Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

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).

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...

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...

I wrote a full article about it in the link above.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some gel point pens are equally comfortable.

(The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard) [https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/Mu...]

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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

Never had to learn anythings, and I still remember 90% of it, even visually.

Remember that the great ones wrote a lot.

So it does fit with my experience.

umm, overstating the case a bit on average.