An Ode to Paper
The Joy of Analog Note Taking, a Full-Sensory Experience
One of the many images of notebooks with coffee stains on my Instagram account.
I love my notebooks.
All of them. And I have a lot!
Notebooks that I still actively use, as well as notebooks that I already completely filled.
I do use an iPad Pro for work, and I find it quite useful in a lot of ways, but I very quickly gave up on trying to use it as a notebook replacement.
Yes, it has the advantages of (practically) unlimited storage, sophisticated apps for organizing notes, search capabilities, copy and paste, advanced drawing and formatting tools, access to the internet, options to erase or undo, and much more.
But I’d argue that many of these apparent benefits are actually why writing on paper is so much better.
Paper is awesome!
It’s been around for millennia and is still, despite the success of computers, an irreplaceable medium for recording as well as developing our thoughts and ideas.
And I’m only talking about paper as a medium to write on. Books are a whole separate topic that I will save for some other time.
When you write on paper, all senses are involved.
There is a reason why such decidedly analog brands as Moleskine and Montblanc are still so successful in our digital age. The feeling of a good pen writing on high quality paper is incredibly satisfying.
But the sense of touch is just the most obvious one. The sounds can be wonderful as well, simultaneously soothing and electrifying.
Yosi Horikawa, one of my favorite producers, captured these sounds beautifully and wrote the perfect soundtrack to this article, his track Letter.
Compare that to the dull and glassy sound of the Apple Pencil on the iPad. Not to mention the unsatisfying frictionless feeling of the plastic pen on the hard screen.
Although to be fair, the clicking of computer keyboards or even old typewriters does have it’s own unique charm as well.
The senses involved in writing on paper don’t stop at touch and sound. Notebooks can even have particular smells, just like the unique smell of a book store or a library.
They are also much more pleasant to look at. Not only because ink on paper is less tiring to they eyes than backlit displays, they also capture much more unique aspects, much more creativity and variation. And even the paper itself can have its own distinct beauty.
I said I use a lot of notebooks. What do I use them for?
As of writing this, I am actively using seven different notebooks.
I have a notebook that I use for everything related to my work on artificial intelligence. Taking notes while reading academic papers, doing calculation and sketching new ideas, taking meeting notes, and so on.
Another notebook is reserved for taking notes while reading non-fiction books. My main reason to start writing was actually to read more deeply. So I started actively taking detailed notes on every non-fiction book I read. Once I’m done with a book, I transcribe my notes to Evernote where I can then use them as the basis for writing. My article on Deep Work was the first one that came about in that way, essentially being an extended and edited version of the notes I took while reading Deep Work by Cal Newport and Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.
I also believe in continuous learning, for example through online courses. Some of my recent courses include a class on writing, and one on Drum & Bass production. I have another notebook to take notes during these courses. This is a type of notebook that I constantly use as a reference, flicking through old notes when I actually try to apply some of the things I have learned.
Writing has recently also been the first thing I do after waking up. I keep a notebook and pen next to my bed for writing down dreams immediately upon waking, in an effort to get better at remembering my dreams, and ultimately at lucid dreaming. Probably sounds a bit new agey, but it actually works.
There is also a second notebook next to my bed, although it’s recently not been used quite as often as I’d like. It’s The 5 Minute Journal, meant for daily gratitude exercises. Unfortunately that has gathered a bit of dust, but I’d like to restart this habit.
Japanese study and practice also has its own notebook.
Finally the last of the seven notebooks is just random notes, anything that doesn’t fit into one of the others. Random thoughts, stream of consciousness journaling (a.k.a. brain vomiting), coffee recipes I’m experimenting with, etc.
Besides those seven, there are many more already completed notebooks filling my shelves.
Some might say that keeping so many different notebooks is tedious, and it’s difficult to always carry the right notebook for the right occasion. But I actually think this adds a strong sense of purpose. When I put a particular notebook in my backpack to take with me, I am much more aware of a specific intention than if I just throw my laptop or iPad in my bag.
During my PhD, my research was entirely theoretical and, except for some numerical calculations, almost exclusively pen and paper based.
