Great discussion. In my opinion, the real takeaway isn’t about notebooks vs. digital tools, it’s about what shifts your mental gears. Every time we switch modes, it forces our brain to pay attention differently. That fresh context can boost focus, creativity, even recall.
For example, I recently stopped coding all the time and picked up a new hobby at night, writing. That simple change gave my brain a reset and actually improved the performance during the day. Same goes for planning: switching from digital to pen and paper breaks the routine and makes your brain engage differently. It’s less about the tool and more about how the change wakes you up.
The book Smarter Faster Better introduced me to the concept of disfluency - the idea that extra friction such as awkward fonts, new environments, different tools, etc will pull you out of autopilot mode and force you to think in new ways. I haven’t seen references to it elsewhere, but it’s changed how I approach problems and learning the last 9 years. Switching to a notebook is one great way I use to trigger this as well.
I wonder how many developers today were forced to take an introductory drafting class. I know a lot of us played with Lego. The problem of describing a 3 dimensional object in two dimensions requires extra projections to describe the thing. A 3d object in 2 dimensions takes three drawings to mostly describe. If the object is more complex than three dimensions, you need to look at it from a lot more angles.
This is one of the reasons that I actually take notes in three different media: paper notebooks, an old-school digital voice recorder, and in text files. Different media have different advantages and disadvantages and represent different ideas for more readily.
I have used the voice recorder less over the years but I find it optimal when time is limited and I have to move onto something else. Part of using a voice recorder as a medium is listening closely afterwards and writing down what I said in a different manner (either in a more permanent paper notebook or digitally in a text file). And yes, each iteration transforms the idea at least somewhat. It gives you the chance to see the idea in a different way.
This is why (apart from being Irish) I drink a fair bit of tea throughout the day.
Going to the kitchen, boiling water and letting it brew, gets me away from my desk and gives me an opportunity to start thinking out loud while I wait.
Sometimes just getting up out of my chair will shake loose some tough problem and the answer will be clear.
Alas, even after all these years, I occasionally grind away on things rather than remembering this.
I read a study a while back that said context switching costs ~15 minutes on average. I don't know how true it is, but my bosses have always believed it and tried to respect it.
Something I noticed for myself—doing a live webinar series over a couple days and taking notes with pen/paper in realtime—I really struggled to keep up at first, but over a few days I started to notice my ability to do a listen-and-write context shift improved and it felt like I was able to retain auditory information better.
Some of the most intelligent people I've ever met in math, physics, and computer science don't even use a notebook. They use printer paper and pen. When they're done, they throw the paper away.
I have seldom found personal notes from far in the past to be useful. If there's something worth noting down, then it goes into documentation, so others can stumble upon whatever quirk I've come across in the future. If there's something I really want to remember, I create flashcards and do spaced repetition until I've learned the thing. But that's just me, and I imagine my way doesn't work for a lot of people.
I think people are taking this post a little too personally and literally. This is a writer's piece. The title is meant to share a philosophy that this developer subscribes to. Nothing about it is declaring that others must subscribe to it as well.
If a pen and notebook don't work for you, then don't use it.
Writing by hand also has a greater effect than typing because it engages more of the senses and more of the brain, in particular the motor cortex.
I keep telling myself that this would all make a great excuse to get a Moleskine, but handwriting just isn't a part of my workflow. Typing copious amounts of stuff into text buffers and then transforming it is, especially now that we have LLMs. If my brain is totally non-functional I simply start typing barely intelligible phrases into a text editor until it wakes up, then I go back and edit/refactor/clean up, and frequently something comes out of this that looks like a vague outline of an email or piece of code I need to write that day. Or at least a todo list. Then we're off to the races doing actual work. Most of the initial doodling is destroyed.
For me it's critical that the note capture mechanism be unstructured and entirely free form. Typing notes on a keyboard just doesn't work when much of the things I need to keep note of are non-linear, non-verbal, relational, or spatial. Or just facts that I need to keep in temp memory.
