What a paper notebook knows

There is a shelf in the workshop with eleven notebooks on it, one for every year since I started. They are the same size, the same brand, with numbered pages and a ribbon. I have tried to replace them with apps more times than I can count. The apps were better at almost everything, and I stopped using every one of them within a month.

It has an order nobody chose

A notebook fills up in the order things happened. A measurement for a cabinet sits next to a shopping list, next to a sketch of a joint I saw in a museum. In an app those would go into three different folders, and I would never see them together again.

That accidental order is useful. When I look for the cabinet measurements, I also find what else I was thinking about that week, and that is often the part I needed.

It runs out

A notebook has a last page. When I reach it, I read the whole thing back before starting the next one. It takes an evening. I copy a few things forward, and I let the rest go.

No app ever asked me to do that, and so in the apps nothing was ever let go. Everything stayed, searchable and slightly in the way.

It is slow in the right places

Writing by hand is slower than typing, and that slowness acts as a filter. I only write down what seems worth the effort. Drawing is the opposite: on paper it is faster than any tool, so I draw much more.

What I use the computer for

I am not against software. Drawings that need to be exact go into a CAD program. Anything I need to share goes into a shared document. Invoices go where invoices go.

But the place where I think is the notebook. It does not sync, it cannot be searched, and it has never once interrupted me.