The Most Economical Productive Tool You Already Own
There's an app for everything now: Notes, voice memos, reminders, cloud docs, and usually more than one to-do list. You'd think all that would leave us more organised, but most of us feel the opposite. The meeting notes are sitting in an app we will never reopen. The to-do list is split across three tools, and we all know, nothing on it gets done.
Writing by hand makes you think: When you type, it's easy to just transcribe. You get down every word someone says without really taking any of it in. By hand, you can't keep up, so your brain has to decide what matters and put it in your own words. That is the useful part. Studies comparing the two have generally found that people remember more from what they wrote by hand, and anyone who has tried to recall a meeting they only typed through will probably agree.
Carrying a pile of half-finished thoughts around is tiring. A task you haven't done, an idea you don't want to lose, something you're afraid you'll forget. Psychologists call it the Zeigarnik effect: unfinished things keep nagging at us, and research suggests that simply writing down what you plan to do about them helps the nagging stop. Once it's on paper, your brain can stop holding on to it. And it costs a lot less than another app subscription.
There's no cursor blinking at you and no fonts to pick. Ideas come out messier on paper, sketches end up next to sentences, arrows connect things that had nothing to do with each other, and the margins fill up with stuff that doesn't belong anywhere else.
But the question is How to start?
You don't need a system, and you definitely don't need the perfect notebook. Keep one on your desk and open it before you open your laptop. Write down the three things that need to happen today, or just dump whatever's in your head onto the page and sort it out later.
What it looks like at Hour Space:
Walk around Hour Space on any given day and you'll spot notebooks all over the place. One open next to a laptop during a call, with someone jotting down a name or a number they'd rather not lose in a chat thread. Another on a table in the courtyard, where someone is sketching out an idea over a coffee. A few tucked under an arm on the way to a meeting.
What we like about it is that nobody here has given up on digital tools. They've just worked out what each one is good for. The notebook is where the thinking happens, and the screen is where the doing happens.
None of this means going back to the old days. It just means that writing something down by hand, even for ten minutes a day, gives you a bit of room to think before the rest of the day starts asking things of you.
PS// Next time you're at Hour Space, bring your notebook out to the courtyard. It's a great spot for a brain dump, and a good place to trade notebook tips with other members
