A funny thing happened to me in 2010 amid the flurry of social media, tablets, smartphones and online services: I fell in love with paper all over again.
While I’m probably as enamoured with the Web, gadgets and hardware as the next guy or girl, paper has started to play a key role in my personal and professional world. It wasn’t by design but simply that paper made more sense.
For example, my consulting business has become really busy, and one of the ways I managed to get a handle on projects is using large sheets of paper to do mind-minding. In my office, there’s a growing pile of paper that features a variety of colours – paper that contains the plans and directions for the work done for many clients. I have tried online mind-minding services but find the tangibility of paper to be more effective and valuable.
I have also become a big fan of Moleskin notebooks. I always carry a small Moleskin in my jacket pocket to write down ideas for blog posts, presentations, and interesting people, books or people. The notebook isn’t particularly organized but the act of writing things down somehow makes them resonate or stick in my brain. Moleskins aren’t particularly sexy but from what I can they still have staying power.
In the past months, I have also embraced paper to create daily to-do lists – in addition to information that exists in iCal and DayLite. It was something that happened because I started to forget phone calls that I had to make, which is not a good thing when your business is all about customer service. Creating a paper-based to-do list somehow makes it easy to remember everything.
And I’m still reading newspapers in the morning at a time when my Google Reader account is collecting dust. Maybe it has to do with my roots as a newspaper reporter but, to me, newspapers are still an elegant and effective way to consume a lot of information, which can then be shared digitally via Facebook or Twitter. For all the talk about the iPad and how it could save the newspaper and magazine worlds, “real” newspapers are a very functional vehicle even if the financial model isn’t as lucrative.
And if you wanted to stretch the paper argument, maybe we could bring whiteboards into the mix. I have several whiteboards in my office, and plan to install IdeaPaint on a wall in the next couple of weeks. If I had the money, I would probably buy a Smart Board to marry the digital and whiteboard worlds.
Maybe paper continues to be part of my world because part of me is still analog in a digital world. At the end of the day, paper still works for me so there’s reason to jump off the bandwagon. How about you?