I periodically review the notes and summarize anything worth keeping into the appropriate system of record (calendar, tickets, wiki, spaced repetition, doesn't matter). Like you, I find that very little is actually worth keeping. And that's fine; the paper notes are not a system of record but more of an extension of working memory.
>I have seldom found personal notes from far in the past to be useful
Same, but I still keep them (both notebooks and random pieces of paper). I find it extremely satisfying to just look into them after many years. It's like looking at random old photos, photos of my thinking process from the past.
This is how my brain works. I do have a notebook. My stream of thoughts for one day go one one page for that day. I turn the page the next day and I almost never look back. There may be some value in looking back. But, I have not been able to make myself do it.
>>Some of the most intelligent people I've ever met in math, physics, and computer science don't even use a notebook. They use printer paper and pen. When they're done, they throw the paper away.
Donald Knuth works that way. In fact, most such people tend to do most of their thinking on paper, making small changes to the problem state, verifying if it sticks, and is going where they want it going. Rollback, make a different change to the same thing, or same change to different things. This goes on over hundreds of pages.
One of the advanced user level performers don't tend to view stationary(especially paper) as something that must be rationed or spent with limits.
I'm sure it's very personal :) Because everyone has their own reality, workflow and reading a piece either resonates or dissonates with you (personally).
I personally find paper&pen both comforting and unsettling at the same time. Soothing because writing really helps sort out thoughts etc. Mindflow is different from flow "on the computer/phone/tablet".
On the other hand, it's distracting because without an index system (I start each notebook with two blank pages trying to index the contents; every other page has a number) it's easy to get lost.
But today's kids, being digital natives, may take a different approach. Paper&pen may present anxiety for them. So it very much depends on the family we grew up in.
I've used printer paper myself in different jobs in science. I personally don't like it but I have done it when it was the only paper available. Budgets in scientific organizations are often very tight, so often nothing else is provided, and many times you do not have the direct authority to order anything yourself.
My point is that I'd view this behavior more as a consequence of the circumstances many scientists find themselves in rather than a conscious choice, though I do admit that some people may like it more than I do.
> They use printer paper and pen. When they're done, they throw the paper away.
That's the most important takeaway from using pen(cil) and paper. If you can make it reusable for you great but the most important thing is physically writing it down.
I rarely, if ever, keep anything I have written down in the notebook. Eventually, I rip it out and shred it.
I used to use fancy watermarked paper just because it was fun, but then I got a job at a place with supply closets stocked with infinite printer paper, and, best of all - 11x17 printer paper! I got a 11x17 clipboard to go with it and been using that ever since.
Calling a notebook the “most important tool” for a dev is pure romanticism. Useful for some, sure, but let's not pretend it outweighs a debugger, version control, or CI. This isn't craftsmanship cosplay, it's software engineering.
OP here. Last time my blog caught attention in HN, I was told I'm "living in a fantasy" and this time it's "pure romanticism".
The tools you shared are of course important and I enjoy having them a lot. Wouldn't want to work as a developer without version control or debuggers, for sure. Those are tools that if I lost them, it surely would slow me down and be annoying.
I do truly consider notebook more important to me than those. Writing and running code is the tool to get things done but software development to me is more importantly building something valuable that solves problems or makes life easier. And to that, code is often somewhat trivial implementation detail — it's much more important to figure out what to build and how.
Some people are good at thinking when they are in a code editor or other digital tools. My brain goes into detail implementation mode and it's hard for me to see the big picture when I'm writing in code editor and building functionality.
For me, it's crucial part of my job to take my notebook and use it as a tool for thinking before (and during!) coding. While losing access to the other tools would definitely slow me down, not being able to think through writing with pen and paper would cripple my thinking, my problem solving ability, my creativity and thus cause me writing bad software.
