Andy Bell: Just Use Fucking Paper, Man

I’ve given up this week and gone back to paper and a pencil and I feel unbelievably organised and flexible, day-to-day. It’s because it’s simple. There’s nothing fancy. No fancy pen or anything like that either. Just a notebook and a pencil.

This may work out for Andy in the long run, but over the years I’ve definitely noticed a genre of blog post where someone goes:

• “I thought I needed a task manager, but actually pen and paper are more than enough”
• “An iPad does everything I need from a computer”
• “I only use the built-in apps on my phone and I’m fine”
• Insert whatever example of someone moving to something that’s less powerful or less polished

Nothing in those ideas are fundamentally wrong, but very often these sorts of posts (including Andy’s) are written days, if not hours into their behavior change. Making changes to how you work can often feel invigorating at the start, but cracks develop over time. A 100% paper and pencil task management system might work great for a few days, but then you recall why reminders and recurring tasks were so nice in the digital world. Maybe you feel totally empowered to do everything on an iPad for a few days or weeks, and then you run into those tasks you didn’t do everyday, but are actually a pain on the more limited OS.

Once again, I’m not saying Andy is wrong or that he hasn’t found his productivity endgame, I’m just saying I’ve seen this before and I’ve subscribed to his blog to see if there is the all-too-common follow-up post down the road where he realized why he liked the more advanced tools to begin with. We’ll see!