For all my love of computers (especially my new MacBook!), I remain a devoted user of pen an paper. As a reporter, I probably used 10s of thousands of paper to take notes – an exercise that saw me developed my own unique form of shorthand. Even today, I find pen and paper indispensable, and feel naked if I walk out of the house with them. It’s something continues to amuse colleagues, who rely on Palms, Blackberrys and cell phones to take notes. The way I see it, pen and paper are elegant, traditional, unobtrusive. if you pull out pen and paper during an interview or at lunch/dinner, it suggests you’re interested enough in what someone has said that you want to mark it down. Pulling out a Blackberry suggests you want to check your e-mail (even if you’re just taking a note). One of the best pen and paper suggestions I’ve come across is from 43Folders.com, which had a post called the Hipster PDA that talked about using 3″ x 5″ index cards. Brilliant. (Hat tip for this post to Om Malik, who recently spent nearly four hours at a cafe with pen and paper writing out a huge to-do list!)
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4 Comments
I’m a luddite as well. You might like PocketMod.com (http://pocketmod.com/); even more portable than Hipster PDA and fits nicely into my Slimmy (http://www.koyono.com/products/slimmy/description.html).
Couldn’t agree more.
Pen and paper are the start of everything for me. My notebook has no hyperlinks to distract me. It also makes doddling easier, and everyody needs a little doodling in their day.
Maybe a nice pen and Moleskine notebook should be in your future?
Being that I use to be an artist with pencil and paper, I often find myself missing the drag of graphite against paper when I am working in Photoshop. It just isn’t the same in the digital world. Sure a filter can give you a perfect shade, but there is nothing like creating that perfect shade by hand. Then when you finish the masterpiece you can see a bit of your life in it. That was until my brother threw a fit and destroyed it out of some rage.
I will just write it off as his real life way of hitting the delete key.