🌲 When computers are less efficient than analog methods

Reflections on bullet journal spreads that seem silly at first glance

Every now and then, someone asks me about analog notetaking methods.

Luhmann-style slip boxes (“zettelkasten” is the jargony German term) are popular for high-level academic work; I learned a variation using index cards in grade school, and then promptly never bothered to use it. For almost every formal paper I ever in college, I’ve never needed anything more than excel or a couple of open tabs in a browser, split-screened with a word processor of my choice.

Adding more complexity to that would have been counterproductive, and using paper notes would have been a silly waste of time.

But most of us aren’t doing academic work — and sometimes, analog methods are super useful!

Meeting notes, for example, are something I’ve almost always done on paper, even when in a virtual meeting. Computers are distracting, and the reality is that if you’re doing stuff on a device, it looks like you’re not paying attention. Taking notes on paper with a real-life physical pen has different vibes. If you’re in a meeting — or an in-person class — and writing stuff on paper, nobody thinks you’re zoned out focused on something else, even if you’re doodling or drafting the next chapter of a great American novel.

Just as a culture thing, plenty of jobs that ban phones are fine with you scribbling notes on a piece of receipt paper…

(yes of course I wrote fiction during downtime at my college retail job!)

Anyway.

Analog notetaking is useful for reasons other than appearances. Sometimes it’s just less annoying, less likely to lead you to get sidetracked by a bunch of notifications, and crucially for me personally — sometimes it lets you model useful skills for children.

I still don’t really like index card style slipboxes, and I’ve gotten away from bullet journals, but I want to take a moment and discuss them anyway because I’m grateful to Ryder Carroll and the movement for helping me along the path to developing my own system.

Ryder Carroll is in some ways a patron saint of “stop optimizing and just write” — the most important takeaway for me was to stop getting anxious about having a journal per project and just fill up the pages and then organize them later, as needed. I’ve filled many notebooks with writing at this point, and though I’ve strayed from the precise mechanics of Ryder’s bullet point system, the core idea of visually differentiating between todos, ideas, things I’ve moved to other lists, and priorities has been really useful for me. So when people ask about taking notes on paper, I usually point them to Bullet Journals.

But it’s easy to dismiss Bullet Journals as pretty nonsense

In its most basic form, a bullet journal is the analog equivalent of an outliner like Logseq, with icons filling the role of tags. Unfortunately, in the years since I’ve started doing bullet journals, the internet has been inundated with search engine optimized articles with beautiful guides to bullet journaling that are, in essence, art journals. Instagram rewards beauty more so than ruthless efficiency, so it can be hard to get a sense of what sample spreads are useful vs. those that are mostly performative or, at least, more about relaxation and decoration than being productive.

It’s easy to get the sense that what happened in the early days is people shared basic bullet journals on Instagram, it took off, and the art journalers stole it. But I think there’s more to it than that. Most people who write articles on the internet as a side hustle are white middle-class stay-at-home moms. So lots of people who use Ryder’s systems are probably middle managers taking notes to help them management projects, but the people who take the time to write about it and try to game the Instagram algorithm for dollars are… not really spending their time that way. The rise of Substack has been a sort of interesting exception, because there’s been a growing push for engineers and founders to have a personal brand for networking purposes. But even so, a lot of productivity influencers mostly use productive systems to create productivity content. Hard to blame them when those are the pieces that get traction — and I don’t even mean this in a cynical way. “Get traction” is just another way of saying “resonate with people and actually help them,” after all.

Practical Applications and Efficiency Hacks

The thing is, though, there are pretty good reasons that bullet journals have moved away from being all about rapid logging, collections, good indexes, and hand-written time-based logs… just like there are good reasons that I eventually rejected daily notes in favor of themed logs.

