I care about practicality. I read books on an iPad and take notes on my laptop; in general, if I can avoid having another thing by replacing it with a digital copy, I’ll use it digitally. For many of their historical uses, pen & paper just aren’t practical anymore compared to computers. A nicer experience, sure, but for my day-to-day work, not practical.

Only recently did I realize the role of pen and paper in my digital life: not as a storage medium, but as a thinking surface.

Computers are better for retrieving, refining, storing, and sharing ideas once they have shape, but paper is better for playing with new ideas.¹ For designing non-traditional software architectures or exploring research ideas, I still do my best thinking on paper, where I draw boxes and arrows and make a mess without distraction. The lack of copy & paste forces me to decide what ideas to carry forward and what to leave behind. No cloud storage or subscription required.

This works because I don’t need full-text search, durable storage, or easy sharing for the intermediate stages of my thinking. It’s for me. I save my ideas digitally once they’re sufficiently developed—best of both worlds.

For lots of creative work, a keyboard is the wrong interface; you need to draw, rearrange, and play with ideas before they become words. The obvious digital alternative is a tablet, but, as someone who prefers reading and annotating books on my iPad, I still find myself more engaged with physical pen & paper when diagramming and brainstorming. I can’t really explain why—maybe it’s just more fun. But for early-stage thinking, paper is practical precisely because it’s temporary, focused, and fun.