Learn to Think on Paper

I always carry paper with me. It's because when I'm working on something, whether that's a creative project for work or a personal communication, there is no amount of thumbming it out on my phone or typing it out in a word document that's going to actually help me get through it. Now, I might get a ton of stuff out of my brain by doing that process, but the onetoone transfer of my thoughts into a digital device doesn't actually help me think.

And because it's not helping me think, it's not helping me actually solve the problem. And I'm not alone here. Even in our highly digital world, you'll still find that most of the innovative thinkers out there will reach for pen and paper first when they are trying to solve complex problems or generate creative ideas.

There's a reason for that and it's not nostalgic or aesthetic. It's neuroscience. So today we're going to talk about the science behind why paper thinking works so well for your brain, different techniques for solving different challenges through paper thinking, and how to set up a practical paper thinking system that works alongside your digital tools.

If you've been feeling stuck in your thinking or if you're finding that your digital tools just aren't cutting it, this might be exactly what you need. So, let's start with some science because I think it's important to recognize the cognitive benefits of handwriting. Compared to typing, handwriting has many benefits.

So, let's start with an example first. When researchers at the University of Washington put people in brain scanners, they found that handwriting activates significantly more areas of your brain simultaneously than typing does. So regions responsible for reading, thinking, and memory get lit up all at once, which creates and establishes these super rich neural pathways and connections that help maintain a connection between what you're actually writing and your working memory.

What I'm showing you now is actually some early drafts and sketching out I did of a story that I was writing of like a novel length story that I was writing. And I've actually put this story on hold. I'm currently working on a different writing project and this is on hold.

But I can still tell you basically from memory what is on these pages if you just like saw me in the wild and asked me. Like I I could talk about the breakthroughs that I had. I could talk about how I determined certain acts.

I could talk about what I made the midpoint for certain characters. And that's because I was doing all this by hand. I was writing it out.

So not only was I getting it out of my head, but because all of my uh areas of my brain were lighting up, I was also cementing it deeper into my memory. So you get it out of your head and you get it sort of deeper in your head, if that makes sense. And I can remember this way better than I can remember stuff that I plotted out on my digital writing platform.

My tool of choice for writing big stories like this is Scriber. And I do a lot of plotting in Scriber, too. But I can tell you I remember the stuff that I plotted here way better than I remember the stuff that I plotted through, you know, typing it into my word processor because of the way it's lighting up my brain.

But it is not just about memory. It's also about how we process information. So in another study at Princeton, researchers also found that students who took notes by hand understood concepts better than those who typed even though they wrote fewer words.

Right here in front of you, I have actual notes from my actual master's degree just in a big old spiralbound notebook. And these notes were on a lecture on a book that we were reading in class about sort of the history of communication technology and specifically digital technology. And those Princeton researchers would tell you that writing forces you to be selective and rephrase information in your own words.

So by listening to my professor and writing down these notes, I was literally thinking differently by writing than those students in the class who were taking notes by typing. So, this actually helped me retain the information that I was learning in those lectures in a better and stronger way because I was translating it into my own words and then spitting it back out in the matter of seconds. I'll also say that the physical space of paper allows for spatial thinking that digital interfaces cannot compete with.

So, I have been in classes, including those in my master's degree, where I'm typing notes out into a note processor or word processor or, you know, I I like to use notion a lot when I was in college and in uh grad school. And my experience typing those notes out was that it was just text. So, it was just a document full-on of like just written word.

It was usually verbatim for the professor and I wasn't doing that translation process. But as you can see in my actual real notes from the time I was getting my master's degree, I was able to do things like draw arrows between related concepts here, here, and here. I was also able to draw things that are super helpful for the way I think, like timelines.

Timelines are a thing I personally love when taking notes cuz they're super visual and they really help you think about what you're learning and put it contextually in history. And you can also see this in these pages where I'm working on my story, right? This is a full-on triangular shape discussing the relationships between these three characters.

And this is not something that typing my notes out into a word processor would be able to generate for me. This is just how my brain wanted to think about it. It wanted to think about the relationships between these characters in shapes.

I wanted to think about these concepts on a timeline. And those things are just harder to build in quickly on note or like digital solutions rather. Most digital solutions for note-taking are just notes.

Meanwhile, I got to like actually draw the shape and actually feel out how I wanted to think about the relationship. So, I'm using my body and my mind at the same time when I'm using paper. You can also use the entire page as a canvas.

