14 ms·

Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

243 points by pgcm1 6y ago

wealthyyy 6y ago
Memorizing is root of all evil. Understanding is more important.
pgcm1 6y ago
I never knew why I unconsciously chose analog over digital in those cases, but it turns out there's a scientific explanation. When we write, we make our brains go through an abstraction process - separating something from a whole to analyze it by itself.- According to neurologist Audrey Van Der Meer, "It seems that keyboards and pens bring into play different underlying neurological processes. This may not be surprising since handwriting/drawing is a complex task that requires the integration of various skills." I wrote a full article about it in the link above.
- com2kid 6y ago
  Every time this topic comes up, I am curious to see a cross-generational study. I'd also be interested in seeing the result of taking notes with a less linear note taking tool, such as OneNote and its infinite canvas, compared to pure linear note taking. Now for most math classes, and other subjects that involve lots of diagrams, hand writing (digital or analog) is better! (Ignoring the people who are so good at LaTeX they can do complex math equations) IMHO the largest issue with modern teaching is the use of slides. I was going to college just as the transition to PowerPoint was happening, and wow was the degradation in quality of teaching noticeable. One of my profs, whose class I had a low opinion of, used slides for all his lectures. One day the projector broke down and he had to teach on the chalk board. It was amazing! The quality of his lecture improved dramatically when he was able to go back and make changes to past diagrams, or change examples on the fly to dive deeper into something the students had difficulty grasping. The other problem with PowerPoint is that it goes by faster than students can take notes! If the prof and the students are both writing notes, they are on (mostly) equal ground, ignoring that profs have decades of experience writing quickly.
  - krrrh 6y ago
    There was also the transitionary period where teachers and profs would print slides onto transparencies and project those onto a screen. The overhead projectors sometimes had a roll of plastic that they could write on with a felt marker either over the slides or as a blank canvas. A bit of googling reveals that many primary schools still use these, and not all have transitioned to “smart boards”. It was a good trade off, and it’s kind of surprising that the rise of tablets and styluses hasn’t seen this hybrid model return.
    - mikestew 6y ago
      It's been over 15 years since I was scribbling on PowerPoint slides while my Tablet PC was hooked to the projector. I'll ask my spouse if her MS Surface supports such functionality, because I found it pretty darned handy at the time. I have little need for such a feature anymore, so I don't know if an iPad Pro w/stylus can do that with Keynote (not without looking it up).
      - SirGiggles 6y ago
        Apple Pencil is able to markup on Keynote slides [0] as well as Powerpoint (should be like OneNote based on a App Store article) [1] [0]: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/keynote-ipad/tance6afafdd/ipados https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/keynote-ipad/tance6afa... [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1458378181 https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1458378181
    - asdff 6y ago
      In the 2010s my organic chemistry professor would use one of those projectors and a sheet of blank printer paper, and would just write out chemical formulas all class. We basically all took notes together along with the professor each lecture, which was great because that meant he could never speed up too much since he had to spend time writing everything down, too. Then everything would go up online afterwards if you needed to refer to the professors notes from that day.
  - BitwiseFool 6y ago
gentleman11 6y ago
I disagree. Writing is helpful for thinking things through, but the writing itself doesn’t do anything. I used to take a lot of notes to remember things and it can just act as an excuse to not think hard. It’s the hard thought and periodic review that cements things
- anyfoo 6y ago
  As I elaborated in another comment, not just the act of writing things down, but the actual very visual recollection of how I wrote it down and where on the page I did helps a lot. I don't know why it works that way, but it definitely does.
- _rpd 6y ago
  Yeah, the title should be "Handwriting helps particular kinds of people remember particular kinds of things"
  - anyfoo 6y ago
    There was a somewhat recent astonishing revelation that a lot of people are apparently unable to visualize things in their mind (which was interesting to both groups in different ways respectively), so I bet that if you don't visualize things in your mind, it won't help much with recollection.
    - ravi-delia 6y ago
      I think that Galton figured that one out at some point in the 1800s, no? There's a huge amount of variation in how precise your mind's eye is, from absolutely nothing to vague impressions to photo-real images.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - caddemon 6y ago
        IIRC it was dismissed by most people at the time though. I've only started to hear it discussed by people in psych/neuro academic departments in the last few years.
igammarays 6y ago
The Brain That Changes Itself. Life changing book. One of the surprising studies there shows how kids with all kinds of learning disabilities can be radically transformed just by being given cursive handwriting exercises. Brain development and activation under handwriting is measurable, and very different from typing or even printing.
- krrrh 6y ago
  One thing that stuck with me from that book was the notion that the fine motor control gained through the rote learning of handwriting might carry over into verbal fluency. iirc it was a speculative point in the book, and I wonder if that has been any research into it since then. It partly inspired me to relearn cursive as an adult using the Getty-Dubay italic. https://handwritingsuccess.com/write-now/ https://handwritingsuccess.com/write-now/
abduhl 6y ago
I think this post just barely misses the main reason which, in my opinion, makes writing a better medium for remembering. They mention that typing is faster and easier than writing but I think the real reason this impacts memory is because you have to reduce things into their smallest form in order to keep up (with the person speaking or your own thoughts). This act of condensing makes you internalize the words into concepts, and concepts are easier to recall.
- fastball 6y ago
  When I was just starting my current startup (a collaborative note-taking platform), I pored over a lot of studies on this subject because I wanted to make sure that if I was going to build a digital knowledge base / note-taking solution I would give our users their best shot at actually remembering what they were storing. In the end, your theory did seem to be the most frequently validated rationalization when it came to discrepancies between handwritten and typed notes. As you say, unless you can write in shorthand very few people are capable of writing at the speed of speech / thought, where as many people can easily type that fast. This requires you to be more thoughtful about what and how you record things with pen and paper, meaning you synthesize / summarize / compartmentalize the information as you go. This was sometimes compounded in environments involving a presentation / lecture slides, as digital note-takers frequently have a copy of the relevant presentation on their device, further reducing the amount of content they feel they need to record in some way and therefore reducing the amount of information synthesis that is happening. The best idea I could come up with to help encourage handwritten-like behavior when recording info on a computer was to move away from the document/bullet-point format and towards a "digital notecard" format, which encourages you to think about ideas as compartmentalized / discrete ideas rather than a thoughtless information dump. So that's what I built. But if you or anyone else has any good ideas about how to emulate the benefits of pen-and-paper on digital, I'm all ears!
dave_sid 6y ago
I handwrite my todo list at the start of everyday and scribble notes down when I’m in meetings and almost never look at them again. It definitely helps solidify things in my head for whatever reason. I’m not uptight or anything, it just seems to help me.
- alex_c 6y ago
