One year of paper notes

A year ago I put a small notebook in my back pocket and stopped taking notes on my phone. Not as a statement about technology. Mostly because I noticed that anything I wrote on the phone was written once and never read again, and I wanted to test whether the medium was the problem or the habit was.

Short answer: the habit was the problem, but the medium helped.

What survived

Three things, consistently, for twelve months: measurements, prices, and sentences I wanted to keep. Measurements because I take them standing in front of the thing being measured and my hands are usually not free. Prices because the same is true in a market. Sentences because writing them by hand slows me down enough to notice when a sentence is bad.

Everything else died. To-do lists died within a month — they turned into a second, worse copy of a list that belonged somewhere else. Meeting notes never happened at all, since meetings happen at a desk with a computer on it.

What the notebook is bad at

Search, obviously. Anything I might need to find again gets photographed and dropped into a plain text file at the end of the week — a five-minute ritual, and it means the notebook never has to be an archive. It is a capture device. The file is the archive.

It is also bad at volume. A page holds about a day's worth of small things. That turns out to be a feature: running out of space forces a monthly pass where half the entries get crossed out because they stopped mattering, which is information I would not otherwise get.

The surprise

The part I did not expect: writing by hand is slow enough that I abandon bad ideas on the page instead of carrying them around. On a keyboard a half-formed thought is cheap to type and then it exists, and then it sits in a list somewhere being vaguely reproachful. On paper it is a scribble I can see is a scribble.

Keeping it

Same notebook again next year, same pocket. One pen, the cheap kind, because a good pen makes me careful in a way that hurts capture. The ritual at the end of the week stays. Nothing else about it is worth formalising.