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I've worked in tech as a software engineer developing web applications for 25 years and I'm one of these people. For note taking, I prefer pen and paper. For d

I've worked in tech as a software engineer developing web applications for 25 years and I'm one of these people. For note taking, I prefer pen and paper. For diagramming and brainstorming, I prefer a physical whiteboard. For non-work related scheduling, I prefer marking things on the physical calendar hanging on my wall... or sometimes I'll reach for a post-it note. For bills, I prefer that my company mail me a paper bill. Especially if accessing the e-bill requires me to have an account with a web app and enable MFA and change my password every 90 days and always have Okta give me problems when I want to check my bill and thus need to jump through these hoops those whopping 12 times per year that I need this information. Maybe it's because I see how the sausage is made. Maybe it's because I use some sort of eletronic device all day for work. But the last thing I want to do when I need to jot something down quickly is reach for a phone or a laptop. Heck, most of the time I don't even remember (or care) where I left my phone.

sixstringtheory 3y ago
Same, iOS developer here. Maybe if software were treated less like fashion that had to constantly be updated, resulting in a neverending revolving door of bugs and new waves of learning curves, and instead like a focused tool, it could catch up more to paper. There are absolutely benefits to software over paper but they feel hamstrung by the constant desire to roll out the next UI paradigm. Sooner or later the set of constraints between device, OS and app versions forces an upgrade. Security updates should be the only reason to even hint at that possibility IMO. Maybe I’m just too close to the problem. If I squint enough I can see how a pen running out of ink is like an app crash, and replacing the pen/ink has a real, nonzero environmental cost. I’m not sure how to amortize the costs of device manufacture and software development across all bugs, and compare that to the costs/benefits of pen and paper. There is some shade of rose on my glasses, no doubt. I need more information, but I sense it’s not the kind of information that is important to many people, and especially corporations, to gather.
- galdosdi 3y ago
  > If I squint enough I can see how a pen running out of ink is like an app crash Interesting analogy. I think a closer analogy to a pen running out of ink and having to grab another pen, is a laptop battery running low and having to be plugged in.
- wnkrshm 3y ago
  I feel it's also a scaling issue: If you wanted to do all of the digital bookkeeping of today on paper, that would be perhaps impossible. I don't think personal note-taking is in any way a large contribution to paper use. I do art on paper and even I don't go through 500 pages in a year. It's at work, things like 60 page reports that need to be printed for submission (and then get printed 2x or 3x again because you can replicate it). The ease of printing documents is the culprit, you can just replicate large physical artifacts again and again. You can't do that with your personal notes that probably only exist as unique artifacts and maybe get scanned into a digital archive.
rpowers 3y ago
I'm in the same situation as you. Though I think the major factor is that the physicality of handwriting the notes helps me.
the_snooze 3y ago
Paper just works. Whether it's for notes, menus, or voting, paper has a lot of really desirable properties: it's cheap, easily understood, minimal room for external dependencies or BS. The moment you introduce software and internet connectivity is the moment you invite fragility and inscrutability.
- TapWaterBandit 3y ago
  Amazon removing 1984 on people's kindles all the way back in 2009 was a wake-up call. Digital media/content is open to revision in a way that physical media/content is not. I have swung back around and now buy many physical books/blurays/etc for things I really love or think are important because my faith that companies/govt won't decide I cant have that version anymore is very low.
- galdosdi 3y ago
  The security properties are also really really different, and really intuitive, and quite strong too: if you have physical possession you have total access, otherwise none at all. With a computing device, only if you are certain there is no wifi/bluetooth/cellular/etc hardware inside the device, can you have a similar trust. And the days are rapidly coming when there's no such thing as a device without such hardware, not even a watch. With computing devices, you do get the ability to encrypt data at rest, so for example, a locked physical paper diary is less secure in that sense than an encrypted text file. But the possible number of actors that would attempt to break the security for a physical paper document is much lower, only whoever is nearby, not everyone on the entire internet. If I had something I really didn't want to get out, these days, I'd be much more likely to recommend the use of a notebook in a safe than an encrypted file on a laptop or phone or something. It doesn't matter how encrypted it is if my device gets compromised. (If it had to be electronic, it'd be a laptop with no working networking hardware, in a safe.)
  - araes 3y ago