Thanks for pointing this out. In the same vein there are so many posts about productivity systems where people put endless amount of time into crafting their gtd notebooks with tabs and lists, etc. All that time spent to be productive instead of actually being productive. Or people describing their ideal Obsidian work flows instead of actually noting anything useful down in it. People writing about how they built their own blogging engine because their particular way of blogging is so unique that they had to hand-roll something. All that time spent on building a blog rather than blogging. (I've been there too).
I love "This isn't craftsmanship cosplay, it's software engineering.". I will definitely steal this, let me put it in my notebook.
What you're talking about is software machining, not software engineering.
The difference between the blue collar machinist and the white collar engineer is exactly this view of the machines they use.
For an engineer a machine - be in a slide rule, calculator or super computer - is just a tool. You're not doing engineering because you're using the tool. You're doing engineering because you're thinking and the tool helps you think a bit faster.
For a machinist the machine is the job. You can't make widgets if you don't have a machine to make them on. Thinking about widgets is pointless because they don't get made by thinking.
The literal argument here is fine - using a notebook is antiquated and we have better tools.
But the sentiment holds true. When you're building software designing good code is the most fundamentally important aspect of your job. All the tools you mention are things that enable you to delivery that code, but if the design of the code itself is wrong then they mean very little. The process of designing code feels like a lost art these days; developers are far too happy to throw crap at a wall until enough of it sticks to pass the acceptance criteria. Going back to actually working out the logic and flow of the code (on paper, in a diagramming app, whatever) is missing for a vast amount of the dev community.
If people were happy to work through the logic of a feature before hitting their IDE and debugging the first thing they code up, maybe apps would be a bit less buggy.
Most comments are focusing on the physical pen and paper aspect of this post, but are missing the underlying principle:
The author uses pen and paper because when they sit down at a computer they end up shifting to "function mode" where they're implementing rather than designing.
That's it.
The important takeaway is to make sure you don't fall into the trap of implementing when you should be designing. How you maintain that balance is up to you.
Exactly! So happy to read you managed to pick up the core gist of the story.
It's important to find the tools that work best for YOU.
I partially wanted to write this because I've often felt as an outsider in tech teams where everyone sits at a computer 7.5 hours every day and I'm the one thinking better when I'm away from the screen and keyboard. So I wanted to offer an example to those who are like me and also feel like they might not belong.
I have been writing software for about 20 years (following on from OChem PhD and research for a few years). I am 'senior' and get paid plenty in Oz...
I have aphantasia - I can't visualise/picture things in my mind, so I use pen and paper or whiteboards A LOT!
I create various ERDs, mind maps, sequence diagrams etc. I use a ReMarkable which makes it a bit easier to move stuff around and makes it more effective.
I get that some people might think it is 'pure romanticism', but pen and paper has been crucial for my success.
I have tried both. Going fully digital and fully notebook oriented. The best I have come up with is to have long term notes in a note app but your on going current thought process in a book. Like what you are currently doing or it's process.
This helps with the search and copy issue of going physical. But writing things for your ongoing process / tasks makes you remember things so much better. Sometimes, all I have to do is write. I don't have refer them. But if I have to, I usually have a better sense of how I got to the end result cos I have the journey written down in my notebook. Also being a fountain pen lover helps.
You must choose one side or the other, and fully commit to it (like everyone else in this comment section). But it's too late now, since you've already tried both sides (fully digital and fully notebook) with an open mind, that means your opinion is automatically invalid and wrong.
I don't understand the pen/physical notebook thing. It's slow to write, insanely slow to search what you've written, almost impossible to copy or share.
After trying all sorts of note taking tools and apps over the years to try to get myself organized, part of my New Year's Resolution this year was to just buy a stack of To-Do list notepads that had a spot for the date and just let me write stuff down ad-hoc while in meetings or working on stuff. It's amazing how much more productive I've been since doing this.
