The same applies to writing code. Being able to visualize hard-to-describe
concepts on a piece of paper makes the overall algorithm as well as early
design mistakes and edge cases much more obvious.

When I'm writing just text (todo lists, product ideas, whatever) and being
able to easily edit, archive or search through the text a normal editor is a
much better choice, but I'm not gonna ditch paper anytime soon.

------
philippoi
Not really technology-free; retrogressive rather.

~~~
icebraining
Yeah, it's always interesting how we stop considering certain things as
"technology" once enough time passes. Yet anyone reading _I, Pencil_ would be
hard pressed to consider it an unprocessed product of the Earth.

~~~
cableshaft
Thanks for mentioning _I, Pencil_. I hadn't encountered that before and found
it very interesting.

Link for anyone else interested:
[http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html)

------
doikor
Is there something wrong with me when I'm the opposite? I can't even read my
own handwriting all that well :(

I just write everything in notepad (or vim/emacs) and store the plain text
files on my server (and take some backups)

~~~
tshadley
Me too! The speed and efficiency of typing, editing, saving, searching, how
can paper compete with that?

Vim just needs a graphics plugin and we're set.

~~~
brennen
There's DrawIt:

[http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=40](http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=40)

...but really I'd like to figure out a good workflow for dropping screenshots
and MyPaint sketches into vimwiki diary entries.

------
jankotek
From article it seems that real productivity killer are the social media.

~~~
davnn
The real productivity killer is multi-tasking and in my opinion the problem
with using digital media is that it's too effortless to start multi-tasking.

There are already apps that restrict yourself to certain programs or websites
- that might be a solution for people having trouble with multi-tasking.

I can't imagine writing on paper that's for sure.

------
wyc
Trying to remove technology from our lives seems to be a current trend. Don't
hate technology just because it's technology. Instead, we should think about
what new undesirable behaviors it introduces and how to address those deeper
issues. I quite like my phone, but I also value setting it aside as much as
possible when in the pleasure of someone's company. I don't recommend we
backpedal on important advances in sanitation, sustainable power, etc. just
because the transistor counts are getting too high.

------
amelius
It lacks a good undo/redo feature.

Unless you scan your work, erase stuff on your computer, and then print it.

~~~
skrebbel
I warmly recommend a mechanical pencil with a relatively soft lead and a
little eraser on the back. If you write softly with soft lead, erasing is very
little effort.

~~~
FreezerburnV
The Frixion line of pens is also useful for this. They might be somewhat
limited as to what you can get outside of Japan, but a site like Jet Pens
should be able to fix any deficiencies. (Eg: didn't know that they made
highlighters with Frixion ink until a recent trip to Japan, where they have
these pens literally everywhere)

~~~
rhinoceraptor
I've heard horror stories of students using those on an exam, and the teacher
leaving the exam in a hot car, which 'erases' the heat sensitive ink.

------
Zigurd
The article if a mixed bag. I use a combination of paper and electronic note-
taking. Being dogmatic about paper is as nearsighted as trumpeting some
specific software solution.

For example, the article states, correctly, that whiteboards dominate
workplace collaborative text and drawing. It is also true that electronic
whiteboards are a repeated failure over multiple product generations. But this
ignores the ubiquity of smartphone cameras. Now people take pictures of
whiteboards and share the images and transcribe the important text.

Cameras have mostly superseded dedicated document scanning machines. Checks,
receipts, signed NDAs, etc. are often managed using document imaging, but the
document imaging product category has largely dissolved into our smartphones
and apps.

I'm not picky about software. I used to use any text editor to make lists, and
have settled on Keep for electronic lists. Having reusable shopping lists
makes Keep a winner over paper for that application. But I also keep a pocket
pen and a small notebook in my pockets. There are times I can't keep up with
note taking. There are also times when I need to extract a short list of tasks
to be done in a morning, and doing that on paper is usually the easiest way to
do it.