    ChangeLog - Paper - Sept 2023 Good news everyone, Paper supports MSPen 2.3.4.5.3.2...., GPen 1.10.1.0.11 "Lumpsucker", iPen 4.2.0 (8 new colors!), and the AmaWEbLumberPen (AWELP) We're happy to report we've solved the issue of Paper randomly vanishing from your house, and reappearing on your roof. Security exploits with D4r|<9@nc1l and Y+e()v+ have been discovered, and we're working on a fix. In the meantime, please update your Paper password (remember not to write it down) Minor issues with Paper flickering (and in a limited user group causing epilepsy seizures and incontinence) have been mitigated. We're aware of Paper occasionally causing i#Desk models to collapse, and working to close the loop. We're also happy to report we've been sold to ShredderCo.! Congratulations to the team for going the extra mile, and we expect a bright future in their exciting and challenging area of business. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/16hqcly/good_news_everyone_apples_polishing_cloth/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/16hqcly/good_news_ev...
HPsquared 3y ago
I'm the same, I think it's literally because I used pen and paper all day in school and that's just what I'm used to.
hypertexthero 3y ago
Ditto. Hate is a strong word, and I hate typing on phones or tablets by trying to hit small shapes behind glass with the tips of my fingers. I like the feel of pencils, particularly softer ones like 2B, 3B, or 4B, on paper, preferably those with texture like recycled brown paper that is often used as a tablecloth in Italian trattorias, the good ones, that aren’t too expensive. The smell of pencil lead and paper and the sound that a pencil marking paper makes both help me absorb and remember things. Betty Edwards wrote Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and Frank R. Wilson wrote The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. Both warmly recommended.
- Projectiboga 3y ago
  Writing uses a broader range of your brain, as the information goes through more circuits as you process language to writing. Typing is somehow less mentally involved. There was a study comparing students typing, recording or writing during the lecture, the written notes cohort supposedly learned the best.
spacemadness 3y ago
Throwing another anecdotal example: Everyone in the gym looks at me like I’m twice my age jotting down my lifts in my notebook. It’s so much less stressful than navigating BS mobile UI stat entry between sets. I say that as someone who develops mobile UI on a daily basis. It’s hard to mistype with a pen.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
clnq 3y ago
Pen and paper doesn't have many failure modes. Put it in a fireproof safe, and it will outlive most digital media. No hacker in a foreign country will steal it, no one will encrypt it, no cloud provider will lose it, and no government will read it, no SSD will byte-rot it. There's really not much to be said against pen and paper.
- jjav 3y ago
  Indeed. I have family books from the 1800s and photo albums from the early 1900s. Zero effort was put into preserving these, they were just left on a shelf, occasionally moving from generation to generation. Except for the most obsessive & technically skilled archivists, nobody will have any photos/documents from today in 100-150 years.
- hoseja 3y ago
  Modern paper will disintegrate over time, something with acid.
  - vixen99 3y ago
    And no need for it. I don't think I have any books printed in the first half of the 20th century with yellowing pages. That's not the case with certain publishers in the recent past who, I guess, have gone for cheap printing options.
  - jmopp 3y ago
    Most printer-paper you can buy in a shop is acid-free. I still have high-school printouts from 20 years ago that show no signs of degradation. I don't think any of my own digital assets have survived from 2003 — granted I was a teenager at the time, so I did not engage in the greatest archival practices. But see the comment above: all you need to preserve paper is to make sure it doesn't get damaged, and simply eyeballing it will confirm whether or not it has.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Fireproof safe's, aren't. A thief could steal it out of your house, you can't access it on the go, it'll get water damaged and mold and rot. The ink will fade. You won't have a drive to read the floppy disk/CD-rom/DVD/USB-A flash drive. You can't grep it and unless you meticulously organize it, it's a jumbled pile of unopened envelopes. Cloud and digital isn't the be all and end all, but there are plenty of problems with paper.
hnthrowaway0315 3y ago
Same. I have tried a few tools but none beat taking notes on paper. You immediately get to mix text, tables and pictures. You can do it however you want. You can arrange it however you want. Nothing beats this. Digital tools might be good at organizing old notes but I feel it is not necessary most of the time.
- sl0tr4cer 3y ago
  I have found the physical act of writing, and this is borne out by research, helps me retain what I have just taken down.
6510 3y ago
> Maybe it's because I see how the sausage is made. I feel the same, only without the maybe. It just struck me that taking a picture of the white board and sending it to the printer would add up to acceptable use of technology. I have no idea why I never thought of that before. It seems actually nice to uses. (provided you delete the picture from drives, clouds, backups and trashcans)
patrickthebold 3y ago
I'm with you except for the bills. Incoming physical mail is hard (for me) to deal with. Also, most things are set up through my bank to auto-pay. I check the first of the month what's going on.