So over the four years of my PhD I went through A LOT of notebooks.
As I described previously, I ended up writing my thesis over the course of three months I spent on the small Greek island of Syros. Half of the volume, and most of the weight of my suitcase was taken up by old notebooks.
One day, I laid them all out on the ground in the living room of the house I had rented.
Looking at all the old notebooks was like time travel through the past several years.
Food, wine, or coffee stains (lots of coffee stains…) on certain pages put me back at exactly the time when I wrote on that particular page.
I already mentioned four of the senses involved when writing on paper, but those stains might even bring back a sense of taste of a particular cup of coffee or glass of wine and the meal I had with it.
In this way you could argue that really all five senses are engaged.
Notes I scribbled down in the margins of my research notebooks had a similar kind of time travel effect. They were often notes taken during calls or while watching random videos on YouTube, or sudden insights I had about something completely unrelated but that I still wanted to record.
To me there is also something very special about the combination of pen and paper and coffee.
When you combine the creative opportunity of a blank page with the caffeinated energy of a good cup of coffee, magic happens.
My recent article series on Variational Autoencoders was almost entirely drafted on paper while sitting in various coffee shops around Tokyo.
Add a good book, and some delicious snacks as fuel, and the creative insights just keep flowing.
I love the internet and certainly wouldn’t want to (couldn’t?) live without it. But it’s also full of distractions.
When you write on a tablet or computer, those distractions are always just one click away, luring you in with a constant stream of temptation and flashing notifications.
Paper doesn’t distract you.
It encourages and facilitates Deep Work.
Also, it fosters creativity.
In the digital realm, copy & paste have become standard operations, so natural to us that we don’t give them any second thought.
But on paper, copy & paste (at least in the sense we’ve become accustomed to) does not exist. Copying someone else’s work on paper is tedious. Even if it’s a quote, you might start paraphrasing and summarizing, and ultimately combining it with your own ideas.
As a result paper promotes truly unique output.
Days on which you start working on paper before switching on any devices are wonderful. They allow you to focus 100% on output before being numbed by input overload, which involuntarily happens on almost any digital medium.
The lack of an undo option also means you are much more conscious and thoughtful about what you write.
“Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
There can even be a tremendous joy in crossing out ideas that maybe didn’t work out.
Other than on a computer where editing is instantaneous and any error immediately forgotten, and any trace of it vanishing forever, a mistake on paper is indelibly imprinted on the page, or at least needs some serious physical effort to erase.
This promotes a much more thoughtful approach as well as a greater learning experience, and allows us to revisit past mistakes and see the full progression of our thoughts, not just the final polished result.
This page from one of my notebooks made me laugh when I looked at it again while writing my thesis.
I clearly didn’t have a particularly good time that day.
Related to the learning experience and long term value, I also noticed that I very rarely look a second time at notes I took on my iPad. You don’t simply flick through old notes when they are in a digital format. Often those thoughts are forever forgotten just minutes after they were written down.
Paper notebooks on the other hand are very easy to flick through. Yes, they do not have any inbuilt search capabilities, but somehow I usually still end up finding what I was looking for much quicker.
Or maybe I rediscover something interesting that I had completely forgotten about. Taking out an old notebook is like an adventure into your thoughts.
You also can’t doodle when using a keyboard, and on a tablet it’s simply not the same kind of experience.
And there is never any anxiety or frustration about batteries reaching the end of their capacity.
So many reasons to love paper notebooks!
It might seem ironic to some that I am working on AI research, something decidedly digital, but prefer to do my work as much as possible on an analog medium.
But to me this is exactly the reason to study AI and why I’m so excited about its possibilities. I don’t believe that AI will replace us humans, or make us less human in any way.
On the contrary, I believe that if we do it right (which might be a big if, but I’m hopeful), advanced AI will allow us to be more human. To focus on the things that truly make us unique, chief among them our empathy and creativity.
Leaving all the tedious tasks to AI, we can once again focus on doodling on a piece of paper while sitting in the sun.