------
noir_lord
One of my "when I have some time" projects is to make a 'better' (in that it
fits my usage case) scanner for all my notebooks, I want something intelligent
that I just put a pad under and it takes an image, converts it to pdf and
stores it and that detects when I turn the page and takes the next image
rather than having to press a button (though that's an option with a floor
button).

I have the design in my head I just need to build one.

------
archagon
I'm 100% onboard with the paper paradigm for my project-related note-taking,
but I've moved over to using GoodNotes with my iPad and Pencil[1] over actual
paper and graphite. It's basically as good as the real thing, but you also get
a pristine PDF version of your notebook once you're done with your doodling.
No doubt that there's a charm to leafing through a pile of your ragged, dog-
eared Moleskines as an occasional nostalgia trip, but I've found myself
returning to my old notebooks far more often now that they're sitting in a
folder on my Dropbox.

In searching for an app like this, one of my main requirements was that the
app produce standard data as output, so that if it shut down or the company
went out of business all my journals would still be safe. Fortunately, the
PDFs GoodNotes spits out are basically pristine copies of its internal data
model: vector graphics, multiple layers (including one for the paper texture),
and even hidden OCR text.

[1]: [http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2016/08/30/on-the-wonders-
of-d...](http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2016/08/30/on-the-wonders-of-digital-
journaling/)

~~~
goerz
I also moved to GoodNotes entirely. It combines all the benefits of paper and
digital: it's exactly as flexible as paper, but also editable. This is a huge
deal: I can refine my handwritten notes by easily moving things around, adding
paragraphs, etc. I can also reorder and move pages around between notebooks
easily, and it's fully searchable. the iPad Pro having the same size as a
sheet of paper, the Apple Pencil being the first stylus that has low enough
latency to make you forget it's not a real pen, and well-designed software
like GoodNotes really has been a revolutionary combination for me.

------
rhelsing
I use paper everyday but am getting tired of buying expensive notebooks and
taking pictures of my pages. Interesting that this would be on the front page
today. I just impulse preordered a remarkable tablet:
([https://getremarkable.com](https://getremarkable.com)). I was experiencing
some buyers remorse. Seeing this article lifted my spirits substantially.

------
losteverything
From my genealogical perspective use paper, please!!!

Writing is a true anchor.

Future generations will enjoy your handwritten, authentic writing.

If ancestry .com is bad now for linking generations (where blind faith can
often lead to incorrect trees) wait till all our electronic words is available
100 years from now. Writing will be greatly appreciated by your yet unborn
great great grandchildren.

------
eddd
Paper is not only bad for but also harmful.

You actually have to cut a tree to make a notepad. I hope in 100 years people
will look at the "paper age" as we do see the era when people carving
information in stones.

Why paper is worse:

* you cannot easily edit/alter information that has been already created

* it is hard to replicate and distribute

* version control is non existent (except book keeping)

* due to the replication problem and accessibility the information on it is not durable (at least not as durable as s3)

* collaboration is hard and not possible over the long distance

* security it terrible (even with all the stamps and hand signatures)

I know that paper might sound tempting sometimes, but I blame the schooling
system which enforces kids to use it. We are trained to use paper first that's
why it might seems easier. To learn how not to use paper (I don't use it at
all for over 3 years) is really hard, it requires to change the workflows,
mindset and attitude towards the information. But at the end of the day, it is
really worth it.

~~~
foldr
>due to the replication problem and accessibility the information on it is not
durable (at least not as durable as s3)

Paper records can last for hundreds of years without the support of any
expensive infrastructure. I wouldn't bet on things that are stored on s3 being
available hundreds of years from now.

~~~
eddd
I think it is called a positive selection bias.

 _Some_ of paper lasted for hundreds of years. How much of information didn't
survive during that time period?

Information on s3 might not last for hundreds of years, but AFAIK the Voyager
satellite didn't ship the information about our specie on paper.

~~~
nickpsecurity
It seems to be default when you count governments and businesses. Those have
lasted decades even when they didn't want individual records to on occasion.
Whereas, the current systems use individual components that break faster with
huge damage loss per square inch provided through services that charge you &
try to cause lock-in more over time. The competition for those services is
also intense in a way that often results in firms going under with a few
surviving.

