Many feel the need to choose between digital and analog for their personal productivity systems. Some consider putting anything on paper as consigning it to an uneditable and inaccessible oblivion, so they go all-in with cloud-networked devices and apps.
Others have grown sick of screen time and the distracted, frantic mindset it can foster, so they go back-to-basics with a paper-based lifestyle.
To those who feel torn between these two sides, David Allen—creator of the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology—essentially says, “Why not both?” He considers the two approaches complementary, even likening them to dance partners:
I love the high-tech/high-touch dance of handwriting notes and then assimilating and processing them into the computer. I often coach people who are looking for the perfect way to use only one or the other—all paper or all computer. I’ve found that doing both increases the use and value of both.
This passage is from the 2004 book Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Getting Things Done, a delightful collection of short articles (which could be aptly called “productivity devotionals”) by Allen. And the experience it describes matches my own.
From Paper to Pixels
On one hand, I am an avid Apple aficionado who has bought into Steve Jobs’s “digital ecosystem.” I’m also a fan of Notion, which, even more than Apple, has become the “cranium” that houses my “second brain”: a concept and term popularized by the 2022 book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. Notion is where I capture ideas and information, manage my workflow, and do all my writing.
And yet, I also love working with paper and ink. Some of my best creative flow states have happened while taking notes longhand. I have my favorite companies and products in that realm, too. I’m one of the many fans of Moleskine, the maker of high-quality, affordable, and wildly popular notebooks. And my favorite pen is the Pilot G-2, specifically the model with a 1-millimeter bold point writing tip (indicated by the number 10 on the clip). Its lush and lustrous line makes notes beautifully re-readable.
From Trash to Treasure
There’s something magical about the creative use of pen and paper, as Allen expressed:
The reason I love my easy-flowing, great-feeling, ballpoint or felt-tipped pen and a nice clean legal pad to write all over is the spontaneity they foster in my messy brainstorming, planning, and note taking. I trust that the ideas will get digested and assessed for value that I don’t yet see.
Allen’s trust is based on his trustworthy habit of following his own “Five Steps of Mastering Workflow,” which he explained in his definitive book on the GTD methodology, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. The five steps are:
Capture
Clarify
Organize
Reflect
Engage
For a very brief explanation of these steps, see my 2022 Medium.com post, “The Allen Algorithm: GTD in a Nutshell.”
Allen’s “high-tech/high-touch dance” mostly involves the first three steps. He likes to use “high-touch” paper to capture ideas and “high-tech” devices to clarify and organize them, which basically means evaluating and routing each idea according to whether it is (1) actionable, (2) archivable, or (3) disposable. Allen wrote:
I love the fact that I’ve thrown away thousands of things I’ve written on hotel notepads, for the few that stood the test of later scrutiny (and that’s not always because of last night’s wine!).
What Allen means is that a key to creativity is accepting that most ideas you capture will be destined for the dustbin and that’s okay. They’re still worth capturing, because it’s difficult to distinguish between trash and treasure at the outset. If you hold back from writing out your ideas for fear of generating trash, you won’t discover any treasure either. As an old English proverb posits, “Where’s there’s muck, there’s brass.”
In a chapter of Ready for Anything titled, “You are thinking more valuably than you may think,” Allen wrote:
Many of the ideas that you have, if not immediately and obviously valuable in the moment, contain the germ of something that may be extremely useful. You simply may not see it yet. Give yourself the freedom to capture all kinds of thoughts that you can later reassess. Make freeform note taking a habit, whenever you are getting input from other sources—meetings, conversations, voice mail—or when you’re just brainstorming with yourself. Make a clear distinction between collecting, processing, and organizing, and give yourself permission to collect anything without censure or analysis. The psychologists call this “distributed cognition.” It will add a major creative source to your work and your life.
From Idea to In-Tray
Allen’s insights have long helped me appreciate the creative power of capturing, especially with pen and paper. The day before yesterday, that appreciation got a fresh boost when I discovered the YouTube channel of Parker Settecase (aka “ParkNotes”), a student of philosophy who systematically uses paper notebooks for his creative and scholarly work and publishes a lot of content about his system.
Settecase’s videos inspired me to better proceduralize the paper part of my productivity process. So the Sanchez clan took a Saturday trip to Target, where I picked up some supplies to give my new note-taking system a fresh start.
That system uses both notebooks and notepads. By “notepad,” I mean glue-bound pads with tear-off sheets. These can range in size from 3x5-inch “scratch pads” to letter- or legal-sized “writing pads.” At my desk, I keep a “scratch pad” and pen handy. When I have an idea, I take a memo and toss it in my in-tray for later processing. Like Allen, I like to use larger writing pads for longer sessions of freeform note taking and brainstorming. Those sheets also get gathered into “in.” Using notepads instead of notebooks can facilitate ad hoc capturing, because there is less reluctance to taking a note if that note is easy to tear off and toss in the trash.
But the situation is different when I’m out and about. In that case, a tear-off notepad is inconvenient, because without my in-tray, I end up losing track of the separate slips. So, for on-the-go capturing, I use a small notebook: specifically Moleskine’s pocket-sized ruled journals from their “Cahiers Collection.”
To Think in Ink
A second notebook I use is inspired by the following passage from another book by David Allen, Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life:
A wonderful way to begin to experience an increase in control during this first phase of capturing is to journal. Often the incomplete energies and loose edges of our lives are manifested only when we are willing to drop back into a more reflective mode and take note of what seems to want to express itself only through a more stream-of-consciousness modality. Over the years I have gravitated toward two types of journal writing for myself. One is a kind of ad hoc running diary of events to record various aspects of my current situation in my workaday world...
Allen says the primary function of such “mundane journaling” is “unloading”: i.e., what psychologists today call “reducing cognitive load.” I call the notebook I use for this kind of journaling my “freewriting notebook.” For this, I’m currently going through all my old random notebooks that still have any blank pages in them. Once those are used up, I’ll get a new Moleskine especially for it.
My freewriting notebook is what I primarily use to “think in ink” throughout my workday. I use it to take stream-of-consciousness notes about everything and anything: messages, meetings, readings, podcasts, videos, experiences, actions, ideas, and plans.
At some point in the day, I will clarify my freewritten notes. As I go, I use a highlighter pen to mark notes that have been clarified and organized into my Notion-based digital system if appropriate: yet another trick I learned from my great guru David Allen. I like to use a light blue highlighter for this to visually evoke “clear blue skies.”
In my freewriting notebook, I fill up every bit of space from left to right and top to bottom, keeping in mind that its main function is to facilitate on-the-spot thinking and creativity, not to produce a resource optimized for future reference and study.
From Stream to Study
For the latter, I use a third and final notebook: specifically Moleskine’s large, hard-cover ruled notebook from their “Classic Collection.” I call this my “commonplace notebook.” “Commonplacing” is a centuries-old method for compiling knowledge and developing ideas used by such thinkers as Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, John Milton, and John Locke.
In my commonplace, I take notes in a more careful and reflective frame of mind. I dedicate whole pages and even two-page spreads to specific topics and sources: book chapters, church sermons, podcast episodes, research projects, my own essays, etc. And I lay out the page with future study in mind. I write key words and summarizing sentences. I make lists and outlines. I copy quotations, especially Bible verses, wise precepts, and other inspiring quotes. And between all these elements, I leave ample blank space for the sake of readability. Often material that I’ve captured on a notepad or in my freewriting notebook will serve as raw material to curate in my commonplace.
My new paper-based system is helping me be more thorough, thoughtful, and creative. And I am especially hopeful that my commonplace books will become deep wells of wisdom to return to and draw from all the rest of my life.