I like writing much better,[1] and after a fair share of Moleskin, Field Notes, and a long streak with Muji, I’m now blown away by Midori. I have already gotten a few, and I’m going to get a lot more. The tactile ‘scratch’ of the fountain pen on the Midori Paper is so soothing, it makes me feel like I’m a poet even when I’m writing down the most mundane idea that I just had. :-)
The bell-curve meme popular on reddit showing both extremes using the same solution, while the "average" cries, is dead on.
OP is on the right path: think before you code.
One of the neat things about being in the last few years of my career (started in 1988) is how the tools change. I'm a senior principal software architect at a large-ish company. And I don't write a single line of code. I write everything in Visio, Word, and PowerPoint (and sometimes PlantUML). As you move up the abstraction ladder the tools become simpler. I define architectures that will deploy into 10-year lifespan applications (think military, medical, and automotive tier-1), and the code that implements it--or even the language used--has absolutely zero impact on the architecture. Mostly C and C++ (went through an Ada period, too), and some of it might even be implemented in Rust over the next few years as it matures into the automotive world, but when you're high enough up, the implementation is irrelevant.
What matters are the building blocks, the apis, and most importantly, the encapsulation because that has an impact on the silicon, security, manufacturing, and test. Stuff that can be drawn and explained in a few slides, and not the code itself. (Of course, my lovely boxes have to be able to withstand upstream discoveries of flaws in the architecture, but that's the fun part!)
I have a notebook that I bring on vacations or weekend trips to jot down occasional bouts of inspiration. A few of those pages contain designs of pet projects that may or may not get implemented later. It can be fun to sit on the beach and map out a potential design even if you never end up implementing it.
Taking detailed notes in meetings, and keeping a record of what I'm doing/thinking about has allowed me to drastically shorten the "context switching time" between meetings and days. And having those notes is vital every once in a while, ie: X person said Y thing on Z date. Or It took me X days to do this thing, etc... doing this is a great way to be "management material" if that's what you wanna do. Because you are visibly very organized.
I literally just write down everything important in meetings because it keeps me focused and I enjoy the act of hand writing.
And then I keep notes in a giant endless .md file of what my goals are for the day. It's like 10 lines per day max.
I use engineering paper and a mechanical pencil extensively for software development work, a habit I picked up in my chemical engineering days.
None of it is saved. I use it to extend my working memory for complex design problems, and for this purpose I find it very effective. The advantage of paper and pencil is that it is naturally and efficiently amenable to non-linear and somewhat arbitrary patterns of access and representation.
Software really struggles at this because computer UIs force everything into coarse linear workflows no matter the presentation, which makes navigating and rewiring a large number of orthogonal dimensions awkward and inefficient on the best days.
As we're absorbing this idea... I've seen employment contracts for technical people that arguably might consider these handwritten notes to be IP artifacts, which must be preserved and made accessible to the company.
If that's your situation, you could scribble the date, your name, project, etc. in some margin of the piece of paper, and stick it in a pile/folder. To eventually be scanned, and the file put somewhere accessible, and/or the paper technically preserved.
In a startup, you might also want to preserve things like these for nostalgia, even if they have no IP value. One seed startup, I kept a folder of "nostalgia" photos, video clips, screenshots, etc., of early prototypes, people working late, incremental successes, etc., and it was quickly a good thing. It's amazing how well you can progress, and what positive feelings you have some of these things that quickly become nostalgic. Anyone can see the current state of the code in the repo, but here's the pencil sketch on quadrille paper (or a napkin) one evening that became our architecture.
As in "the most important accessory beyond a computer and a text editor", I absolutely agree for how I work and think.
Nothing I have tried comes close. No iPad, writing code directly, talking it through, thinking it through, sketching it out on whatever drawing tool you might like. Pencil and paper are all I want.
Now, let's argue about our favourite colours and why teal is objectively the best.
I have thought through tough problems using pen and paper. Have tried a lot of iterations of digital notebooks, but lost the fluidity and malleability of paper.
These days I have found the iPad + Pencil with an infinite canvas to be the best fit. I use Ahmni (https://www.ahmni.app/) which is a delight.
