Pen pal?

For the last couple of days, I have had no access to my laptop or the internet and been forced to work with old skool pen and paper.

Now I am old enough to remember life without computers, but I am not one of those people who harp on about how “it was better without them”.

I think computers and laptops have changed the way we live and work in a very positive way.

But being forced to go back to pen and paper highlighted some advantages that mode of working has.

A notebook and pen never run out of battery; they come in much smaller sizes so they can fit in your jeans pocket, you cant break the screen when you drop them, and at the end of the day, sitting, musing and making notes looks pretty cool.

But the one thing that I believe pen and paper do way more than any computer could is they connect us more to the work we are doing.

Writing by hand causes us to absorb what we are writing in a much deeper way. We remember it much better, it feels real to us and we experience fewer distractions working like this.

Richard Branson, the famous entrepreneur and now budding astronaut, is renowned for using a notebook and pen as his primary tool, and he has done alright.

Computers, laptops, tablets and phones are great tools, but they come pre-installed with many distractions, and sometimes we need to remove these distractions to be productive.

I can confidently say that the last two days using pen and paper have been the most productive days for me in recent weeks.

I am not rushing to ditch the tech; far from it, using the notebook first makes the work on the computer much easier. This blog for example was drafted on pen and paper and is now being typed up in less than 5 mins.

If you, like me, can be easily distracted by “dumb shit” online, I would suggest a day or two now and again away from devices that can access the internet. Get out somewhere quiet armed with just a ballpoint and cheap notepad and see what you can get done.

But be aware if you have been away from using your hand to write for a while, you might be shocked at the standard of writing you produce. Of the many pages of notes I made, I can read about 20%; the rest looks like a spider fell into an ink well and dragged itself across the page to die.

But writing like any skill improves with practice, so stick with it, and soon you could be like Richard Branson, a world-class notetaker with your own spaceship.

Take Care

GB

Originally published at https://www.garethboot.com on August 18, 2021.