Writing with a pen and paper is different from typing on a keyboard at. brain level.

I need to finish that research and write that blog post, apparently.

I suspect it's to do with fluency, at least partially. Have you looked into how it goes for very fluent typists? Problem is, I suspect you might get enough fluency that typing isn't distracting as compared to handwriting only at significantly faster speeds than most people consider the beginning of "fast".

It's not about distraction, actually. Since the mode of typing vs. writing is different; I can feel that my brain is working differently.

While I don't type lightning fast (~130WPM and beyond), I already type without thinking about it. I just think and it appears on screen, actually. On the other hand, when I'm writing, there's another sub-process which is evaluating whether what I'm writing makes sense or works in real world. It's not possible to do this while typing since the freedom provided by the pen, and the thinking process is completely different. Also, I can build a model of what I'm writing about in my mind better. In short, typing lends to shallower thinking while writing allows more depth and exploration on the subject.

This is also evident when I'm writing code. I design it on paper, and type that design to the IDE I use.

The research articles I started to collect also points to something similar. When using pen and paper, neurons fire differently and in larger networks, pointing to a different mode of thinking. Considering I started use pen/paper and keyboards almost at the same time, and able to verify that using a pen really makes my brain work differently, I find "you're typing it wrong" a flawed argument for the most part.

Interesting, thanks. Notwithstanding all I've said, I've also struggled with a nebulous sense that there's something to handwriting, possibly bordering on "sacred", to be a bit dramatic about it. This has resulted in phases of annoying obsession with handwriting where all its technical/practical shortcomings are overwhelmed by this unknown property for a time.

The sub-process thing sounds vaguely plausible, but at the same time, I'm under the impression that I'm already constantly evaluating whether what I'm writing makes sense, its implications and assumptions, etc. At least I feel that I'm attentive to the impression of it not making sense, though I also try not to confuse the feeling that something makes sense with the fact of it being so.

Anyway, what I'm going for here is, did you consciously apply any technique or process to evaluating this or do you come by this insight naturally?

One of the factors I was able to pinpoint was the speed difference between typing and writing affects this "evaluation" process. I'm not a fast typer by any means. ~70 WPM or so, however, this effortless typing reduces how I think while typing vs. how I think while writing. Writing is always deeper, and creates more sparks or lead for new ideas. Also what I write comes out more refined since my mind has to wait for my hand more, hence re-evaluate or evaluate further down into the path before my hand can write out what I have thought in the beginning.

Another thing is, even though I have a very good to-do system backed by a nice software and allows me to see what I'm doing forward in time (application is called Pagico, BTW), I always keep a notepad nearby and automatically offload some information onto it. I tried tons of fast-note applications. On-screen sticky notes, notational velocity and friends and whatnot. I always return back to pen and paper and live better with it.

Well, the notepad I'm currently using is labeled "#14", and this is after the fact that I started numbering them to be able to index them. So, by both trial/error and intuition/insight, I always return to pen and paper.

Same for my diaries. I have an encrypted diary on my computer, yet I still use my paper one(s), and the digital one is a backup in case I really need it, and I don't have the paper one with me.

Hope this answers your question. If you want to chat further into this, you can find ways to contact me starting with the profile page here.

Curious to know what you actually do with the notes, though. I've tried to get in the habit of keeping daily journals but it ends up being very much write once, read never. Maybe having some kind of fuzzy, semantic search or LLM would unlock their usefulness, but so far I don't find myself ever really using the things I write down.

I use a similar system at work.

Off the top of my head, I have used it to put links together — for example, a Stack Overflow description of some bug, the official documentation, and maybe copying in the exception or the error message.

Then I've sometimes done the same thing when I'm doing ops on a broken system.

Other times it's copying in a specific query or a link to a query in Application Insights.

Other times it's the ticket I was working on, a comment from a coworker, and maybe a few references to either tickets or files. Very rarely is this professional or looks nice. It's just that I need one place where I can put multiple things that fit together.

I find that retrieval does drop off very quickly. But that's just to say most of the value is front loaded. And we should not underestimate the value of being able to answer 'da fuck was I doing yesterday'. Context switching is expensive. But in many ways it is also unavoidable. If you context dump at the end of a workday, it's that much easier to return to it later.

The other thing I do is because the note system I use can I can drop in Hashtags. Yeah, I know. Not exactly HN friendly. What that means is I can find all the times I ran into the same issue, sort of weaving a meta thread through my work. It's really hard to explain, but it's one way of treating notes as not just segments of text.

For me it's mostly about being able to find stuff. For example, I save links (with some notes) that I've seen that day, and weeks/months later I'll remember "I read an article about $THING" or "I saw a repo that was similar to $THING" and I'll be able to find it.

Omnisearch is really good: https://publish.obsidian.md/omnisearch

Same - they are too low quality for me to decode more than 8 hours afterwards.