  This is me. I've tried various note taking apps but I never stick with them for more than a few days. My notebook is everything. If I don't have it for any reason (most often: it ran out and need to buy a new one) my productivity actually takes a big hit. Basically: if I don't write it down, I probably won't get it done.
metalliqaz 6y ago
what the heck is "digital handwriting"?
- reificator 6y ago
  Presumably using something like an active stylus on a tablet? https://www.trustedreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2020/03/Press-render-Hero-wide-transparent.png https://www.trustedreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2... [1]:
JohnCohorn 6y ago
Current generations may perform better in various ways while handwriting because we grew up being forced to write by hand for many years while we were developing in childhood. I wonder if upcoming generations that grow up typing instead will perform the same way, or if they’ll do better taking typewritten notes.
anyfoo 6y ago
In my case at least, I noticed that remembering things has a strong "visual" component. I have nothing close to a photographic memory (I wish), but for example in university, I often remembered facts and formulas by also remembering where on a page they were. I wouldn't quite "read it off" the page in my mind, but just the visualization of the page helped getting to the fact, in a "oh yeah, that's where that was written down" kind of way. Today, I write down the most important dates and facts on pieces of paper or a little notebook, and just the strong, vivid, very visual recollection of me writing it down (and where) helps tremendously in remembering what was written down.
- krrrh 6y ago
  In university I used to take notes with lots of arrows between concepts, while constantly switching between coloured pens, sometimes with an explicit system in mind and sometimes more intuitively. I noticed that this also greatly aided my spatial memory and recall.
briandoll 6y ago
This is one of the reasons I've started to use the reMarkable tablet for taking notes. Sometimes I don't even look at them again, it's just a more efficient way to get the info into my head. I wrote more about my current workflow/stack here if anyone is interested (w/ some reMarkable hacks): https://briandoll.medium.com/personal-setup-for-getting-shit-done-in-2021-b6bdef7ad7f0 https://briandoll.medium.com/personal-setup-for-getting-shit...
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I take notes in a $.79 spiral paper notebook. When it fills up, I just scan it and get another one.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    Likewise, but I don't bother scanning it. I just throw it away and get another one off the pile. If it's important I'll transcribe it in the moment, but it's almost never that important.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      When I was in college, I'd write code in spiral notebooks (didn't have screen editors then). It's amusing to me to see those today.
  - briandoll 6y ago
    Absolutely. I did the same for a long time. I work with a bunch of companies every year, and having notes organized by client has been really helpful. That and a nice workflow to send notes/sketches/ideas from the notebook to a client via email is pretty nice. But definitely not for everybody.
  - SiVal 6y ago
    Can you recommend a quick, easy method for scanning all the pages? I like paper notebooks, too. Someday, I'd like to have an app that would let me turn any ordinary stack of scratch paper or notebook into a searchable PDF in under 5 minutes. I would finish a notebook and just put my phone on a gooseneck stand and turn the pages one at a time (not riffle) at one page per second or two, and it would know when to take the photos, which it would flatten, orient, and bind into a PDF of the notebook. It would maintain my handwritten pages but add an OCR'ed backstore of the text that could be used to create something like a table of contents, an index, and a fulltext search. I imagine some portion of that is already available, and the rest will be arriving anytime now.
WalterBright 6y ago
I found that out taking notes in college. It's pretty obvious :-)
samuell 6y ago
One aspect the article doesn't mention is spatiality, and how that aids memorizing. As you might know one very common technique used by memorizing masters is to place things you want to remember in some imagined 3D world. This effect is also something I've experienced strongly myself when listening to audiobooks while running. I figured I can actually remember the exact place along my running route in a nearby forest that I was listening to a particular passage in the book - and vice versa - going back in memory to a particular location immediately makes me start hearing memories from the book passages I listened to in that location! I think this aspect is at play a lot with handwriting as well. You are always writing in tangible places inside a notebook, while when typing things on the computer there is less of an immediate spatial location of each note. In any case that location will both be mostly the same for all notes (you sitting at the computer), and regarding any virtual spatiality of you computer desktop system, that will have a less tangible connection with your senses, (although any sense of spatiality surely can help a bit).
- cameronh90 6y ago
  During the pandemic, I have been listening to audiobooks while I’m programming. I don’t really listen to the content, it just makes me feel less lonely. But what I’ve found is that I end up associating code I’m writing to the audiobook I’m listening to at the time. Later on, when I work on that bit of code again, I replay the audiobook I was listening to when I wrote it, and it helps me remember how that code works.
- fatnoah 6y ago
  Very interesting! In college, I strongly experienced the phenomena of taking a test and not being able to remember the exact content, but could accurately remember the layout of the page that the data was on. I also got into the habit of creating 1 or 2 page cheat sheets for tests, whether I could use them in the test or not, and the spatial organization of the data seemed to correlate very directly with my ability to process and absorb the data.
  - samuell 6y ago
    Thanks! Interesting observation about the layout! Indeed, I also feel my most effective notes are the ones where I get a little creative with the layout, placing things out thoughtfully. (Also, going back and filling in with a lot of balloons with thoughts afterwards etc, to make each page a little customized).
olivermarks 6y ago
I find hand written lists are good for focusing, but if I'm in a store hours later shopping for a group of disparate objects (10 ft ladder, size 5 2.5 inch screws, plant pot etc etc) I find a digital list invaluable because I can remove the items I have got so far leaving a shorter list. I've found that unless I strike out items I somehow miss something on a long list. I know you can do this with a pen too but I've gone from wunderlist to the various google phone list tools and find them v useful
- bradstewart 6y ago
  Yea I actually draw little squares next to my todo items, and then fill them in when I complete the task. For some reason, I find that way easier to parse than a bunch of scratched out words. I also do that in my engineering notebooks--it makes to-dos stand out more from the rest of my notes.
  - olivermarks 6y ago
    Good idea, I'll remember that for the occasions when I do have a pen & paper list!
majormajor 6y ago
I find typing perfectly adequate for remembering things - in school if I was copying out notes I did just as well typing as handwritten, and could do it faster (and so get more repetition in) on a computer. Both blew away just reading or listening passively. However, for brainstorming or planning, which is a lot of what this article is talking about, the unbounded spatial component of paper (or a drawing app with stylus) is much better for me than the constrained nature of a word processor. Something like graphviz isn't bad for certain types of things, but anything that relies on mouse-based selection and dragging of things breaks my flow in a way that jotting a new note off to the edge of an open paper doesn't.
lightlyused 6y ago
For me it does in a way, but I still need to read my notes while the details are still fresh in my mind. The main reason is I'm a sloppy writer and I might not be able to make out my mess if I haven't reviewed it enough. Also, for small things like passwords, saying them 10 times helps me get over 'what was that again' hump.
whiddershins 6y ago