sixstringtheory 3y ago

Same, iOS developer here. Maybe if software were treated less like fashion that had to constantly be updated, resulting in a neverending revolving door of bugs and new waves of learning curves, and instead like a focused tool, it could catch up more to paper. There are absolutely benefits to software over paper but they feel hamstrung by the constant desire to roll out the next UI paradigm. Sooner or later the set of constraints between device, OS and app versions forces an upgrade. Security updates should be the only reason to even hint at that possibility IMO. Maybe I’m just too close to the problem. If I squint enough I can see how a pen running out of ink is like an app crash, and replacing the pen/ink has a real, nonzero environmental cost. I’m not sure how to amortize the costs of device manufacture and software development across all bugs, and compare that to the costs/benefits of pen and paper. There is some shade of rose on my glasses, no doubt. I need more information, but I sense it’s not the kind of information that is important to many people, and especially corporations, to gather.

galdosdi 3y ago
> If I squint enough I can see how a pen running out of ink is like an app crash Interesting analogy. I think a closer analogy to a pen running out of ink and having to grab another pen, is a laptop battery running low and having to be plugged in.
wnkrshm 3y ago
I feel it's also a scaling issue: If you wanted to do all of the digital bookkeeping of today on paper, that would be perhaps impossible. I don't think personal note-taking is in any way a large contribution to paper use. I do art on paper and even I don't go through 500 pages in a year. It's at work, things like 60 page reports that need to be printed for submission (and then get printed 2x or 3x again because you can replicate it). The ease of printing documents is the culprit, you can just replicate large physical artifacts again and again. You can't do that with your personal notes that probably only exist as unique artifacts and maybe get scanned into a digital archive.

rpowers 3y ago

I'm in the same situation as you. Though I think the major factor is that the physicality of handwriting the notes helps me.

the_snooze 3y ago

Paper just works. Whether it's for notes, menus, or voting, paper has a lot of really desirable properties: it's cheap, easily understood, minimal room for external dependencies or BS. The moment you introduce software and internet connectivity is the moment you invite fragility and inscrutability.

TapWaterBandit 3y ago
Amazon removing 1984 on people's kindles all the way back in 2009 was a wake-up call. Digital media/content is open to revision in a way that physical media/content is not. I have swung back around and now buy many physical books/blurays/etc for things I really love or think are important because my faith that companies/govt won't decide I cant have that version anymore is very low.
galdosdi 3y ago
The security properties are also really really different, and really intuitive, and quite strong too: if you have physical possession you have total access, otherwise none at all. With a computing device, only if you are certain there is no wifi/bluetooth/cellular/etc hardware inside the device, can you have a similar trust. And the days are rapidly coming when there's no such thing as a device without such hardware, not even a watch. With computing devices, you do get the ability to encrypt data at rest, so for example, a locked physical paper diary is less secure in that sense than an encrypted text file. But the possible number of actors that would attempt to break the security for a physical paper document is much lower, only whoever is nearby, not everyone on the entire internet. If I had something I really didn't want to get out, these days, I'd be much more likely to recommend the use of a notebook in a safe than an encrypted file on a laptop or phone or something. It doesn't matter how encrypted it is if my device gets compromised. (If it had to be electronic, it'd be a laptop with no working networking hardware, in a safe.)
- araes 3y ago
  ChangeLog - Paper - Sept 2023 Good news everyone, Paper supports MSPen 2.3.4.5.3.2...., GPen 1.10.1.0.11 "Lumpsucker", iPen 4.2.0 (8 new colors!), and the AmaWEbLumberPen (AWELP) We're happy to report we've solved the issue of Paper randomly vanishing from your house, and reappearing on your roof. Security exploits with D4r|<9@nc1l and Y+e()v+ have been discovered, and we're working on a fix. In the meantime, please update your Paper password (remember not to write it down) Minor issues with Paper flickering (and in a limited user group causing epilepsy seizures and incontinence) have been mitigated. We're aware of Paper occasionally causing i#Desk models to collapse, and working to close the loop. We're also happy to report we've been sold to ShredderCo.! Congratulations to the team for going the extra mile, and we expect a bright future in their exciting and challenging area of business. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/16hqcly/good_news_everyone_apples_polishing_cloth/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/16hqcly/good_news_ev...

