Back to a paper notebook
For about six years every note I took went into an app. Shopping lists, half ideas, the name of a song someone played at a party. The app was fine. It synced, it searched, it never got coffee spilled on it. And at some point this winter I realised I had not read a single one of those notes twice.
So in March I bought a plain A5 notebook, the kind with a stitched spine and no logo on the cover, and a pencil instead of a pen because pencils do not dry out in a coat pocket. The rule was simple: anything I want to remember goes on paper first. If it still matters a week later, it can go somewhere digital.
The first thing I noticed is that I write much less. Typing costs nothing, so I used to type everything. Writing by hand costs a little, which turns out to be a useful filter. A thought has to earn its two lines.
The second thing is that I actually flip back through it. On the tram, waiting for the kettle, before bed. Paper has a shape. I remember that the bread recipe is on a left page near the coffee ring, and that the list of books to find is just after the page where the pencil broke. None of that spatial memory exists in a search box.
There are downsides. I cannot search it. Twice I have rewritten something I had already written a few pages earlier. My handwriting at speed is a private language that even I cannot always read. And it is one more object to carry, though it weighs less than I expected.
What surprised me most is how much calmer the act of noting things feels. Opening an app means seeing the other apps. Opening the notebook means seeing the last thing I wrote, usually something small and unimportant, like a reminder to buy matches.
Six weeks in, I am on page 41. I will probably not keep this up forever. But for now the notebook stays.