maybe It certainly seems plausible to me, in my personal experience, but this article is talking about something that may be true. This is another headline that is planting an idea in casual reader’s heads without explicitly mentioning it is in large part anecdotal and speculative.
mrtksn 6y ago
I find that it also helps me get over things. If there's something that I'm obsessing over or simply cannot get off my mind, I can write it down and it will go away. Throwing the piece of paper is optional. I think writing puts some kind of structure to your mental model, you process it at the time of writing and can move on to the next thing while preserving the output of the processing. The output tends to be some kind of map about where you can find it and short description about the nature of the thing you write down. It's almost as if you put the stuff of your "hot memory", the memory that is about the main process you operate on, into your visual memory. For some reason, typing on a computer doesn't have the same effect. It does have some effect but it's different.
ridaj 6y ago
Qui scribit bis legit
Imnimo 6y ago
>All of this makes me believe we need more time for our brains to adapt to writing on glass, or technology needs to advance enough so that writing on tablets feels like writing in a notebook. This strikes me as implausible. Did the earliest paper-writers (or parchment writers) not get the same benefit because their brains were adapted for cuneiform on clay tablets?
doliveira 6y ago
I don't even ever read back what I wrote. But I find I need to write down something to actually remember it. So it does fit with my experience.
john-tells-all 6y ago
Agree. I just passed a certificate by writing down all my study material for the past three weeks. It's a lot, but the act of writing things down really helps cement info into my brain.
dagmx 6y ago
I have a really hard time writing down notes while things are going on. I have very good memory but if I'm taking notes while something is happening, I often don't remember anything other than writing it down. If I don't take notes, my memory of events, topics and discussions is often far better. Writing things down post facto also does not help me much, other than I know where I wrote it. However I find the act of discussing a topic helps cement things. For me, the engagement with a subject is what really helps me remember things, and I suspect writing notes removes that.
sethammons 6y ago
Key quote: > This cognitive effort of condensing and translating into your own words is what facilitates learning. Which is why you could still do this with typing, but it's easy to avoid the cognitive effort of translating and condensing (and we tend toward cognitive laziness) and just type it verbatim because you can keep up. When I type notes (all the way back to college), it is in one ear, out the other (onto the page). The act of physically writing it down, and potentially a second pass to clean up the notes, is almost all I ever need to get something into working memory. Back in college, the third time I would look at my notes would be the morning of the test where I would just glance through them. Seeing the general shape of the text was often enough to trigger the recall.
jbverschoor 6y ago
Our biology teacher told us to not bring the text book. He wrote and drew everything on the blackboard, and we had to copy it by writing it down. Never had to learn anythings, and I still remember 90% of it, even visually. Remember that the great ones wrote a lot.
tombert 6y ago
Bit of a life-hack I picked up awhile ago is to "write the notes by hand, then type them out later". This has a few advantages. First, you basically get all the benefits listed in this article. Second, you get the advantage of repetition, and possibly correcting errors in your handwritten notes. Last, you have pretty notes to read off of later if you need to study for something, which is useful.
- caddemon 6y ago
  Yeah I do this for anything that's both important and complicated - it can be a slow process for me, but when typing things up I'll usually end up further refining my thoughts and coming up with new ideas, in addition to the benefits you mentioned. Although my handwriting is also hilariously bad, so it's kind of necessary for anything I anticipate needing to closely review in the future.
  - tombert 6y ago
    Fellow bad-handwriters unite! I forgot to mention that as another perk.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  Funny, I did the opposite for bar exam prep. I took notes on the computer like a machine so I didn't miss anything, then I reformatted them afterward. After that, I hand-wrote them. By the end, they were pretty much memorized.
pgcm1 6y ago
Subscribe here: ProductiveGrowth.substack.com
imwillofficial 6y ago
I do the opposite of what this author does. Digital feels more at home
base698 6y ago
I always assumed this is because of the extra brain power used for your hands. When you write the tactile sensation, the pressure, the texture all activate different parts of your brain. My assumption was more activation means more opportunity for memorization.
iradik 6y ago
I love note taking on paper; the problem is finding my notes later.
qrbLPHiKpiux 6y ago
The sound of writing with a wood-cased pencil is very soothing. Currently I'm using a MITSU-BISHI 9800 with my absolute favorite being the CARAN D'ACHE Swiss Wood red tip.
analog31 6y ago
Something I've learned is that if you're a disorganized person, you're going to have a disorganized computer, and disorganized notes. But with physical notes, I can put them in a physical pile, and they'll pretty much stay there until I need them, sometimes for years. Once in a while I can go through them and throw away the ones that I really don't care about, and I can transfer really vital stuff to the computer. Scanning is easy. My cell phone is a good enough scanner. Where paper shines is equations and drawings. I'm building an elaborate electronic circuit as a hobby project right now. The ease of drawing the schematics by hand outpaces any drawing program, and it's effortless to carry paper into my workshop. Of all places, Target sells a lovely quad ruled notebook where one side of each sheet is 4 grids per inch, and the other side 5. Now I've read a lot of comments and articles about pens. Uggh. Pens are just not my friend. I've struck a blow for freedom and bought pencils. There, I said it. Lots of them. I know all the cool kids write with pens, but my handwriting is so horrible, I usually have to erase my worst scribbles and start over quite frequently.
- throwanem 6y ago
  Hey, don't let the fountain pen hipsters [1] get you down. The point is what you're writing, not what you're writing it with. [1] To whom it may: If reading the phrase "fountain pen hipster" has upset you, you may be interested to know that I EDC a Pilot Decimo in lavender with a lightly custom-ground F nib, which right now is inked with Iroshizuku Murasaki-shikibu from a cartridge I filled myself. We're the same, it's whatever, chill, you don't have to take the existence of fountain pen hipsters or a mention of same as a personal attack, it isn't one. Unless you're out there being a jerk to people who use different kinds of writing tools, in which case we aren't the same and you should stop.
yardshop 6y ago
I had a task at work today where I had to go to pen and paper first in order to get myself moving forward on it. Not exactly the point of the OP, but it was a different kind of enabling factor. I had a web site update to do that involved a handful of different pages, with related forms and emails and so on. I had an email chain of modifications from the requestors. I was putting it off for a couple days because there were too many places to start and I needed to straighten things out in my head. So I printed the email chain, and then with my favorite pen (Sharpie Pen) split the emails into parts and drew little blocks for each page and added bullet lists of steps to be done. Once I scribbled things out like this, I was then able to get into the editor and make the changes (Divi Builder on WordPress). And most importantly, check things off as I went along! Endorphin hits! As I was making the content and layout adjustments, I got frustrated with the builder and clicking and dragging to change each little bit and wished for a text-mode way of making these adjustments, something above the level of HTML and CSS but below the GUI approach. So at this stage I wanted to go back to typing. To finish up I would get into OneNote and write up the steps I did, including screen clips and links and file paths, then I will have something to search for next time I do this. So for me several forms of note taking are useful at different stages of the process. Often I will do this all in OneNote, but today I needed the physical stuff to get going!
