My Remaining Use for Pen and Paper

I care about practicality. I read books on an iPad and take notes on my laptop; in general, if I can avoid having another thing by replacing it with a digital copy, I’ll use it digitally. For many of their historical uses, pen & paper just aren’t practical anymore compared to computers. A nicer experience, sure, but for my day-to-day work, not practical. Only recently did I realize the role of pen and paper in my digital life: not as a storage medium, but as a thinking surface. Computers are better for retrieving, refining, storing, and sharing ideas once they have shape, but paper is better for playing with new ideas.1 For designing non-traditional software architectures or exploring research ideas, I still do my best thinking on paper, where I draw boxes and arrows and make a mess without distraction. The lack of copy & paste forces me to decide what ideas to carry forward and what to leave behind. No cloud storage or subscription required. This works because I don’t need full-text…