I had to work on a coding project with a serious geometric problem in the core, and no amount of thinking over code itself could help, whereas on paper, I could find the solution easily. And implementing it in code didn't progress, until I wrote down all the formulae, in sequence, on paper too.
As I like to say, I do most of my programming before I touch a keyboard.
The single most powerful thing I do is ask questions and write down the answers. When I want to understand a system this is the fundamental step that cannot be skipped. How crucial it is that I understand the system will tell me how formal I need to be in my thinking. If it's a basic web application or a report I need to generate it's a simple, informal note. If we're talking about a critical system that's distributed and requires high-availability with hard limits on processing time and the consequence of getting things wrong is that businesses and people lose money/property? Then I'll bust out the mathematics and model things formally.
I've experimented as well with writing code on paper first. This doesn't work so well with procedural languages without some form of shorthand/formalism. It works much better with statically-typed functional programming languages. When using such languages I mostly need to reason about the types: the implementation is a matter of filling in the holes which can be done when I'm at the keyboard. The more I learn to "think in types," the better this works but I'm not super great at it yet.
Notebooks are where it all begins.
I also use notebooks to journal my work. I use the bullet journal system to keep track of my work. Keeping it on paper forces me to sit in front of it and physically remind myself of my tasks. It helps me stay focused on the day to day activities and not lose track of my longer-term goals. After using one long enough this way it becomes a chronicle of my work. Handy for performance review season. A great deal of programming work comes out of these journals.
Some folks prefer digital tools and that's fine and dandy. I'm just old school and prefer physicality. Paper and pen work on the level my brain works on and gives me a break from screen, keyboard, and constant stream of notifications. Room and freedom to think without interruptions is important and useful.
I highly recommend the Leuchturm 1917 A4 Master notebook with a dotted grid. Beautiful quality and a delight to use, especially with a good fountain pen.
Yes A4 is quite big but has good advantages for inserting loose papers and the A4 real estate is a great size for user interface design.
[+] [-] ednite|9 months ago|reply
For example, I recently stopped coding all the time and picked up a new hobby at night, writing. That simple change gave my brain a reset and actually improved the performance during the day. Same goes for planning: switching from digital to pen and paper breaks the routine and makes your brain engage differently. It’s less about the tool and more about how the change wakes you up.
[+] [-] cleak|9 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] atrettel|9 months ago|reply
I have used the voice recorder less over the years but I find it optimal when time is limited and I have to move onto something else. Part of using a voice recorder as a medium is listening closely afterwards and writing down what I said in a different manner (either in a more permanent paper notebook or digitally in a text file). And yes, each iteration transforms the idea at least somewhat. It gives you the chance to see the idea in a different way.
[+] [-] kapitar|9 months ago|reply
Going to the kitchen, boiling water and letting it brew, gets me away from my desk and gives me an opportunity to start thinking out loud while I wait.
Sometimes just getting up out of my chair will shake loose some tough problem and the answer will be clear.
Alas, even after all these years, I occasionally grind away on things rather than remembering this.
[+] [-] stronglikedan|9 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] sky2224|9 months ago|reply
I have seldom found personal notes from far in the past to be useful. If there's something worth noting down, then it goes into documentation, so others can stumble upon whatever quirk I've come across in the future. If there's something I really want to remember, I create flashcards and do spaced repetition until I've learned the thing. But that's just me, and I imagine my way doesn't work for a lot of people.
I think people are taking this post a little too personally and literally. This is a writer's piece. The title is meant to share a philosophy that this developer subscribes to. Nothing about it is declaring that others must subscribe to it as well.
If a pen and notebook don't work for you, then don't use it.
[+] [-] safety1st|9 months ago|reply
Here's one of the hundreds of articles about this, it's a very well documented phenomenon https://www.newscientist.com/article/2414241-writing-things-...
Writing by hand also has a greater effect than typing because it engages more of the senses and more of the brain, in particular the motor cortex.