dukeofdoom 6y ago
If you are in Canada, you can go to Dollarama and get sketch notebook with ring binding for $4, and a gel pen. No lines easy to flip pages and a smooth pen. Perfection.
roughly 6y ago
> It’s not eco-friendly I'm actually curious about this point. I wonder about the actual environmental comparison between, say, going through 3-4 notebooks a year vs. a tablet with a 3-5 year span. A notebook "costs" trees, and in theory is use-once and disposeable, but it's biodegradable, the ingredients are relatively easily accessible, and the manufacturing process is pretty refined by now. A tablet, on the other hand, has a whole world of exotic and toxic materials and manufacturing, doesn't break down nearly as cleanly in the end, and costs energy along the way...
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  Some concerns with paper might be related to water usage in manufacturing or to the bleaching process. One other thing is that putting paper into landfill can be a form of medium-term carbon sequestration.
- misterkrabs 6y ago
  Not to mention paper has a recycling rate of ~68%! [1] I'm just not sure if more energy is consumed by (1) a computer/tablet using a word processor or (2) manufacturing and recycling the equivalent amount of paper. Then there's also the matter of what type of electricity is used to power the computer or manufacture/recycle the paper (eg. hydroelectric, natural gas, etc). Wish there was a way to track all of this... [1] https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/paper-and-paperboard-material-specific-data https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
- moonchild 6y ago
  Not exactly the same, but I did some research a while ago on the environmental impact of ereaders vs paper books. They're actually quite close, though it depends on how much you read; the overall impact of the ereader is ~100-140x that of a single paper book. A full-on tablet is probably worse, as the display is more expensive to manufacture.
  - 90minuteAPI 6y ago
    It’s a shame that the reading experience gets worse as you go from book to e-ink to tablet, at least for me. Like many HN readers I’m already staring at screens for many hours per day. Using the library for books seems like the way to go! I see bookshelves in so many houses and wonder, realistically how many of those will ever be opened again? I have books that will comfort or challenge me for decades to come, but more than a couple of shelves seems like hoarding. Maybe it’s more of a signal to guests that they’re well-read.
raspo 6y ago
I personally really enjoy the world of GTD (Getting Things Done). I like reading about the best techniques, latest to-do apps and I tried a lot of them over the years. But in practice, for whatever reason, the only to-do lists that I complete are the ones I quickly write down on a random piece of paper sitting on my desk. Even though digital notes have many more advantages and I would like to use them, they just never work for me. I forget to periodically check them and if they send me notifications I simply ignore them.
nanomonkey 6y ago
Anyone interested in writing faster and with less hand strain should look into fountain pens. With a quality nib, that doesn't scratch/catch the paper one can continuously write for hours at decent speed. I usually do the first draft of anything I need to write by hand with a fountain pen as it allows me to get out my thoughts without the distractions of editing. You can cross out your work, but it is still there to go back to, or incorporate in later edits (done at the computer). Plus you can draw out ideas that you can't immediately put into words, when words fail you. Some gel point pens are equally comfortable.
catchmeifyoucan 6y ago
This is a particular research paper on taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand, and how notes are transcribed. They conclude that longhand is better than the taking notes on laptops. Pretty popular paper. (The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard) [https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/MuellerAndOppenheimer2014OnTakingNotesByHand.pdf https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/Mu...]
k_sze 6y ago
When I was in high school in Montréal, waaay back in 1995, our French teacher would tell us “qui écrit, lit deux fois” (“the one who writes, reads twice”), as a motto to encourage us to copy the texts we read via handwriting, instead of really just reading. And I can attest that it works really well. I remember a lot more when I write. On the surface, it’s slower; but in really, if I took the same amount of time to only re-read the same material without copying, I still wouldn’t remember as much.
snicker7 6y ago
For me, I differentiate between note taking & note archiving. The latter is best done electronically. The former is best done by hand for many reasons stated by the author.
XorNot 6y ago
I like pen and paper because it's secure. It's an unhackable, hard to forge tamper evident record. There's a stupid number of problems where the easiest answer is "pen and paper" because while it's hard to make redundant, it's completely security auditable.
rramadass 6y ago
Relevant: The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee.
philipswood 6y ago
> We could transcribe real-time audio with our eyes closed and still be pretty accurate. umm, overstating the case a bit on average.
gbertasius 6y ago
I got a tablet with a pen from a popular South Korean company and I love it precisely because it serves as a great alternative to typing. I take notes for class with its native app. This format works for me because I love paper notes but can't get over how hard it is to organize my chaotic style. Having it all located and organized on in a single object I can pick up any time is amazing. Lots of potential there but what is available already has led me to replace pen and paper with digital handwritten notes and papers. I live with limited space so this saves on space and allows me to maintain an easily searchable database of my work.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  Can you link to the device?
kalal 6y ago
I personally use more or less 3 stages. 1. whiteboard and marker - explore ideas, big-picture thinking, fast iterations. 2. paper notebook - things that emerged from point 1 are more precisely recorded into a paper notebook. Things go much slower here, especially because the eraser or the paper burns out quite quickly and there is no point to keep pointless notes. The structure of the paper is quite important as well. I noticed blank paper does not work that well and I spent more space there with less structure. Linked paper is also not good. Square paper is better. But the best one for me is dotted paper. Ideal compromise between structure and freedom. 3. everything that survives stage 2 goes to real code and git logs. Here the structure is maximal. Keeping notes in the code is of course good way as well as extensive git comments.
kstenerud 6y ago
I think there's a critical element missing from these experiments: transcribing information vs storing knowledge. When you're transcribing things (writing down as you hear or see it), you're normally not involved in learning or remembering the information; merely writing it down. In this case, handwriting would help to remember it later since writing on autopilot a more involved process than typing on autopilot. HOWEVER, when it comes to writing down KNOWLEDGE, it's a very different experience. This is why I always advocate to think before you type, and why less than 10% of my time spent developing software involves actually touching the keys on my keyboard. A live coding session with me would be extremely boring; 10 minutes of me staring into space, followed by 1 minute of dumping the code into the source file. But I'm very productive; my projects on github, sourceforge and sunsite speak for themselves. From the point that I entered college onwards, I've barely handwritten a paragraph of text per year (going on 25 years). I noticed no difference in cognition or memory then, nor do I now. Re-reading things I've typed in the past bring the whole experience flooding back the same as is expressed in the article as a handwriting experience. But then again, I'm not transcribing; I'm writing down knowledge.
tanseydavid 6y ago
I endure a fair amount of ridicule around my use of pen and paper but have known instinctively for some time that it is far better for many use cases, in practical terms.