Whereas, the older tech that lasted so long used simple components on older,
process nodes with careful engineering practices. The better ones were also
extremely costly with Voyager being a good example at $800+ million.

------
no_wizard
I still use paper to model application modes or write quick snippets of code
when I'm stuck on something in particular, like a function. There seems to be
some (to me at least) benefit to taking my mind away from the screen and doing
the same task on paper that allows me to have some breakthroughs.

I will say however, since I got an iPad Pro, I been using an App called
Notebook by Zoho

[https://www.zoho.com/notebook/](https://www.zoho.com/notebook/)

I have to say, it simulates the paper experience enough with the pencil that I
seem to get the same benefit. I really enjoy it and I can still sync my notes
across devices and it supports simple text edits checklists inserting photos
and links and other cool things. I have to say its pretty darn good and I seem
to get the same focus experience using this as I do when I use actual paper.

Maybe its the fact that when you are writing like this its the slowdown
effect?

~~~
archagon
I use an app called GoodNotes for the exact same reason[1], except in an even
more analog way: no typed text, checklists, or anything else — just writing
and sketching. Bonus: pristine PDF notebooks (covers and all) in my Dropbox
once I'm done with my work!

[1]: [http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2016/08/30/on-the-wonders-
of-d...](http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2016/08/30/on-the-wonders-of-digital-
journaling/)

------
reubenswartz
I've tried various approaches and realized that I'm trying to solve different
problems in different situations.

For example, in some meetings, everyone types at a keyboard, but in others,
only paper note taking is socially acceptable. In these cases, capture happens
on paper, but I need to transcribe to an electronic format if I want to use
these notes later. (I take a lot of notes if I want to remember anything these
days, and I tag them for easy lookup.)

In some discussions, sharing a whiteboard or even a notebook is the best way
to hash out ideas. (I'll just snap a picture with my phone if there's
something I want to keep.)

I've tried to get away from paper entirely, but the above scenarios make it
hard. Plus, there is something nice about writing on paper.

In a recent meeting, a prospect was talking about how he switched from paper
to iPad Pro + Apple Pencil, and he loved it. (He also has much better hand
writing than me.) Anyone else tried this?

~~~
oddlyaromatic
Haven't tried that but I've used something called Rocketbook that is a
notebook with features on each page that an app can recognize and easily
capture and upload pages to specific destinations. So I can take notes by hand
and still have a digital record with don't rudimentary tagging. Then you can
reuse the notebook. Requires a specific pen and the right smartphone but to me
this is totally worth it and I'm not stuck with no notes when I forget the
notebook!

------
programminggeek
This is not surprising to me at all. I tried a ton of notes and todo list
tracking apps and they all sucked for one reason or another and always ended
up in not being the right tool for the job.

Eventually, my friend and I ended up designing our own notebooks and crafting
our initial prototypes by hand until we came up with something that we use
everyday.

It's up for sale on Amazon and we have a lot of happy customers. It's not
changing the world and we aren't VC backed or anything fancy like that, but
it's great to make something real that people love to use.

If you're curious about any of the process, I'd be happy to answer any
questions and if you want to check out the notebooks they are available
here... [https://www.amazon.com/Unbranded-Pocket-Notebook-3-pack-
Note...](https://www.amazon.com/Unbranded-Pocket-Notebook-3-pack-
Notebooks/dp/B00ZGE1914/)

------
uselpa
To me paper is a temporary GTD-style "Inbox" which quickly captures draft
information until it can be put into a trusted _electronic_ system. I guess I
am too hooked on backups, tagging and searching, as well as the possibility of
encrypting sensitive information.

------
ryderpcarroll
For those interested in the some of the underlying philosophy of the Bullet
Journal®, check out the TED talk that just went live:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym6OYelD5fA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym6OYelD5fA)

------
dbuxton
Came here expecting to find recognition for Dropbox Paper, which is pretty
much my favourite app. Ironically, mainly because it's not very flexible and
doesn't give you many options around appearance, so saves faffing around that.