I keep telling myself that this would all make a great excuse to get a Moleskine, but handwriting just isn't a part of my workflow. Typing copious amounts of stuff into text buffers and then transforming it is, especially now that we have LLMs. If my brain is totally non-functional I simply start typing barely intelligible phrases into a text editor until it wakes up, then I go back and edit/refactor/clean up, and frequently something comes out of this that looks like a vague outline of an email or piece of code I need to write that day. Or at least a todo list. Then we're off to the races doing actual work. Most of the initial doodling is destroyed.
Handwriting does aid retention though.
[+] [-] perrygeo|9 months ago|reply
I periodically review the notes and summarize anything worth keeping into the appropriate system of record (calendar, tickets, wiki, spaced repetition, doesn't matter). Like you, I find that very little is actually worth keeping. And that's fine; the paper notes are not a system of record but more of an extension of working memory.
[+] [-] freetonik|9 months ago|reply
Same, but I still keep them (both notebooks and random pieces of paper). I find it extremely satisfying to just look into them after many years. It's like looking at random old photos, photos of my thinking process from the past.
[+] [-] cheema33|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] MSFT_Edging|9 months ago|reply
Occasionally i'll write something down that I know I'll forget for later reference and put a small post-it sticking out for easy access.
[+] [-] kamaal|9 months ago|reply
Donald Knuth works that way. In fact, most such people tend to do most of their thinking on paper, making small changes to the problem state, verifying if it sticks, and is going where they want it going. Rollback, make a different change to the same thing, or same change to different things. This goes on over hundreds of pages.
One of the advanced user level performers don't tend to view stationary(especially paper) as something that must be rationed or spent with limits.
[+] [-] sixtyj|9 months ago|reply
I personally find paper&pen both comforting and unsettling at the same time. Soothing because writing really helps sort out thoughts etc. Mindflow is different from flow "on the computer/phone/tablet".
On the other hand, it's distracting because without an index system (I start each notebook with two blank pages trying to index the contents; every other page has a number) it's easy to get lost.
But today's kids, being digital natives, may take a different approach. Paper&pen may present anxiety for them. So it very much depends on the family we grew up in.
[+] [-] tmaly|9 months ago|reply
I am thinking about trying to do something with this like scanning for connections between notes or adding some tags to make ideas easier to find.
[+] [-] atrettel|9 months ago|reply
My point is that I'd view this behavior more as a consequence of the circumstances many scientists find themselves in rather than a conscious choice, though I do admit that some people may like it more than I do.
[+] [-] hk1337|9 months ago|reply
That's the most important takeaway from using pen(cil) and paper. If you can make it reusable for you great but the most important thing is physically writing it down.
I rarely, if ever, keep anything I have written down in the notebook. Eventually, I rip it out and shred it.
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[+] [-] Hamatti|9 months ago|reply
The tools you shared are of course important and I enjoy having them a lot. Wouldn't want to work as a developer without version control or debuggers, for sure. Those are tools that if I lost them, it surely would slow me down and be annoying.
I do truly consider notebook more important to me than those. Writing and running code is the tool to get things done but software development to me is more importantly building something valuable that solves problems or makes life easier. And to that, code is often somewhat trivial implementation detail — it's much more important to figure out what to build and how.
Some people are good at thinking when they are in a code editor or other digital tools. My brain goes into detail implementation mode and it's hard for me to see the big picture when I'm writing in code editor and building functionality.
For me, it's crucial part of my job to take my notebook and use it as a tool for thinking before (and during!) coding. While losing access to the other tools would definitely slow me down, not being able to think through writing with pen and paper would cripple my thinking, my problem solving ability, my creativity and thus cause me writing bad software.
[+] [-] mosselman|9 months ago|reply
I love "This isn't craftsmanship cosplay, it's software engineering.". I will definitely steal this, let me put it in my notebook.