HPsquared 3y ago

I'm the same, I think it's literally because I used pen and paper all day in school and that's just what I'm used to.

hypertexthero 3y ago

Ditto. Hate is a strong word, and I hate typing on phones or tablets by trying to hit small shapes behind glass with the tips of my fingers. I like the feel of pencils, particularly softer ones like 2B, 3B, or 4B, on paper, preferably those with texture like recycled brown paper that is often used as a tablecloth in Italian trattorias, the good ones, that aren’t too expensive. The smell of pencil lead and paper and the sound that a pencil marking paper makes both help me absorb and remember things. Betty Edwards wrote Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and Frank R. Wilson wrote The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. Both warmly recommended.

Projectiboga 3y ago
Writing uses a broader range of your brain, as the information goes through more circuits as you process language to writing. Typing is somehow less mentally involved. There was a study comparing students typing, recording or writing during the lecture, the written notes cohort supposedly learned the best.

spacemadness 3y ago

Throwing another anecdotal example: Everyone in the gym looks at me like I’m twice my age jotting down my lifts in my notebook. It’s so much less stressful than navigating BS mobile UI stat entry between sets. I say that as someone who develops mobile UI on a daily basis. It’s hard to mistype with a pen.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

clnq 3y ago

Pen and paper doesn't have many failure modes. Put it in a fireproof safe, and it will outlive most digital media. No hacker in a foreign country will steal it, no one will encrypt it, no cloud provider will lose it, and no government will read it, no SSD will byte-rot it. There's really not much to be said against pen and paper.

jjav 3y ago
Indeed. I have family books from the 1800s and photo albums from the early 1900s. Zero effort was put into preserving these, they were just left on a shelf, occasionally moving from generation to generation. Except for the most obsessive & technically skilled archivists, nobody will have any photos/documents from today in 100-150 years.
hoseja 3y ago
Modern paper will disintegrate over time, something with acid.
- vixen99 3y ago
  And no need for it. I don't think I have any books printed in the first half of the 20th century with yellowing pages. That's not the case with certain publishers in the recent past who, I guess, have gone for cheap printing options.
- jmopp 3y ago
  Most printer-paper you can buy in a shop is acid-free. I still have high-school printouts from 20 years ago that show no signs of degradation. I don't think any of my own digital assets have survived from 2003 — granted I was a teenager at the time, so I did not engage in the greatest archival practices. But see the comment above: all you need to preserve paper is to make sure it doesn't get damaged, and simply eyeballing it will confirm whether or not it has.
fragmede 3y ago
Fireproof safe's, aren't. A thief could steal it out of your house, you can't access it on the go, it'll get water damaged and mold and rot. The ink will fade. You won't have a drive to read the floppy disk/CD-rom/DVD/USB-A flash drive. You can't grep it and unless you meticulously organize it, it's a jumbled pile of unopened envelopes. Cloud and digital isn't the be all and end all, but there are plenty of problems with paper.

hnthrowaway0315 3y ago

Same. I have tried a few tools but none beat taking notes on paper. You immediately get to mix text, tables and pictures. You can do it however you want. You can arrange it however you want. Nothing beats this. Digital tools might be good at organizing old notes but I feel it is not necessary most of the time.

sl0tr4cer 3y ago
I have found the physical act of writing, and this is borne out by research, helps me retain what I have just taken down.

6510 3y ago

> Maybe it's because I see how the sausage is made. I feel the same, only without the maybe. It just struck me that taking a picture of the white board and sending it to the printer would add up to acceptable use of technology. I have no idea why I never thought of that before. It seems actually nice to uses. (provided you delete the picture from drives, clouds, backups and trashcans)

patrickthebold 3y ago

I'm with you except for the bills. Incoming physical mail is hard (for me) to deal with. Also, most things are set up through my bank to auto-pay. I check the first of the month what's going on.