(Good work Hackpad team btw).

------
sengork
Free form paper still fills in the gap where computers/tablets/phones are too
cumbersome and just slow the process down.

Sometimes the simplest tool happens to be the most effective tool (paperless
office hasn't fully happened yet).

Another aspect to consider is the process of writing often leads to insights
that you may not have stumbled upon whilst using a keyboard/touch screen for
writing the same message. This may be due to the speed of writing relative to
the speed of creative thought. It may also stem out of less distractions
encountered during the paper writing process vs a busy computer screen.

------
erikpukinskis
I think the reason digital doodling hasn't taken off yet is the UIs are too
complicated. They are designed for professionals and have lots of ways to do
things.

And the reason for that is we don't have a good drawing layer library yet. If
developers could throw together simple drawing apps in a weekend, we could
test more interactions and maybe find one that holds a candle to a pen.

Remember: it took a long time to develop the modern pen. If we were still
dipping feathers in inkwells I suspect this thread might be more forgiving
toward digital drawing UIs.

------
Ezhik
For note taking, I generally stick to first writing things down on paper, then
copying them to OneNote later. I figure this gives me the best of both worlds,
I get the better retention from handwriting, get to review my notes as I copy
them, and get the notes in a format I can always access.

Organization, though... Man, no matter how hard I try, I just can't stick to
any organization system, paper or digital. I wanted to bullet journal, I
really did, but I have notebooks worth of failed organizing attempts. It's
sad.

------
brooksdra
It seems the process of writing notes longhand instead of typing into a
computer may have a positive effect on the retention and understanding of
information by students. This link is to a 2014 study by Pam A. Mueller and
Prof. Danial Oppenheimer.

[http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797614524581](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797614524581)

------
closed
I've been setting aside an hour in the mornings for studying math, and using a
paper notebook has been plain delightful. I just leave my computer somewhere,
and scribble down problems on scrap paper. Once I've worked them out a bit, I
put them in the notebook. There's no search/edit, but it's quick and lets me
glance at what I've done over the previous month easily.

------
criddell
So, what's your favorite notebook and pen combination?

I ordered a bunch of pens from Jet Pens a year ago and my favorite also ended
up being one of the cheapest - the Pilot Hi-Tec-C.

My favorite notebook used to be an engineering notebook. It had a grid on one
side of the page and college-ruled lines on the other and had a spiral bound
spine. Not sure if I have a favorite any more. I do use a lot of index cards.

~~~
mrob
Favorite pen: Lamy Safari fountain pen with EF nib, and Noodler's Black ink.
I've been using this for many years and it's always reliable. The grip is
comfortable and the construction feels solid (it's survived being dropped a
few times with no real damage). It's reasonably priced and meant as a
practical tool, not a fashion statement like some fountain pens. And Noodler's
Black ink is waterproof and will write on the cheapest paper without problems.
I've tried many other fountain pens and inks but I always come back to this
combination because it's so trouble-free.

Favorite pencil: Rotring 500 0.5mm, with Pilot Neox 4B lead. I never much
liked pencils before I found this lead. It's the softest I've found in 0.5mm,
softer than most brands of 4B. It lets you write with very little pressure so
it feels more like using a pen. The Rotring 500 has the same solid and
reliable mechanism as the famous Rotring 600, but a plastic body so it's
cheaper and lighter. But despite being a good pencil, I can't recommend it as
strongly as the Lamy Safari because of one major flaw - it has no end cap. I
reserve it for desktop use because the end pipe is completely unprotected and
fragile.

I have no strong preferences for paper and IMO a good writing implement should
work with any common paper.

~~~
criddell
I have a Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen. It's a nice pen but I don't use it
for a few reasons. First, the ink evaporates very quickly. Secondly, the ink
is always uniformly dark. I like that I can vary the heaviness of lines by
varying the force I use as I write. Third, they are messier.

~~~
BeetleB
Interesting: I own the same pen, but do not have the issues you listed. Mine
is a Medium, but light inks remain light (i.e. the flow is not thick).

If you meant that you want the thickness of the ink to vary with angle, then
yes - most modern fountain pens are designed that way. However, they do also
make the "italic" type ones.