So, obviously, this is several pages to think about a story. But on each of these pages, I'm sort of doing something a little bit different. Like for example, this is where I'm really plotting character journeys, where I'm really laying out the act structure, whereas this is where I'm laying out relationships between the characters and sort of, you know, which character fits the head, the gut, and the heart, those kinds of things.

So, I'm making like character decisions here. Um, I'm mapping arcs in these two different methods side by side, so I can see all the arcs side by side, and then I can see how exactly they're lining up with one another um through the three-act structure of a story. It's just so nice to be able to have a big expanse of a page and get all of your thinking done on that page where you can see everything compared to like a notes file where you just be scrolling through the document and scrolling through the document.

Now, you might be able to achieve a mind map that looks a lot like this or even like this in digital canvases like Canva or Figma, but when you write it all by hand, parts of your brain involved in navigation and spatial reasoning are activated. So mind mapping digitally just don't give you that same mindbody connection that I was just talking about. But it's not just like your experience on the page.

It's also the experience flipping through the page. When you're using things like notebooks or if you use note cards, flipping through the note cards. Often when I'm flipping through my notebook looking for something, I remember the shape of the notes that I wrote.

I remember even what part of the page I wrote something on because that mind body connection is so strong. This is a really good example. I started journaling just straight up and down journaling in columns.

And then you can see as I transition, I start using different colored pens and I start writing things at different angles. You even start writing things at this angle. And again, still to this day, I can tell you like when I transition these ideas, I move my body, move my pen, interact with my literal object of thinking slightly differently in a way that's just not possible with most digital note-taking solutions.

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So, now I want to give you some practical tips for how to actually implement paper thinking into your life. The first thing is to choose your tools thoughtfully. That is my first tip.

All facets of a notebook, the color of the pages, the spine, how it feels in your hand, the size, these all have an impact on your thinking. And so, it's my recommendation that you choose products that will help you facilitate thinking. Now, a classic example of this is a Moleskine or a loy term notebook.

These two are both Moleskine here. It's my preferred brand between the two, but either will do you just fine if you're looking for a basic, intentionally designed, minimal, functional, beautiful, and useful notebook. I'll open this up.

Do I have a blank page left in this notebook? I think I really filled this all the way to the end. So, as you can see, Moleskine notebooks are super minimal.

They're black. They're not invasive. They're slightly shorter than your average notebook as well, like in terms of horizontal space, so that you can throw it in a bag, a pocket, a jacket pocket.

really anything. This is like my triedand-true notebook that I recommend to everybody. And also, you'll notice that it's very simple, simply designed, but it also has like cream paper on the inside.

So, it's a lot less bright than say my common planner notebook. See them side by side. Uh, this is a common planner by Sterling Inc.

I think this is a fantastic notebook, but you can see this is a little bit more cream and this is a little bit more white. Still not quite as bright white as like paper you'd get from these sort of spiralbound notebooks for note-taking. I'm not sure if that is showing up on camera, but these are three different shades of white, I promise you.

And so Moleskine's philosophy is this like soft yellow uh is easier on the eyes, so you can spend more time in your notebook, whereas the sort of bright white is a little bit harsher on the eyes. But a lot of people have different preferences, right? People have different preferences for grid notebooks versus something like a dot grid notebook.

This is the um manager notebook from Paper Test Designs. has a dot grid and the spare pages in the back. You might prefer a dot grid.

You might prefer a graph paper like I really like the graph paper or you might even want something with lines on it as I have here. I will say Moleskine and Lerm have all of these options. So any configuration that helps your brain think best you can find in these two brands that I'm recommending or you can you know go on your own journey and find your own favorite notebooks.

But truly any minimal notebook will do. You don't need something that's expensive because the point of thinking on paper is to be a messy act. It's not something fancy or pretty.

You want it to be messy because you want it to actually be like the raw experience of being in your brain. You want to be putting that down on paper instead of bottling it all up. So, you want something that you're okay with being sort of messy in.

I'll give you another example. This is something from I think this notebook is like from like 2019. Yeah, it must be cuz I'm I'm This was when I first started grad school.

This was like the notebook I was using for productivity. So you can see I'm just bringing like being like really messy here. This is like chicken scratch essentially.

So find yourself a minimal notebook. Think about your tools very carefully. If something like this, you know, you're like, I just don't like how that feels in my hand, get something else.

Get something like this. Maybe something like a boutique notebook brand like Sterling Ink feels too precious for you. So you go for a truly like $1, $2 spiral notebook just to get your your stuff out of your head.

And that's totally fine. I would however recommend uh a slightly larger notebook. When I'm working on big or complex problems, I prefer something like this.