[+] [-] noosphr|9 months ago|reply
The difference between the blue collar machinist and the white collar engineer is exactly this view of the machines they use.
For an engineer a machine - be in a slide rule, calculator or super computer - is just a tool. You're not doing engineering because you're using the tool. You're doing engineering because you're thinking and the tool helps you think a bit faster.
For a machinist the machine is the job. You can't make widgets if you don't have a machine to make them on. Thinking about widgets is pointless because they don't get made by thinking.
[+] [-] onion2k|9 months ago|reply
But the sentiment holds true. When you're building software designing good code is the most fundamentally important aspect of your job. All the tools you mention are things that enable you to delivery that code, but if the design of the code itself is wrong then they mean very little. The process of designing code feels like a lost art these days; developers are far too happy to throw crap at a wall until enough of it sticks to pass the acceptance criteria. Going back to actually working out the logic and flow of the code (on paper, in a diagramming app, whatever) is missing for a vast amount of the dev community.
If people were happy to work through the logic of a feature before hitting their IDE and debugging the first thing they code up, maybe apps would be a bit less buggy.
[+] [-] kstenerud|9 months ago|reply
The author uses pen and paper because when they sit down at a computer they end up shifting to "function mode" where they're implementing rather than designing.
That's it.
The important takeaway is to make sure you don't fall into the trap of implementing when you should be designing. How you maintain that balance is up to you.
[+] [-] Hamatti|9 months ago|reply
Exactly! So happy to read you managed to pick up the core gist of the story.
It's important to find the tools that work best for YOU.
I partially wanted to write this because I've often felt as an outsider in tech teams where everyone sits at a computer 7.5 hours every day and I'm the one thinking better when I'm away from the screen and keyboard. So I wanted to offer an example to those who are like me and also feel like they might not belong.
[+] [-] adampwells|9 months ago|reply
I have aphantasia - I can't visualise/picture things in my mind, so I use pen and paper or whiteboards A LOT!
I create various ERDs, mind maps, sequence diagrams etc. I use a ReMarkable which makes it a bit easier to move stuff around and makes it more effective.
I get that some people might think it is 'pure romanticism', but pen and paper has been crucial for my success.
[+] [-] unsungNovelty|9 months ago|reply
This helps with the search and copy issue of going physical. But writing things for your ongoing process / tasks makes you remember things so much better. Sometimes, all I have to do is write. I don't have refer them. But if I have to, I usually have a better sense of how I got to the end result cos I have the journey written down in my notebook. Also being a fountain pen lover helps.
[+] [-] quectophoton|9 months ago|reply
You must choose one side or the other, and fully commit to it (like everyone else in this comment section). But it's too late now, since you've already tried both sides (fully digital and fully notebook) with an open mind, that means your opinion is automatically invalid and wrong.
Them's the rules.
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sylens|9 months ago|reply
The item in question for anyone curious: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BS1WJZNW
[+] [-] Brajeshwar|9 months ago|reply
https://brajeshwar.com/2025/notes/
[+] [-] FigurativeVoid|9 months ago|reply
Working on an architecture with a peer and marker really led to some elegant class designs.
[+] [-] voilavilla|9 months ago|reply
OP is on the right path: think before you code.
One of the neat things about being in the last few years of my career (started in 1988) is how the tools change. I'm a senior principal software architect at a large-ish company. And I don't write a single line of code. I write everything in Visio, Word, and PowerPoint (and sometimes PlantUML). As you move up the abstraction ladder the tools become simpler. I define architectures that will deploy into 10-year lifespan applications (think military, medical, and automotive tier-1), and the code that implements it--or even the language used--has absolutely zero impact on the architecture. Mostly C and C++ (went through an Ada period, too), and some of it might even be implemented in Rust over the next few years as it matures into the automotive world, but when you're high enough up, the implementation is irrelevant.