~~~
criddell
With ball points, I can vary the heaviness of lines by altering how hard I
press the tip into the paper. Very light pressure yields very faint lines. A
fountain pen is uniformly dark, which I suppose what most people want for
writing.

~~~
BeetleB
Yep - that's true. With some fountain pens, you can vary with angle, but not
as much control as with pressure.

Personally, one of the reasons I like fountain pens is that I don't have to
apply pressure. :-)

------
jwtadvice
Another advantage to paper is that you can invent your own notation (this
seems to be the primary innovation of "bullet journaling).

The full 2D space and the relationship of symbols is available to you on
paper, whereas on the computer we are still struggling to enable this type of
expression.

There's some question about whether Feynman would have invented Feynman
diagrams had he been restricted to Latex.

------
bambax
"Suits are back"??

------
miguelrochefort
This is ridiculous. Are people this short-sighted? I keep hearing about people
going back to paper agenda or simple text files for todos. I would understand
if they said they couldn't find a better solution, but many of them claim that
this is an improvement over any digital solution.

Again, nobody seems to be tackling this. Not even YC mentions this problem.

~~~
theonemind
You seem to have implicitly made a jumbled mass of claims without supporting
any of them. I can't quite tell what claims. It seems you contend that you
need more complicated solutions for a better task tracking solution than paper
or text files can offer. At some point, you reach the point of not getting any
more marginal utility by making your planning system more complicated. The
mental energy you put into the dealing with the machinery of your task
tracking system could go into actually solving the problem. Bill Gates,
shockingly, built Microsoft without a GTD planner. Trump became president of
the united states without one. I don't find this premise at all convincing.

Paper, as mentioned by the article, can stimulate different parts of the
brain. No app can match that.

You seem to react with shock to the notion without addressing the actual
shortcomings in any constructive way.

~~~
miguelrochefort
> Bill Gates, shockingly, built Microsoft without a GTD planner. Trump became
> president of the united states without one. I don't find this premise at all
> convincing.

I can walk all the way to Argentina. Does that make planes any less useful?

> Paper, as mentioned by the article, can stimulate different parts of the
> brain. No app can match that.

Bullshit.

> You seem to react with shock to the notion without addressing the actual
> shortcomings in any constructive way.

I can't believe nobody has managed to tackle perhaps the most important
problem (GTD) using computers. I truly can't accept that this is true. I must
be missing something.

You are correct. My comment was not constructive at all. There's nothing I
want more than a discussion about making the world better through proper GTD
tools.

------
WalterBright
Taking notes works far better on paper. Then scan the notes into the computer,
and you get the best of both.

------
rshm
For past several years I have Command+W mapped to sublime text opening text
file named wiki for any notes on computer. Mostly copy paste and ctrl+f.

For any TODO or small notes i fall back to half sized index cards 3"x2.5".

For brainstorm use yellow legal pads with pilot V5 and tear them off once
done.

------
jxy
I have a feeling that when paper came out, parchment had probably been praised
as "the real 'killer surface'".

By the way, writing in sand is really much better than writing with a chunk of
graphite. Clean hands!

------
sampl
We made a parody video of 53's Paper app video.

It's making the same point:
[https://vimeo.com/127749826](https://vimeo.com/127749826)

------
gbuk2013
Obligatory DIY Planner link :)

[http://www.diyplanner.com/templates/official](http://www.diyplanner.com/templates/official)

------
mentos
Could anyone see a flexible piece of LED display with the surface texture of a
piece of paper ever being a product? (iPaper) ?

~~~
catshirt
yes of course.

------
satai
My 2 eurocents

Paper:

\+ comfortable (for majority of people, not for everybody)

\+ easy to add math or graphics to text

\+ cool

\+ supereasy to understand

\- hard to edit (frixion helps a bit)

\- no search

\- not readily available when compared with a smartphone

\- hard to backup or share

------
jeron
I thought Paper referred to the Facebook app that shut down a couple years
back

------
sloam
I can't use paper since my wrist injury. Writing now get's sudden jolting
punctuation of pain, depending on the motion.