This is an A5 size for Moleskine over something like this, which is the pocket size for Moleskine. It just gives me a bit more space to spread my ideas around and get them all on one page because the paper is literally bigger. That said, I do always carry this pocket notebook with me because having something to capture my thoughts when they come and I'm on the road, I'm on the train, I'm in transit, I'm wherever.

Having something to capture my notes when I'm just out and about is so invaluable. So, I do try to keep a pocket notebook with me at all times. But, this would be super easy to carry, too.

And I recommend finding a simple notebook that is the right size for you personally to carry around. Also, on the topic of tools, I want to talk about pens. So, I always carry a pen with me.

And specifically, I prefer multicolored pens. So, this is a Uniball Jetream multicolored. You can see there's like a black, a blue, a green, a red, and then also a pencil.

I love this pen and I love multi-pens because I often change colors when I change ideas. And so it just adds a little bit more of that like like haptic feedback, say, uh, when you are writing and when I'm looking back on my notes. Like for example, you can see I changed colors here.

This was with a different multi-pen that I was using, one where it was black and brown. So I changed colors here when my thoughts changed. And then in another example that I showed you earlier, I use different colors for different characters.

So, it was really helpful and I can just see at a glance what relates to who when I'm looking at this page. Um, so I really like multi pens for that reason. It just get gives you more like of a physical experience in your notebook.

But if you just like one color pen, that's fine, too. Tip number two is to use different thinking techniques for different problems. So, not all thinking is the same, and different problems benefit from different paper techniques.

So, let me show you a few of my favorites. For creative problems, I really like a mind map. For example, this is a mind map I did for a video the other day.

When I'm brainstorming video ideas or trying to explore a concept, this radial thinking approach helps me make new connections. So, I have some main ideas in circles and then I'm like connecting them to each other along the graph here. And it really makes me connect ideas to one another and see it in a visual way.

I would argue this is also a mind map here that I already showed you. I have three main characters. I'm connecting them in visual ways and sort of branching off of these relationships in various parts of the page.

So that's for solving creative problems. But what about decision making and delegation? So I like to use a decision matrix that is called the Eisenhower matrix.

Now the Eisenhower matrix on this page is a way of sorting tasks into quadrants in a four quadrant grid. So there are tasks that are urgent and there are tasks that are non-urgent and then there are tasks that are important which go in this uh row and tasks that are not important which go in this row. And so what I like to do as a productivity technique is I like to brain dump all of the tasks I have to do in a given month.

And then I like to sort them into an Eisenhower matrix to help make the decision making process easier. Because the act of sorting my tasks into a matrix like this is thinking like I have to think critically about the task on this page in order to put it into a box on this page. Sometimes I don't always get it right, but that practice of thinking and putting it into the matrix is really important decision-making factor and it really helps you make decisions about who should do what on my team, who should do what in my household, those kinds of things.

I'll also say your standard pros and cons list is also a decision matrix. So, when you are making a decision and you have one column say pro, one column say con, and you write those things out, that's also something that is much easier to do on paper than it is to type up. Um, and it is totally a valid example of a decision matrix that helps you make well decisions.

For emotional processing problems, I recommend a pretty standard one, which is journaling. Specifically, freewriting. So, there's lots of different ways to journal, but just freewriting yourself out helps you emotionally process the stuff that's going on in your mind.

For example, sometimes you need to get thoughts out without any structure. The flow of the hand on the page helps process emotions in a way that typing doesn't because again there's that mind body connection. So you're using a lot of parts of your brain to help you work through the feeling you're having.

This is a recent piece of journaling that I did. I was just watching a lot of content about making content in a capitalistic economy in a potentially one would call it a late capitalist society. I was thinking a lot about these ideas and it was just all jumbled up in my brain and I needed to just journal it out.

So, I just journaled it out. And honestly, then I could have thrown this page away. If it wasn't like literally attached to my notebook, I might have just thrown this page away because I don't need it once it's out of my system.

I just needed to get it out because now I have an understanding of how I think about these things and they're not just like a loose idea inside my brain causing me anxiety. I was able to process it by handwriting it. Another type of freewriting I do is I journal about the exercise classes I take right after I take them.

And this is part of a larger goal of mine to try a bunch of exercise classes and basically see which one works for me. And so I journal about them right after. I just do a session of freewriting and that makes it so easy and immediate to process my feelings.

It's just an immediate easy way to get it all out of me that then I can reference back later to say actually I really did like core power yoga or I didn't like orange theory. This is you know no shade to orange theory. I think I actually did enjoy my class but you get the example.