243 points by pgcm1 6y ago

Memorizing is root of all evil. Understanding is more important.

I never knew why I unconsciously chose analog over digital in those cases, but it turns out there's a scientific explanation. When we write, we make our brains go through an abstraction process - separating something from a whole to analyze it by itself.- According to neurologist Audrey Van Der Meer, "It seems that keyboards and pens bring into play different underlying neurological processes. This may not be surprising since handwriting/drawing is a complex task that requires the integration of various skills." I wrote a full article about it in the link above.

com2kid 6y ago
Every time this topic comes up, I am curious to see a cross-generational study. I'd also be interested in seeing the result of taking notes with a less linear note taking tool, such as OneNote and its infinite canvas, compared to pure linear note taking. Now for most math classes, and other subjects that involve lots of diagrams, hand writing (digital or analog) is better! (Ignoring the people who are so good at LaTeX they can do complex math equations) IMHO the largest issue with modern teaching is the use of slides. I was going to college just as the transition to PowerPoint was happening, and wow was the degradation in quality of teaching noticeable. One of my profs, whose class I had a low opinion of, used slides for all his lectures. One day the projector broke down and he had to teach on the chalk board. It was amazing! The quality of his lecture improved dramatically when he was able to go back and make changes to past diagrams, or change examples on the fly to dive deeper into something the students had difficulty grasping. The other problem with PowerPoint is that it goes by faster than students can take notes! If the prof and the students are both writing notes, they are on (mostly) equal ground, ignoring that profs have decades of experience writing quickly.
- krrrh 6y ago
  There was also the transitionary period where teachers and profs would print slides onto transparencies and project those onto a screen. The overhead projectors sometimes had a roll of plastic that they could write on with a felt marker either over the slides or as a blank canvas. A bit of googling reveals that many primary schools still use these, and not all have transitioned to “smart boards”. It was a good trade off, and it’s kind of surprising that the rise of tablets and styluses hasn’t seen this hybrid model return.
  - mikestew 6y ago
    It's been over 15 years since I was scribbling on PowerPoint slides while my Tablet PC was hooked to the projector. I'll ask my spouse if her MS Surface supports such functionality, because I found it pretty darned handy at the time. I have little need for such a feature anymore, so I don't know if an iPad Pro w/stylus can do that with Keynote (not without looking it up).
    - SirGiggles 6y ago
      Apple Pencil is able to markup on Keynote slides [0] as well as Powerpoint (should be like OneNote based on a App Store article) [1] [0]: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/keynote-ipad/tance6afafdd/ipados https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/keynote-ipad/tance6afa... [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1458378181 https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1458378181
  - asdff 6y ago
    In the 2010s my organic chemistry professor would use one of those projectors and a sheet of blank printer paper, and would just write out chemical formulas all class. We basically all took notes together along with the professor each lecture, which was great because that meant he could never speed up too much since he had to spend time writing everything down, too. Then everything would go up online afterwards if you needed to refer to the professors notes from that day.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago

gentleman11 6y ago

I disagree. Writing is helpful for thinking things through, but the writing itself doesn’t do anything. I used to take a lot of notes to remember things and it can just act as an excuse to not think hard. It’s the hard thought and periodic review that cements things

anyfoo 6y ago
As I elaborated in another comment, not just the act of writing things down, but the actual very visual recollection of how I wrote it down and where on the page I did helps a lot. I don't know why it works that way, but it definitely does.
_rpd 6y ago
Yeah, the title should be "Handwriting helps particular kinds of people remember particular kinds of things"
- anyfoo 6y ago
  There was a somewhat recent astonishing revelation that a lot of people are apparently unable to visualize things in their mind (which was interesting to both groups in different ways respectively), so I bet that if you don't visualize things in your mind, it won't help much with recollection.
  - ravi-delia 6y ago
    I think that Galton figured that one out at some point in the 1800s, no? There's a huge amount of variation in how precise your mind's eye is, from absolutely nothing to vague impressions to photo-real images.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - caddemon 6y ago
      IIRC it was dismissed by most people at the time though. I've only started to hear it discussed by people in psych/neuro academic departments in the last few years.

igammarays 6y ago

The Brain That Changes Itself. Life changing book. One of the surprising studies there shows how kids with all kinds of learning disabilities can be radically transformed just by being given cursive handwriting exercises. Brain development and activation under handwriting is measurable, and very different from typing or even printing.

krrrh 6y ago
One thing that stuck with me from that book was the notion that the fine motor control gained through the rote learning of handwriting might carry over into verbal fluency. iirc it was a speculative point in the book, and I wonder if that has been any research into it since then. It partly inspired me to relearn cursive as an adult using the Getty-Dubay italic. https://handwritingsuccess.com/write-now/ https://handwritingsuccess.com/write-now/

abduhl 6y ago

I think this post just barely misses the main reason which, in my opinion, makes writing a better medium for remembering. They mention that typing is faster and easier than writing but I think the real reason this impacts memory is because you have to reduce things into their smallest form in order to keep up (with the person speaking or your own thoughts). This act of condensing makes you internalize the words into concepts, and concepts are easier to recall.

fastball 6y ago
When I was just starting my current startup (a collaborative note-taking platform), I pored over a lot of studies on this subject because I wanted to make sure that if I was going to build a digital knowledge base / note-taking solution I would give our users their best shot at actually remembering what they were storing. In the end, your theory did seem to be the most frequently validated rationalization when it came to discrepancies between handwritten and typed notes. As you say, unless you can write in shorthand very few people are capable of writing at the speed of speech / thought, where as many people can easily type that fast. This requires you to be more thoughtful about what and how you record things with pen and paper, meaning you synthesize / summarize / compartmentalize the information as you go. This was sometimes compounded in environments involving a presentation / lecture slides, as digital note-takers frequently have a copy of the relevant presentation on their device, further reducing the amount of content they feel they need to record in some way and therefore reducing the amount of information synthesis that is happening. The best idea I could come up with to help encourage handwritten-like behavior when recording info on a computer was to move away from the document/bullet-point format and towards a "digital notecard" format, which encourages you to think about ideas as compartmentalized / discrete ideas rather than a thoughtless information dump. So that's what I built. But if you or anyone else has any good ideas about how to emulate the benefits of pen-and-paper on digital, I'm all ears!

dave_sid 6y ago

I handwrite my todo list at the start of everyday and scribble notes down when I’m in meetings and almost never look at them again. It definitely helps solidify things in my head for whatever reason. I’m not uptight or anything, it just seems to help me.

alex_c 6y ago
This is me. I've tried various note taking apps but I never stick with them for more than a few days. My notebook is everything. If I don't have it for any reason (most often: it ran out and need to buy a new one) my productivity actually takes a big hit. Basically: if I don't write it down, I probably won't get it done.