Trackers are common spreads you might see on instagram, or google images, if you prefer to avoid the toxic femininity of that corner of social media. Think artsy mood tracking, with daily color codes — which can seem silly if you’re a well-adjusted senior engineer trying to figure out the best way to keep track of what you accomplished in a given week. It’s handy if you have depression and anxiety, though, and are trying to figure out patterns… and want to model coloring at the breakfast table instead of using your phone. Same thing with sleep trackers, and eating logs.

So many people have smartwatches and accompanying apps — myself included. Mine is handy for keeping track of how many steps I walked in a day and correlating that to how much hip and lower abdominal pain I experience in the evening, which is good to report to my physical therapist.

If you don’t want to spend the money for an expensive smartwatch and don’t need things like the heart monitor the way I do, though, using a paper log can be a lot less hassle than trying to find an app that doesn’t glitch.

I’ll confess that I don’t much see the point in logging the weather in a world in which I have access to the internet, but if you’re trying to track whether you have something like seasonal affect disorder, that seems logical to me. If just color pretty clouds and doodle? That can also be sensible and practical! I’ve heard that some ADHD people like to draw in the margins so they don't zone out in meetings. Back when I was teaching, I used to I doodle in meetings all the time so I didn’t start losing my temper at what a poorly implemented waste of time some of the things I had to listen to were. Doodling in a meeting makes you look busy if it's an in-person meeting. Ranting in texts your phone makes you look like an jerk, and so does playing Candy Crush. But writing down rants and coloring is still socially acceptable.

Fine, one might say. What about people who are still using analog budgeting methods, like in the Stone Age? One needn’t use fancy budgeting software hooked up to your bank account, but surely pretty paper spreads for business income are just an egregiously bad idea? Frivolous nonsense?

I dunno, man, I got away with using a single text file to manage my budget for a long time, and so do lots of others. A paper version isn’t that different, and excel is really annoying! My tax preparer can barely figure out how to use my pivot tables, and I’m not even asking her to do anything but read the table.

Your average momfluencer sharing pretty bullet journal spreads probably saves all of her receipts, and then sits down and periodically tallies it all up to make sure things aren’t getting out of hand. I imagine she does it on paper instead of the computer because maybe she gets too distracted by social media on the computer, or the kids make it hard to focus in excel but will color quietly if mommy is coloring too.

Analog methods are great for ‘focus mode’

The problem with software is that you have to learn how to use the software, and can’t just get distracted by anything else on your computer. Not getting distracted by other things on your computer and choosing to do things on paper is a time-honored technique. Neil Gaiman writes his entire first draft on paper specifically so that he doesn't get bogged down in software giving him all the powerful tools that make him fiddle instead of write. Distraction-free apps and hardware like the Remarkable and Daylight Computer are fancy ways to try to solve this problem, but as much as I enjoy reading on my Boox, I am not going to claim it is a frustration-free experience. When I pick up a paper book and a pen, I don’t get the advantages of search, seamless integration with text to speech, or voice to text notes… but I also don’t ever need to turn it off and back on again to see if a glitch will magically resolve itself the way the parking break monitor in my car does.

I put real effort, once upon a time, into developing a cleaning schedule. Paid for fancy software, gave learning reverse polish notation a solid go, the whole nine. The idea is that the cleaning schedule helps you clean your house on a schedule over time; it's theoretically supposed to last multiple years, front-loading some of the effort of figuring out when to do things, so you're overall more efficient.

My personal hack was just to get my husband to pay for house cleaners for anniversaries, instead of taking me out to dinner or buying me jewelry. It was not significantly more expensive than the task management app subscription, even before you consider the value of my time.

For the rest of the cleaning that needs to happen?

There’s always the Konik Method for maintaining sane task lists... despite having a full-time job, two kids underfoot, and a history of severe depression ;)

Further Reading

• This 2023 article about how computers reduce efficiency recently hit the front page of Hacker News and prompted me to finish this article. It’s mostly talking about technical things like CAD software and manufacturing robots, but the claim is basically “I suspect banning computers in R&D facilities excepting where absolutely necessary would pay dividends” and it’s definitely an interesting thought experiment!