I'm able to see what I liked, what I didn't like when I refer back to this later from my freewriting session, how it emotionally impacted me. So, lots of use cases, both ones that you don't think you'll reference again and ones you think you will. Another problem you might have to work through is project planning.

And for project planning, I really like backward mapping. So, for example, with backward mapping, you start with the end goal and you work backwards to see what you need to do at each milestone along the way towards that goal to get clarity in a way that linear planning often doesn't. So, for example, this is the story I'm writing right now.

This is where I'm keeping track of my writing process. And I have over here in quarter 4, I'm going to be publishing the story. And so, my final goal is going to have it be ready for publish at the end of the year.

So, I've broken it up by quarters and I've said, well, if I want to publish by the end of the year, I have to be at least on my second draft by quarter 3. And if I want to be on my second draft by quarter 3, I really have to write the first draft during quarter 2. And if I want to be prepared enough to write the first draft in quarter 2, I need a rough draft in quarter 1.

So, you can see right now we're still in quarter 1. I'm about halfway through my progress on the rough draft, which is really good for when the time I'm recording this um in March. And once I finish this, I can move on to my first draft.

But if I didn't do this sort of backwards planning, if I hadn't started from quarter 4, end of the year, what do I want to have done? And then moved backwards along that timeline, I would not know that I actually need to finish my rough draft by the end of March. I would think, okay, well, yeah, I have to do a rough draft, I have to do a first draft, I have to do a second draft, and then I get to publish.

And I would think, okay, I'll just start on my rough draft. And I would have no reasonable timeline for when I wanted to get it done. And honestly, without a timeline, this rough draft would have taken me all year.

But because I started at the end and I worked backwards, I'm able to see this rough draft and I'm able to say like, okay, this actually does have a strict timeline. It needs to happen by the end of March. And then in April, I start writing.

Tip number three for integrating paper thinking into your life is to create a system for integration with digital tools. So, this doesn't necessarily mean that your paper notebook is a permanent home for these thoughts. All of the things you see in my notebook have for the most part been translated out into other systems where I can use them more effectively.

For example, a lot of my story stuff gets translated out into my writing app which I mentioned is Scrier. But I want to talk about my YouTube stuff to give you a more concrete example. So if you aren't on YouTube, no problem.

Just think about any creative project you're working on while I explain this. So you want to do what I call twostage processing. You want to think on paper first in this messy, unfiltered, creative way.

And then you want to transfer the key insights of this into a digital tool for organization and implementation. So thinking messy, getting it in your brain, get it swimming around your brain, swimming around on paper. Don't worry about what it looks like.

It's unfiltered. And then translate this into some kind of text document. Move the key insights, the most important pieces of information into that text document and organize and implement it from there.

What do I mean by this? I'll show you my example for YouTube scripting. So, this is a script of a YouTube video that I'm putting up later later this month.

And I needed to mind map it. I needed to just get it out and think about what I wanted to actually talk about. And so, I did that on this piece of paper.

And then what I did, maybe I can put a screenshot, we'll see, is I typed that up in my notes app just with my phone on my thumbs. I just looked at this and I was like, "Okay, what am I actually saying here? What am I trying to say?

" And then from there, because notes apps these days have such powerful search functions, when I was actually ready to write, I was just able to search in my notes app, find the original note, copy that into a word document, and flow from there. So my ideas start on paper where I can be unfiltered, and then I type it all up. Digital tools are also really great for sharing.

So once I have typed up my finished draft of a YouTube video, I'll often send it to my editor and others for their feedback or for their thoughts. And that's also something that I couldn't do with a piece of paper. Like I would have to like physically mail a piece of paper to those folks, like a script to those folks.

And that's just not going to happen, right? So technology does have its great advantages, but for this actual thinking process, I really, really need paper. But that translation from paper is like thinking again.

So I'm putting my ideas down into words and then I'm putting my words into slightly different words in a slightly different format. By moving information from one medium to another, you force your brain to process it again, which helps again with understanding and retention. Truly, the two-stage processing method is what I do with almost all my creative projects, and it always yields really good results.

I feel really strongly that notebooks are meant to be messy, especially a notebook that you're using for thinking. They're not meant to be pretty or Instagram worthy. They are meant to be as chaotic as the human brain.

So, if it looks like your brain threw up all over the page, you are doing it right. If you liked this video, you may also like a video that I did on the benefits of handwriting. I will leave that linked right up here on the screen next to my head for your viewing pleasure.

Otherwise, thank you so much for watching, for being subscribed, for being awesome. I love you so much and I will see you in the next video. Bye.