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Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

The scientific reason, explained

Feb 28 4
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Welcome to another edition of [7]ProductiveGrowth 🌱, weekly stories
about productivity, leadership, motivation, and anything else that
helps us and our teams grow and be more productive. Plus, industry news
on the companies, products, and services that allow us to work less and
do more.
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Google 'analog vs. digital handwriting' and you'll find numerous
articles explaining why one is better than the other. It's not novel,
but I've noticed every time I plan my week, write or brainstorm, I
first open an app — Asana, docs, or Notion. I try to start writing
things down, but then, I automatically close the app and shift to pen
and paper.

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 [9]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."

Kids take months or even years to perfect their handwriting, and even
when we get older, we pay attention to the way we write, the sounds it
makes, and how it feels. Van Der Mee shares, "A lot of senses are
activated by pressing the pen on paper, seeing the letters you write
and hearing the sound you make while writing. These sensory experiences
create contact between different parts of the brain and open the brain
up for learning. We both learn better and remember better."

I have a good memory, but the last sentence got me thinking. Do I
retain more information when I write vs. when I type? I decided to try
something, and I encourage you to do it as well. I grabbed a
two-year-old notebook, opened a random page, and read what it said.
Next, I did the same with digital notes I had typed during the same
timeframe.

Theory confirmed. I remembered many details from the handwritten note —
I even recalled where I was when I wrote the entry. However, with the
typed note, I even doubted if I was the one who wrote it.

Australian neuroscientist, [10]Jared Hovarth, explains why this
happens. "The very nature of handwriting means you have to write and
organise as you are thinking, and that kind of organisation affects how
you are interpreting the information. It's the way the handwriting
forces you to organise your thoughts that leads to deeper processing."

When we type, it's different. Typing notes is easier and faster, so our
brains don’t need time to analyze the information; we simply type the
words as we hear or think about them.

I asked a community of online writers if they had the same impression
as me when it came to using a pen and paper for creation over typing.
Writer Grant Nice explained,

"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."

Typing is a fast and mechanical task. We could transcribe real-time
audio with our eyes closed and still be pretty accurate. As Nice says,
even if we could force our brain to go through the same work it goes
through when handwriting, we hardly ever do that.

In addition to Nice, other online writers and some bullet journal
owners told me what they wrote down and why:
* Lisa Dell is a school nurse who uses a bullet journal to organize
tasks, her schedule and eliminate post-its. She believes writing
things down helps her remember, explaining, "My pen and paper can
be left out for me to check throughout the day easily. I just feel
that having it on my phone or computer would not be a reminder, and
I would not remember to keep checking it."
* Brett Fridman, a writer and marketing & sales director, agrees, "I
handwrite notes for conversations and lectures because it helps me
remember the details. I also handwrite any complex graphics like
mental maps or math equations because it's quicker. Writing feels
good."
* David Burt, a media and community writer, uses handwriting for two
reasons, "1) Remembering: I remember things better with analog
notes. 2) Brainstorming: Flexibility for drawing, arrows, circles,
graphs, etc., when brainstorming. A digital doc doesn't do justice
to how things could fit together."
* Steven Ovadia, an academic librarian and writer, shared, "I compose
with pen and organize digitally. When I want to think (i.e.,
create), I handwrite. When I don't want to think (i.e., organize),
I go digital."

It's not a surprise they all choose handwriting when they need to
create or remember something.

Up to this point, we’ve discovered handwriting is better than typing
for memory and processing information. Here’s why those concepts are
crucial to productivity:
1. To remember pending tasks and to set goals to achieve them.
2. To understand, internalize and remember how to perform a new task.
3. To improve your focus and concentration.
4. To come up with insights for process optimization or problem
solving.

If the problem with typing is we do it faster and skip steps, how about
digital handwriting using a tablet? It should be the same, shouldn’t it?

Eh, this is hard to answer with data since there are not enough studies
to prove it. But logic tells us it should!

The thing is, digital handwriting feels different. The screen of a
tablet feels like a screen; people describe it as writing on glass.

However, Lynn Nicholas, project manager and bullet journal owner,
merges the old pen and paper with digital handwriting. For her, it has
the same effect. "I use my iPad and Apple pencil to write everything
down like pen and paper. The more a person writes, the more a person
remembers."

I have my take on this particular debate between digital and paper
handwriting. Our brains evolve at a lower rate than technology. "So our
societies and world evolved rapidly in the past 300,000 years, while
our brains evolved slowly... We did it not by adapting our brains but
by changing our cultures," writes [11]Nick Longrich for the
Conversation. We may have access to technology, but that doesn't make
our brains different from Plato's.

