I use pen and paper for the majority of my journals and a Remarkable 2 for some.

I find writing long-hand works best for me. It's slower and that's the point of it. The journey is the process and the goal. The end result is clear, well-formed thoughts. You cannot rush the process to get the end result faster: you'll end up with a jumble of short-hand, bullet points, and half-baked ideas.

I also prefer a page. I can draw diagrams when it suits me. Software forces me to switch tools and my mental context to add diagrams. And they're all clunky besides. I'd rather something more intuitive that doesn't get in my way: a pen and perhaps a ruler, slide, etc on occasion.

The Remarkable software has improved with time and with the addition of the keyboard I can get close to the best of both worlds. I tend to use it for work-focused and project-focused journals. I'll start with free-hand but use the text-conversion and clean things up from there. The free-hand diagramming is much improved now that they've introduced better drawing tools that can force straight shapes from my free-hand ones. And then you get the benefit of being able to search through your documents from a computer.

For my paper journals I have to use a bookshelf and a box of index cards to keep everything organized. For the amount of journals I produce this is sufficient but it's not as convenient as it is on a computer... but personally I don't find I need to maximize convenience in my life, I'm satisfied with some processes and tasks being manual and tedious.

I also like the paper journals because it leaves a physical legacy of my learnings, thoughts, and experiences. I like reading through them on occasion to recall some algorithm I learned years ago that I need to remember or some book I had read in order to recall the salient thoughts and quotes I found interesting. And I hope maybe some day my children or surviving colleagues will find them useful too.

I use a probably similar workflow (writing about everything, multiple journals - work projects, personal projects, notes taken when reading books, random thoughts, relationship topics etc.) and I feel like electronic vs paper/pen definitely makes a difference. I use both types for different things.

Electronic obviously has the advantage of being able to edit the text in a non-linear fashion, which I think is something necessary for the notes I take for work. Being in the same 'space' as the work I do (so on screen) is also helpful, as well as being able to include things like hyperlinks/chunks of code. Since I type fast, taking digital notes also lets me dump whatever is in my head faster (this is usually relevant for other types than work notes).

Paper on the other hand I feel puts me into a different headspace when writing (might be the lack of a screen, or maybe the slower writing?) and is (usually, not always) more fitting for stuff I write about personal topics or books. Some types of notes (e.g. stuff about music) also benefit from the freedom pen on paper gives you - adding scribbles, drawings, formatting text in non-standard visual ways. Small paper notebooks are of course also much easier to take with you on trips and write on a bus, train, park bench or w/e (I've heard some people use phones but I can't imagine myself writing proper notes on a smartphone keyboard).

Not op but for me what makes the difference is doing anything at all. Even if one is better than the other, writing down at all has a huge beneficial effect for many.

I find that writing with pen and paper is best for my mind. But, I’m a technologist so I love digital. I use the Kindle Scribe to cover both bases. I’ve written about it here:

https://notes.joeldare.com/handwritten-notes-on-the-kindle-s...