Why I went back to a paper notebook

For years every note I took went into an app. The apps were good. They synced, they searched, they tagged. And somehow I never looked at anything I wrote in them again.

In the spring I bought a plain A5 notebook with dotted pages, mostly because it was on sale. I started using it for shopping lists, then for to-do lists, then for everything. Four months later it is nearly full, and I flip back through it all the time.

What changed

Writing by hand is slower, and slower turns out to be the point. I write less, so what I write is what actually matters. There is no inbox, no notification, no sync conflict. When the page is full, I turn it.

The only real downside is search. My solution is a small index on the last two pages: a date and a few words for anything I might want to find again. It is primitive and it works.

Nothing syncs, nothing pings, and the battery never dies.