What matters are the building blocks, the apis, and most importantly, the encapsulation because that has an impact on the silicon, security, manufacturing, and test. Stuff that can be drawn and explained in a few slides, and not the code itself. (Of course, my lovely boxes have to be able to withstand upstream discoveries of flaws in the architecture, but that's the fun part!)
[+] [-] jimlawruk|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dustbunny|9 months ago|reply
I literally just write down everything important in meetings because it keeps me focused and I enjoy the act of hand writing.
And then I keep notes in a giant endless .md file of what my goals are for the day. It's like 10 lines per day max.
[+] [-] jandrewrogers|9 months ago|reply
None of it is saved. I use it to extend my working memory for complex design problems, and for this purpose I find it very effective. The advantage of paper and pencil is that it is naturally and efficiently amenable to non-linear and somewhat arbitrary patterns of access and representation.
Software really struggles at this because computer UIs force everything into coarse linear workflows no matter the presentation, which makes navigating and rewiring a large number of orthogonal dimensions awkward and inefficient on the best days.
[+] [-] neilv|9 months ago|reply
As we're absorbing this idea... I've seen employment contracts for technical people that arguably might consider these handwritten notes to be IP artifacts, which must be preserved and made accessible to the company.
If that's your situation, you could scribble the date, your name, project, etc. in some margin of the piece of paper, and stick it in a pile/folder. To eventually be scanned, and the file put somewhere accessible, and/or the paper technically preserved.
In a startup, you might also want to preserve things like these for nostalgia, even if they have no IP value. One seed startup, I kept a folder of "nostalgia" photos, video clips, screenshots, etc., of early prototypes, people working late, incremental successes, etc., and it was quickly a good thing. It's amazing how well you can progress, and what positive feelings you have some of these things that quickly become nostalgic. Anyone can see the current state of the code in the repo, but here's the pencil sketch on quadrille paper (or a napkin) one evening that became our architecture.
[+] [-] gherkinnn|9 months ago|reply
Nothing I have tried comes close. No iPad, writing code directly, talking it through, thinking it through, sketching it out on whatever drawing tool you might like. Pencil and paper are all I want.
Now, let's argue about our favourite colours and why teal is objectively the best.
[+] [-] sawaali|9 months ago|reply
These days I have found the iPad + Pencil with an infinite canvas to be the best fit. I use Ahmni (https://www.ahmni.app/) which is a delight.
[+] [-] culebron21|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] agentultra|9 months ago|reply
The single most powerful thing I do is ask questions and write down the answers. When I want to understand a system this is the fundamental step that cannot be skipped. How crucial it is that I understand the system will tell me how formal I need to be in my thinking. If it's a basic web application or a report I need to generate it's a simple, informal note. If we're talking about a critical system that's distributed and requires high-availability with hard limits on processing time and the consequence of getting things wrong is that businesses and people lose money/property? Then I'll bust out the mathematics and model things formally.
I've experimented as well with writing code on paper first. This doesn't work so well with procedural languages without some form of shorthand/formalism. It works much better with statically-typed functional programming languages. When using such languages I mostly need to reason about the types: the implementation is a matter of filling in the holes which can be done when I'm at the keyboard. The more I learn to "think in types," the better this works but I'm not super great at it yet.
Notebooks are where it all begins.
I also use notebooks to journal my work. I use the bullet journal system to keep track of my work. Keeping it on paper forces me to sit in front of it and physically remind myself of my tasks. It helps me stay focused on the day to day activities and not lose track of my longer-term goals. After using one long enough this way it becomes a chronicle of my work. Handy for performance review season. A great deal of programming work comes out of these journals.
Some folks prefer digital tools and that's fine and dandy. I'm just old school and prefer physicality. Paper and pen work on the level my brain works on and gives me a break from screen, keyboard, and constant stream of notifications. Room and freedom to think without interruptions is important and useful.
[+] [-] WalterBright|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fallinditch|9 months ago|reply
Yes A4 is quite big but has good advantages for inserting loose papers and the A4 real estate is a great size for user interface design.