For the last few months I had not been writing at all by hand. My notebook has sat on my desk untouched without an entry for over 90 days.
What was immediately apparent to me is that this hiatus coincided measurably with my creativity slipping, my writing slowed down and I haven’t released a (new) blog post in some time. Truly, I was struggling to connect ideas, and the generation of those ideas was essentially non-existent.
While sleep deprivation (the sleep regression for babies is no joke and even less fun - I write this on about 4 hours last night) may have played a bit of a role, I found that as soon as I picked up my pen, I felt this undeniable flow of creativity coming back with the ink on the page.
It may be that as a millennial, I hand-wrote nearly everything for the first decade and a half of my life, and so, it is ingrained that words flow from a pen rather than a keyboard far more easily. I had been discussing this with a friend recently in that nobody I knew had a laptop until university, and even then, notes were almost always by hand. The kids using a laptop in class were looking up memes and scrolling Facebook by and large. My entire scholastic career was analogue with the exception of computer class (Mavis Beacon anyone?).
Nevertheless, I have always felt a sense of “connection” with the physical page.
Getting back to Analogue#
While I admittedly spend a ton of time on the computer, interestingly enough, the solution seems to be to defer to the analogue as the base of much of what I do, only moving to the digital when ready for execution.
For me this means writing by hand whenever possible, and making it the baseline of my notetaking/idea/creative flow.
Planning can be done in analogue, note taking that doesn’t need permanent grepping can be done in my Midori. I find I can easily draw connections and build diagrams of how I intend to build infrastructure, create lists, and begin longer form writing on the page.
In fact, many of my blog posts are written by hand before final publishing so that the words flow from a pen and are refined by the keyboard in final revision. I am even experimenting with using OCR text recognition and Tessaract to translate much of my handwriting to a text buffer in emacs and then final editing it in the world’s greatest Operating system.
No distractions#
Perhaps the issue of distraction on the machine is one that I also succumb to far too frequently. I don’t know how the average person has notifications enabled on their phones, they’re far too distracting, everything vying for your attention and sucking you into rabbit holes that I would prefer to not go down. Even on my main machines, with most notifications disabled, the internet itself is too much of a distraction - I have even started disconnecting from the internet at regular intervals, keeping as much of my work offline as possible.
On Eink notetaking#
Even though I had a Supernote, I did not feel the writing was as solid as pen on paper, and I listed it for sale.
There is something to writing by hand and not syncing everything, but to manually think through that which is going into my filesystem, that which I can permanently access. Sometimes rewriting notes also means they “stick” better in my mind, reinforcing the thoughts and expanding upon them in the digital format.
The experiment I will run until the end of the year is simple: I will carry a notebook in my pocket, a pen, and have my A5 size notebook sitting on my desk at home. Whenever I have an idea, it will not be first instinct to reach for my phone in my right pocket, but to pull the notebook out of my left and scribble down that which my mind had received.
As I have described in my post “How I never forget things”, I will then take my notes and review them at the end of the day, where I input them into my org-mode system for longterm capture, creating pieces of writing, videos, and such as I go.
The Two Notebook System#
I have seen the recommendation to “dual wield” notebooks in many places, as you have one for “having thoughts” and “capture”, while the other “solidifies” information and offers more space for longform exploration.
I think this is a wonderful idea: you carry around a cheap and easily obtained notebook and pen, and have your stationary at home that you enjoy long form writing on. The notebook in your pocket is for grabbing everything of interest that passes through your consciousness. The stationary is where ideas are honed and sharpened, built and hammered. You can sit with them there, building something you can reach out and touch with your hands from your mind.
This is the draw of the computer, in that you can translate ideas from mind to world. I am not saying that you should not do this. What I am saying is that (at least for me) ideas need honing and crafting before they are put out, and the way to do this that seemingly works the best is on paper.
Conclusion#
I will report back at the end of the year how this is going for me, but I can already say I feel more creative, ideas are flowing better, and I’m forgetting a lot less (maybe it’s the sleep again…). Perhaps slowing down and feeling out ideas is what we were meant to always be doing.
As always, God bless, and until next time.
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