Ruminating on Why I Still Use a Paper Notebook
Digital tools are better for everything except thinking.
I have tried every note-taking app. Notion, Obsidian, Apple Notes, Bear, Roam Research, plain text files. I keep coming back to a cheap paper notebook from Muji.
The reason is not nostalgia. Paper forces me to think before I write. With a digital tool, I can type faster than I can think, which means I end up with a lot of words and not many ideas. With a pen, I have to choose my words because crossing things out is messy.
Paper also has no notifications. No links to click. No formatting options to fiddle with. It is just me and the thought.
My system is simple. One notebook at a time. Date at the top of each page. Write whatever. No organization system, no color coding, no fancy bullet journal layouts. When it is full, I flip through it once, tear out the pages with ideas worth keeping, and transfer those to a digital file. The rest gets recycled.
About 80% of what I write in notebooks is trash. But the 20% that survives the flip-through tends to be the real stuff. The ideas that passed the "still interesting after two weeks" test.
The digital tools are for storage. Paper is for thinking.
- Mohan
- Mohan