My Remaining Use for Pen and Paper -Skip to main content<br>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&rsquo;ll use it digitally. For many of their historical uses, pen & paper just aren&rsquo;t practical anymore compared to computers. A nicer experience, sure, but for my day-to-day work, not practical.<br>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.<br>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.<br>This works because I don&rsquo;t need full-text search, durable storage, or easy sharing for the intermediate stages of my thinking. It&rsquo;s for me. I save my ideas digitally once they&rsquo;re sufficiently developed—best of both worlds.<br>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&rsquo;t really explain why—maybe it&rsquo;s just more fun . But for early-stage thinking, paper is practical precisely because it&rsquo;s temporary, focused, and fun.<br>Exceptions include AI, interactive data visualization, running simulations, etc, where the computer is an active thinking partner . ↩︎

2026-05-30<br>/blog/my-remaining-use-for-pen-and-paper/<br>jarbus

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