![]() What we refer to as “multitasking” is actually our brain context switching - jumping rapidly back and forth between tasks, which burns this same oxygenated glucose at monstrous rates, leading us into energy nosedives mid-afternoon. It turns out, the vast majority of us are actually incapable of multitasking. In the flow state, also known as “being in the zone,” we burn less brain fuel (oxygenated glucose). Single-tasking allows us to more easily achieve the flow state. Instead, paper restricts us to single-tasking, which has numerous advantages of its own. Fisher Space Pens can write upside down and underwater but they won’t let you add things to your Amazon wishlist. We can’t fall down a Wikipedia rabbit hole when using a yellow legal pad. Midori Traveller’s don’t pop up new tweets or Facebook invites to events we will never attend. Our Rhodia dot pads don’t vibrate when someone types us on Snapchat. Our Leuchtturm1917 notebooks don’t ring when someone calls. If you think I’m wrong, I’ll email you some WordStar and AppleWorks documents just as soon as I can figure out how to get them off my five and a quarter inch floppies.īut I can go the National Archives right now and read a copy of the Magna Carta that was handwritten 793 years ago. And if an IT person tells you that there is a way to archive a digital file, not touch it for 500 years, and guarantee that it will remain usable-that person is lying to you. Data turns to noise in all kinds of unpredictable ways. It captures the marks I make so that they can be referred to at a later time.” In his wonderful article In Defense of Writing Longhand, McLean goes on to explain how paper is actually more enduring than files: Alexa can’t even leave the house.Īs author Patrick McLean says, “A pen and paper has but one functionality. Siri, Cortana and Google Now can’t doodle. No virtual assistant can offer us the same versatility. ![]() No quick entry system developed today can begin to compete with the access that a pocket notebook offers (not the “screen-off memo” option on Samsung’s Galaxy Note 5 nor the Surface Pro 4’s eraser clicking quick note). Formatting is decided by the user and can be changed in an instant. With paper, there’s no system to learn no hot keys to memorize. Cheap spiral notebooks don’t need a lightning cable or a power brick. Bic pens are ready to write at a moment’s notice, whether you have 4G connectivity or not. Paper doesn’t require booting time, passwords, or fingerprint scanning. In the words of Getting Things Done guru David Allen, “…the easiest and most ubiquitous way to get stuff out of your head is pen and paper.” It‘s fast and dead simple After thousands of years, the use of paper feels natural and innate. It’s easy to take paper for granted and even easier to forget how refined of a medium it truly is. Love the tactile satisfaction of crossing a task off on paperĮqually love the ubiquity, versatility, and searchablility of a digital task managerīut first we need to know what exactly we can achieve with pen and paper that we can’t achieve with digital tools and vice versa… Advantages of paper So why does paper continue to hold on to its place in the world of productivity tools? In the past, there was resistance to television, refrigeration, sound in film, the automobile and even the cotton gin, but in the end these new technologies eradicated their predecessors. Livescribe makes pens which function like normal ballpoints while simultaneously capturing the pen strokes in a digital format.Īnd Mod Notebooks allow you to mail them your completed notebook, which they will then scan and digitize for you. Whitelines offers products with light grey paper and white lines which are designed to disappear when scanned, preserving only the text or image on the page. Notebook company Moleskine partnered with Evernote to create, which automatically file handwritten notes through the use of stickers. On the other end of the spectrum, pen and paper companies are innovating just as quickly to find their place in the digital world: Evernote and OneNote both incorporate “Optical Character Recognition” into their apps, allowing users to handwrite notes or to scan in paper notes without sacrificing the ability to search their text. Facebook, Dropbox, and FiftyThree each have an app that they call “Paper”.Īnd the crossover between digital and analog doesn’t end with metaphors. Yet, Apple still calls their new stylus a “Pencil” while Microsoft offers theirs as a “Pen”. In recent years, Apple, Google and Microsoft have openly accepted flat design in an attempt to move past the need for these real-world metaphors.
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