Paper doesn’t require booting time, passwords, or fingerprint scanning.

In the words of Getting Things Done guru David Allen, “…the easiest and most ubiquitous way to get stuff out of your head is pen and paper.” It‘s fast and dead simple After thousands of years, the use of paper feels natural and innate. It’s easy to take paper for granted and even easier to forget how refined of a medium it truly is. Love the tactile satisfaction of crossing a task off on paperĮqually love the ubiquity, versatility, and searchablility of a digital task managerīut first we need to know what exactly we can achieve with pen and paper that we can’t achieve with digital tools and vice versa… Advantages of paper So why does paper continue to hold on to its place in the world of productivity tools? In the past, there was resistance to television, refrigeration, sound in film, the automobile and even the cotton gin, but in the end these new technologies eradicated their predecessors.

Livescribe makes pens which function like normal ballpoints while simultaneously capturing the pen strokes in a digital format.Īnd Mod Notebooks allow you to mail them your completed notebook, which they will then scan and digitize for you. Whitelines offers products with light grey paper and white lines which are designed to disappear when scanned, preserving only the text or image on the page. Notebook company Moleskine partnered with Evernote to create, which automatically file handwritten notes through the use of stickers.

On the other end of the spectrum, pen and paper companies are innovating just as quickly to find their place in the digital world: Evernote and OneNote both incorporate “Optical Character Recognition” into their apps, allowing users to handwrite notes or to scan in paper notes without sacrificing the ability to search their text. Facebook, Dropbox, and FiftyThree each have an app that they call “Paper”.Īnd the crossover between digital and analog doesn’t end with metaphors. Yet, Apple still calls their new stylus a “Pencil” while Microsoft offers theirs as a “Pen”. In recent years, Apple, Google and Microsoft have openly accepted flat design in an attempt to move past the need for these real-world metaphors.

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