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 (which, in fact,
already exists. Like the [12]reMarkable 2, for example.)

Keeping notes on paper is not perfect.

I think it’s clear I’m #teamhandwriting, but I know there are some
downsides to it. It’s not eco-friendly; there’s no way to automatically
back-up the data; plus it’s hard to find entries and edit them.

Even if some companies are trying to solve those problems by making
reusable and smart notebooks (I left you more information on this in
the Discover section below), it still doesn’t make paper perfect.

Don’t get me wrong. I do use several digital apps for writing. In fact,
I wrote this piece using Google Docs. I spent a lot of time organizing
and editing my thoughts, the same way I would’ve done it if I had
handwritten it.

However, this article made me realize my preference for analog over
digital has nothing to do with creation, but productivity.

Productivity apps overwhelm me. They offer infinite capacity. I end up
adding, together with on-going and crucial tasks, a long list of
nice-to-have tasks that I didn’t actually think through. Instead, when
I list my pending tasks in a notebook, I stick to ongoing tasks and
priorities.

Memory is a key component in the way I work. I usually remember
everything I need to do, and probably check my notes only two or three
times a week.

Naturally, when I check the app at the end of the week, all I see are a
few completed tasks along with many other trivial ones I forgot to do.
But when I check my notebook, I can see everything is completed. Not
only because I remembered the important things, but also because I gave
more thought to the task I wrote down.

Now that I understand what happens to the brain when writing by hand,
typing and digitally writing — and why I always choose a notebook over
a productivity app— I might consciously give digital apps a try.

There are some incredible tools available. By taking the time to
process my thoughts before using these tools to enter only my
priorities, who knows? In a few months, I might end up writing an issue
about how I absolutely love typing.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve been through this and if you’re
team typing or team handwriting.

Have feedback? Let us know at [email protected]
__________________________________________________________________

EDITOR’S PICKS

📚[13]Build the Perfect Productivity System with Paper Notebooks and
Digital Tools- There are hundreds of different options and techniques
to organize your workload. Apps, notebooks, tablets, etc. This article
shares a handful of accessible and easy-to-use options to help you
choose the method that works best for you.
__________________________________________________________________

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

* [14]Say what matters

We tend to conflate corporate communication with tedious, broad, and
confusing language. But corporate communications don’t need to be like
that. The way we communicate with our employees can change how they
feel about the company. To avoid sounding like you have a secret
agenda, and to discover how to communicate with purpose, read PG’s
February 21 issue.
__________________________________________________________________

SCROLLING THROUGH

[fortelabs.jpg] Tiago Forte @fortelabs
Once you break down everything into discrete units of information,
captured in notes, it all becomes very simple Instead of a mind-numbing
diversity of projects, goals, tasks, research, etc all requiring their
own dedicated system, it’s just one fluctuating, dynamic stream

February 23rd 2021
4 Retweets36 Likes

Tiago Forte is a productivity expert and founder of [15]ForteLabs. I
second this tweet. We might be involved in several projects, but we
don’t need to have them occupy all of our minds 24/7. Take notes,
organize and work on one thing at a time.
__________________________________________________________________

DISCOVER

If you’re a pen and paper kind of person but are terrified to lose your
journal and data forever, keep reading! This [16]Rocketbook Fusion is a
reusable smart notebook, and it’s advertised as “the last notebook
you’ll ever buy.” It comes with different templates, its own pen, and a
towel to keep its reusable pages clean. Once you scan the pages, they
immediately upload to the cloud. Check out the full review [17]here.
__________________________________________________________________

What did you think of this issue?

👋 This is a subscriber’s post! Make sure to participate in the
comments, I’d love to 👂hear what you think.

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[25]Ehab[26]13 hr ago

I love this! I'm also a paper and pencil guy. Recently I got the new
iPad Air and love using it for note taking and brainstorming with the
Apple Pencil.

I think one thing your article is missing, and is worth investigating
further, is (and this is a hypothesis) when you have a paper and pencil
(versus typing away at a keyboard + mouse) you're more likely to draw
and doodle out your thought process. Drawing, at least for me, is very
relaxing and also helps capture things much more profoundly than typed
letters. It's like they say - a picture is worth a thousand words. Not
to mention people remember images far better than words.

As for the writing on glass problem, and yes, it is a problem and takes
some getting used to, there are screen protectors you can put on that
make it feel (and sound!) just like writing on paper. reMarkable2 also
solves for this with the texture of their screen (though I personally
haven't tried it).
[27]Reply
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