Typing on the other hand is painless for me. So now I use a combination of
Dropbox Paper, OneNote (in office) and plaintext. And like others have said,
Ctrl+F is gold!

------
known
I believe "toothbrush" is the real killer app

------
davidw
I'm dismayed they didn't get in touch with us at
[http://73primenumbers.com/](http://73primenumbers.com/) for a quote!

------
cr0sh
I think one thing this article hits on may be spot-on - at least in my recent
experience - they mention this study:

[http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614524581](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614524581)

When I enrolled into the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree, I made
the conscious decision to try taking "dead tree" notes.

Before, when I had done other machine learning MOOCs, I had taken notes using
other methods, but I found that I didn't retain as much of the information
after the courses were completed. So this time, having read that paper in the
past, I decided to try longhand note taking instead.

So far, I have found it wonderful - for the most part. Sometimes it is
tedious. Overall, it has worked out well for me.

For my notes, I use 100 sheet single-subject grid notebooks with micro-perf
tear-out sheets. I use pencil for my notes, and when needed, fine-tipped
sharpie pens in four colors (red, green, blue, black) for when I need the
contrast (useful for graphs or emphasis). I write on one side of each page
only.

When I complete the course, I intend to write up an index, and move the
notebooks into three-ring binders. I might even scan the pages and turn them
into PDFs or something.

I have also found that a form of the Cornell method of note-taking has been
very useful as well; although it isn't as conducive to some uses - but I've
made it work well enough.

Are there downsides? Yes. The main downside, from the standpoint of a MOOC, is
the amount of time it takes to take the notes. This makes each "lesson" in the
course take much longer to complete due to the transcription of the notes (I
am not quite fast enough, or have the skill, to transcribe from video as I
watch it - I'm still trying to figure out a solution to that - because trying
to condense the information about machine learning as it is talked about and
such isn't an easy task, even with the ability to pause).

A secondary downside (though maybe one that is my issue partly) is when I have
written my note titles with one particular title (and more importantly, the
lesson number), and then the MOOC admins (or whomever) decide to add a new
lesson "in the middle" or alter things to re-number the lessons slightly. Now,
your notes don't match up to the syllabus and courses, which can be a real
pain to review things. So far, in my current course, this has happened twice.
Ugh.

But as far as retention of the material? I think this time around I have much
better retention and understanding than I gained from my previous ventures in
the same space. For that, it's been worth the issues I have experienced.

------
marvindanig
There is also one more thing to factor in: freedom from a bunch of weirdos
(both pigs and wolves) who want to track every move I make, every purchase I
do or every interest that I share over the wire.

Thank you paper. I can shred, burn or let you decompose in the rain to enforce
my right of _forgetability_!

------
matchagaucho
For me, paper is necessary for mindmaps, or any task that exercises spatial
intelligence and building relationships between concepts.

------
gulperxcx
So we're reverting back to killing trees.

~~~
kagamine
What price a PC compared to a farmed forest?

~~~
dmoo
As I always say, trees for paper are a crop with a long growth cycle. If you
don't need the paper who will plant the trees?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
What proportion of planting is for paper, I'd expect wood used in construction
to be a greater demand?

~~~
erikbye
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
(FAO), globally around 40 percent of the annual industrial wood harvest is
processed for paper and paperboard.

The pulp and paper industry is the fourth largest industrial user of energy,
consuming 6.4 EJ in 2005, and a significant emitter of greenhouse gas (source
EIA report 2008).

Paper consumption has risen by 400% in the past 40 years. 35% of trees
harvested are due to paper manufacture.

6.5+ million trees were cut down to make 16 billion paper cups used by US
consumers, only for coffee, in 2006.

Paper waste accounts for up to 40% of total waste in the United States. 71.6
tons per year.

Sources: Wikipedia, WWF, FAO

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Thanks for that. Crazy 'cups' statistics.