metalliqaz 6y ago

what the heck is "digital handwriting"?

reificator 6y ago
Presumably using something like an active stylus on a tablet? https://www.trustedreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2020/03/Press-render-Hero-wide-transparent.png https://www.trustedreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2... [1]:

JohnCohorn 6y ago

Current generations may perform better in various ways while handwriting because we grew up being forced to write by hand for many years while we were developing in childhood. I wonder if upcoming generations that grow up typing instead will perform the same way, or if they’ll do better taking typewritten notes.

anyfoo 6y ago

In my case at least, I noticed that remembering things has a strong "visual" component. I have nothing close to a photographic memory (I wish), but for example in university, I often remembered facts and formulas by also remembering where on a page they were. I wouldn't quite "read it off" the page in my mind, but just the visualization of the page helped getting to the fact, in a "oh yeah, that's where that was written down" kind of way. Today, I write down the most important dates and facts on pieces of paper or a little notebook, and just the strong, vivid, very visual recollection of me writing it down (and where) helps tremendously in remembering what was written down.

krrrh 6y ago
In university I used to take notes with lots of arrows between concepts, while constantly switching between coloured pens, sometimes with an explicit system in mind and sometimes more intuitively. I noticed that this also greatly aided my spatial memory and recall.

briandoll 6y ago

This is one of the reasons I've started to use the reMarkable tablet for taking notes. Sometimes I don't even look at them again, it's just a more efficient way to get the info into my head. I wrote more about my current workflow/stack here if anyone is interested (w/ some reMarkable hacks): https://briandoll.medium.com/personal-setup-for-getting-shit-done-in-2021-b6bdef7ad7f0 https://briandoll.medium.com/personal-setup-for-getting-shit...

WalterBright 6y ago
I take notes in a $.79 spiral paper notebook. When it fills up, I just scan it and get another one.
- ddevault 6y ago
  Likewise, but I don't bother scanning it. I just throw it away and get another one off the pile. If it's important I'll transcribe it in the moment, but it's almost never that important.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    When I was in college, I'd write code in spiral notebooks (didn't have screen editors then). It's amusing to me to see those today.
- briandoll 6y ago
  Absolutely. I did the same for a long time. I work with a bunch of companies every year, and having notes organized by client has been really helpful. That and a nice workflow to send notes/sketches/ideas from the notebook to a client via email is pretty nice. But definitely not for everybody.
- SiVal 6y ago
  Can you recommend a quick, easy method for scanning all the pages? I like paper notebooks, too. Someday, I'd like to have an app that would let me turn any ordinary stack of scratch paper or notebook into a searchable PDF in under 5 minutes. I would finish a notebook and just put my phone on a gooseneck stand and turn the pages one at a time (not riffle) at one page per second or two, and it would know when to take the photos, which it would flatten, orient, and bind into a PDF of the notebook. It would maintain my handwritten pages but add an OCR'ed backstore of the text that could be used to create something like a table of contents, an index, and a fulltext search. I imagine some portion of that is already available, and the rest will be arriving anytime now.

WalterBright 6y ago

I found that out taking notes in college. It's pretty obvious :-)

samuell 6y ago

One aspect the article doesn't mention is spatiality, and how that aids memorizing. As you might know one very common technique used by memorizing masters is to place things you want to remember in some imagined 3D world. This effect is also something I've experienced strongly myself when listening to audiobooks while running. I figured I can actually remember the exact place along my running route in a nearby forest that I was listening to a particular passage in the book - and vice versa - going back in memory to a particular location immediately makes me start hearing memories from the book passages I listened to in that location! I think this aspect is at play a lot with handwriting as well. You are always writing in tangible places inside a notebook, while when typing things on the computer there is less of an immediate spatial location of each note. In any case that location will both be mostly the same for all notes (you sitting at the computer), and regarding any virtual spatiality of you computer desktop system, that will have a less tangible connection with your senses, (although any sense of spatiality surely can help a bit).

cameronh90 6y ago
During the pandemic, I have been listening to audiobooks while I’m programming. I don’t really listen to the content, it just makes me feel less lonely. But what I’ve found is that I end up associating code I’m writing to the audiobook I’m listening to at the time. Later on, when I work on that bit of code again, I replay the audiobook I was listening to when I wrote it, and it helps me remember how that code works.
fatnoah 6y ago
Very interesting! In college, I strongly experienced the phenomena of taking a test and not being able to remember the exact content, but could accurately remember the layout of the page that the data was on. I also got into the habit of creating 1 or 2 page cheat sheets for tests, whether I could use them in the test or not, and the spatial organization of the data seemed to correlate very directly with my ability to process and absorb the data.
- samuell 6y ago
  Thanks! Interesting observation about the layout! Indeed, I also feel my most effective notes are the ones where I get a little creative with the layout, placing things out thoughtfully. (Also, going back and filling in with a lot of balloons with thoughts afterwards etc, to make each page a little customized).

olivermarks 6y ago

I find hand written lists are good for focusing, but if I'm in a store hours later shopping for a group of disparate objects (10 ft ladder, size 5 2.5 inch screws, plant pot etc etc) I find a digital list invaluable because I can remove the items I have got so far leaving a shorter list. I've found that unless I strike out items I somehow miss something on a long list. I know you can do this with a pen too but I've gone from wunderlist to the various google phone list tools and find them v useful

bradstewart 6y ago
Yea I actually draw little squares next to my todo items, and then fill them in when I complete the task. For some reason, I find that way easier to parse than a bunch of scratched out words. I also do that in my engineering notebooks--it makes to-dos stand out more from the rest of my notes.
- olivermarks 6y ago
  Good idea, I'll remember that for the occasions when I do have a pen & paper list!

majormajor 6y ago

I find typing perfectly adequate for remembering things - in school if I was copying out notes I did just as well typing as handwritten, and could do it faster (and so get more repetition in) on a computer. Both blew away just reading or listening passively. However, for brainstorming or planning, which is a lot of what this article is talking about, the unbounded spatial component of paper (or a drawing app with stylus) is much better for me than the constrained nature of a word processor. Something like graphviz isn't bad for certain types of things, but anything that relies on mouse-based selection and dragging of things breaks my flow in a way that jotting a new note off to the edge of an open paper doesn't.

lightlyused 6y ago

For me it does in a way, but I still need to read my notes while the details are still fresh in my mind. The main reason is I'm a sloppy writer and I might not be able to make out my mess if I haven't reviewed it enough. Also, for small things like passwords, saying them 10 times helps me get over 'what was that again' hump.

whiddershins 6y ago

maybe It certainly seems plausible to me, in my personal experience, but this article is talking about something that may be true. This is another headline that is planting an idea in casual reader’s heads without explicitly mentioning it is in large part anecdotal and speculative.

mrtksn 6y ago

I find that it also helps me get over things. If there's something that I'm obsessing over or simply cannot get off my mind, I can write it down and it will go away. Throwing the piece of paper is optional. I think writing puts some kind of structure to your mental model, you process it at the time of writing and can move on to the next thing while preserving the output of the processing. The output tends to be some kind of map about where you can find it and short description about the nature of the thing you write down. It's almost as if you put the stuff of your "hot memory", the memory that is about the main process you operate on, into your visual memory. For some reason, typing on a computer doesn't have the same effect. It does have some effect but it's different.

ridaj 6y ago

Qui scribit bis legit

Imnimo 6y ago

>All of this makes me believe we need more time for our brains to adapt to writing on glass, or technology needs to advance enough so that writing on tablets feels like writing in a notebook. This strikes me as implausible. Did the earliest paper-writers (or parchment writers) not get the same benefit because their brains were adapted for cuneiform on clay tablets?

doliveira 6y ago

I don't even ever read back what I wrote. But I find I need to write down something to actually remember it. So it does fit with my experience.

john-tells-all 6y ago

Agree. I just passed a certificate by writing down all my study material for the past three weeks. It's a lot, but the act of writing things down really helps cement info into my brain.

dagmx 6y ago

I have a really hard time writing down notes while things are going on. I have very good memory but if I'm taking notes while something is happening, I often don't remember anything other than writing it down. If I don't take notes, my memory of events, topics and discussions is often far better. Writing things down post facto also does not help me much, other than I know where I wrote it. However I find the act of discussing a topic helps cement things. For me, the engagement with a subject is what really helps me remember things, and I suspect writing notes removes that.

sethammons 6y ago

Key quote: > This cognitive effort of condensing and translating into your own words is what facilitates learning. Which is why you could still do this with typing, but it's easy to avoid the cognitive effort of translating and condensing (and we tend toward cognitive laziness) and just type it verbatim because you can keep up. When I type notes (all the way back to college), it is in one ear, out the other (onto the page). The act of physically writing it down, and potentially a second pass to clean up the notes, is almost all I ever need to get something into working memory. Back in college, the third time I would look at my notes would be the morning of the test where I would just glance through them. Seeing the general shape of the text was often enough to trigger the recall.

jbverschoor 6y ago

Our biology teacher told us to not bring the text book. He wrote and drew everything on the blackboard, and we had to copy it by writing it down. Never had to learn anythings, and I still remember 90% of it, even visually. Remember that the great ones wrote a lot.

tombert 6y ago

Bit of a life-hack I picked up awhile ago is to "write the notes by hand, then type them out later". This has a few advantages. First, you basically get all the benefits listed in this article. Second, you get the advantage of repetition, and possibly correcting errors in your handwritten notes. Last, you have pretty notes to read off of later if you need to study for something, which is useful.

caddemon 6y ago
Yeah I do this for anything that's both important and complicated - it can be a slow process for me, but when typing things up I'll usually end up further refining my thoughts and coming up with new ideas, in addition to the benefits you mentioned. Although my handwriting is also hilariously bad, so it's kind of necessary for anything I anticipate needing to closely review in the future.
- tombert 6y ago
  Fellow bad-handwriters unite! I forgot to mention that as another perk.
gnicholas 6y ago
Funny, I did the opposite for bar exam prep. I took notes on the computer like a machine so I didn't miss anything, then I reformatted them afterward. After that, I hand-wrote them. By the end, they were pretty much memorized.

pgcm1 6y ago

Subscribe here: ProductiveGrowth.substack.com

imwillofficial 6y ago

I do the opposite of what this author does. Digital feels more at home

base698 6y ago

I always assumed this is because of the extra brain power used for your hands. When you write the tactile sensation, the pressure, the texture all activate different parts of your brain. My assumption was more activation means more opportunity for memorization.

iradik 6y ago

I love note taking on paper; the problem is finding my notes later.

qrbLPHiKpiux 6y ago

The sound of writing with a wood-cased pencil is very soothing. Currently I'm using a MITSU-BISHI 9800 with my absolute favorite being the CARAN D'ACHE Swiss Wood red tip.

analog31 6y ago

Something I've learned is that if you're a disorganized person, you're going to have a disorganized computer, and disorganized notes. But with physical notes, I can put them in a physical pile, and they'll pretty much stay there until I need them, sometimes for years. Once in a while I can go through them and throw away the ones that I really don't care about, and I can transfer really vital stuff to the computer. Scanning is easy. My cell phone is a good enough scanner. Where paper shines is equations and drawings. I'm building an elaborate electronic circuit as a hobby project right now. The ease of drawing the schematics by hand outpaces any drawing program, and it's effortless to carry paper into my workshop. Of all places, Target sells a lovely quad ruled notebook where one side of each sheet is 4 grids per inch, and the other side 5. Now I've read a lot of comments and articles about pens. Uggh. Pens are just not my friend. I've struck a blow for freedom and bought pencils. There, I said it. Lots of them. I know all the cool kids write with pens, but my handwriting is so horrible, I usually have to erase my worst scribbles and start over quite frequently.

throwanem 6y ago
Hey, don't let the fountain pen hipsters [1] get you down. The point is what you're writing, not what you're writing it with. [1] To whom it may: If reading the phrase "fountain pen hipster" has upset you, you may be interested to know that I EDC a Pilot Decimo in lavender with a lightly custom-ground F nib, which right now is inked with Iroshizuku Murasaki-shikibu from a cartridge I filled myself. We're the same, it's whatever, chill, you don't have to take the existence of fountain pen hipsters or a mention of same as a personal attack, it isn't one. Unless you're out there being a jerk to people who use different kinds of writing tools, in which case we aren't the same and you should stop.

yardshop 6y ago

I had a task at work today where I had to go to pen and paper first in order to get myself moving forward on it. Not exactly the point of the OP, but it was a different kind of enabling factor. I had a web site update to do that involved a handful of different pages, with related forms and emails and so on. I had an email chain of modifications from the requestors. I was putting it off for a couple days because there were too many places to start and I needed to straighten things out in my head. So I printed the email chain, and then with my favorite pen (Sharpie Pen) split the emails into parts and drew little blocks for each page and added bullet lists of steps to be done. Once I scribbled things out like this, I was then able to get into the editor and make the changes (Divi Builder on WordPress). And most importantly, check things off as I went along! Endorphin hits! As I was making the content and layout adjustments, I got frustrated with the builder and clicking and dragging to change each little bit and wished for a text-mode way of making these adjustments, something above the level of HTML and CSS but below the GUI approach. So at this stage I wanted to go back to typing. To finish up I would get into OneNote and write up the steps I did, including screen clips and links and file paths, then I will have something to search for next time I do this. So for me several forms of note taking are useful at different stages of the process. Often I will do this all in OneNote, but today I needed the physical stuff to get going!

dukeofdoom 6y ago

If you are in Canada, you can go to Dollarama and get sketch notebook with ring binding for $4, and a gel pen. No lines easy to flip pages and a smooth pen. Perfection.

roughly 6y ago

> It’s not eco-friendly I'm actually curious about this point. I wonder about the actual environmental comparison between, say, going through 3-4 notebooks a year vs. a tablet with a 3-5 year span. A notebook "costs" trees, and in theory is use-once and disposeable, but it's biodegradable, the ingredients are relatively easily accessible, and the manufacturing process is pretty refined by now. A tablet, on the other hand, has a whole world of exotic and toxic materials and manufacturing, doesn't break down nearly as cleanly in the end, and costs energy along the way...

dan-robertson 6y ago
Some concerns with paper might be related to water usage in manufacturing or to the bleaching process. One other thing is that putting paper into landfill can be a form of medium-term carbon sequestration.
misterkrabs 6y ago
Not to mention paper has a recycling rate of ~68%! [1] I'm just not sure if more energy is consumed by (1) a computer/tablet using a word processor or (2) manufacturing and recycling the equivalent amount of paper. Then there's also the matter of what type of electricity is used to power the computer or manufacture/recycle the paper (eg. hydroelectric, natural gas, etc). Wish there was a way to track all of this... [1] https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/paper-and-paperboard-material-specific-data https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
moonchild 6y ago
Not exactly the same, but I did some research a while ago on the environmental impact of ereaders vs paper books. They're actually quite close, though it depends on how much you read; the overall impact of the ereader is ~100-140x that of a single paper book. A full-on tablet is probably worse, as the display is more expensive to manufacture.
- 90minuteAPI 6y ago
  It’s a shame that the reading experience gets worse as you go from book to e-ink to tablet, at least for me. Like many HN readers I’m already staring at screens for many hours per day. Using the library for books seems like the way to go! I see bookshelves in so many houses and wonder, realistically how many of those will ever be opened again? I have books that will comfort or challenge me for decades to come, but more than a couple of shelves seems like hoarding. Maybe it’s more of a signal to guests that they’re well-read.

raspo 6y ago

I personally really enjoy the world of GTD (Getting Things Done). I like reading about the best techniques, latest to-do apps and I tried a lot of them over the years. But in practice, for whatever reason, the only to-do lists that I complete are the ones I quickly write down on a random piece of paper sitting on my desk. Even though digital notes have many more advantages and I would like to use them, they just never work for me. I forget to periodically check them and if they send me notifications I simply ignore them.

nanomonkey 6y ago

Anyone interested in writing faster and with less hand strain should look into fountain pens. With a quality nib, that doesn't scratch/catch the paper one can continuously write for hours at decent speed. I usually do the first draft of anything I need to write by hand with a fountain pen as it allows me to get out my thoughts without the distractions of editing. You can cross out your work, but it is still there to go back to, or incorporate in later edits (done at the computer). Plus you can draw out ideas that you can't immediately put into words, when words fail you. Some gel point pens are equally comfortable.

catchmeifyoucan 6y ago

This is a particular research paper on taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand, and how notes are transcribed. They conclude that longhand is better than the taking notes on laptops. Pretty popular paper. (The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard) [https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/MuellerAndOppenheimer2014OnTakingNotesByHand.pdf https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/Mu...]

k_sze 6y ago

When I was in high school in Montréal, waaay back in 1995, our French teacher would tell us “qui écrit, lit deux fois” (“the one who writes, reads twice”), as a motto to encourage us to copy the texts we read via handwriting, instead of really just reading. And I can attest that it works really well. I remember a lot more when I write. On the surface, it’s slower; but in really, if I took the same amount of time to only re-read the same material without copying, I still wouldn’t remember as much.

snicker7 6y ago

For me, I differentiate between note taking & note archiving. The latter is best done electronically. The former is best done by hand for many reasons stated by the author.

XorNot 6y ago

I like pen and paper because it's secure. It's an unhackable, hard to forge tamper evident record. There's a stupid number of problems where the easiest answer is "pen and paper" because while it's hard to make redundant, it's completely security auditable.

rramadass 6y ago

Relevant: The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee.

philipswood 6y ago

> We could transcribe real-time audio with our eyes closed and still be pretty accurate. umm, overstating the case a bit on average.

gbertasius 6y ago

I got a tablet with a pen from a popular South Korean company and I love it precisely because it serves as a great alternative to typing. I take notes for class with its native app. This format works for me because I love paper notes but can't get over how hard it is to organize my chaotic style. Having it all located and organized on in a single object I can pick up any time is amazing. Lots of potential there but what is available already has led me to replace pen and paper with digital handwritten notes and papers. I live with limited space so this saves on space and allows me to maintain an easily searchable database of my work.

ceilingcorner 6y ago
Can you link to the device?

kalal 6y ago

I personally use more or less 3 stages. 1. whiteboard and marker - explore ideas, big-picture thinking, fast iterations. 2. paper notebook - things that emerged from point 1 are more precisely recorded into a paper notebook. Things go much slower here, especially because the eraser or the paper burns out quite quickly and there is no point to keep pointless notes. The structure of the paper is quite important as well. I noticed blank paper does not work that well and I spent more space there with less structure. Linked paper is also not good. Square paper is better. But the best one for me is dotted paper. Ideal compromise between structure and freedom. 3. everything that survives stage 2 goes to real code and git logs. Here the structure is maximal. Keeping notes in the code is of course good way as well as extensive git comments.

kstenerud 6y ago

I think there's a critical element missing from these experiments: transcribing information vs storing knowledge. When you're transcribing things (writing down as you hear or see it), you're normally not involved in learning or remembering the information; merely writing it down. In this case, handwriting would help to remember it later since writing on autopilot a more involved process than typing on autopilot. HOWEVER, when it comes to writing down KNOWLEDGE, it's a very different experience. This is why I always advocate to think before you type, and why less than 10% of my time spent developing software involves actually touching the keys on my keyboard. A live coding session with me would be extremely boring; 10 minutes of me staring into space, followed by 1 minute of dumping the code into the source file. But I'm very productive; my projects on github, sourceforge and sunsite speak for themselves. From the point that I entered college onwards, I've barely handwritten a paragraph of text per year (going on 25 years). I noticed no difference in cognition or memory then, nor do I now. Re-reading things I've typed in the past bring the whole experience flooding back the same as is expressed in the article as a handwriting experience. But then again, I'm not transcribing; I'm writing down knowledge.

tanseydavid 6y ago

I endure a fair amount of ridicule around my use of pen and paper but have known instinctively for some time that it is far better for many use cases, in practical terms.