I'm writing the material for a speech I'll do at a swiss university right now, and initially, I wanted to try and see if I was able to get it done directly on my PC. So I went, grabbed the keyboard and an empty markdown file, trying to come up with some ideas.
I was stuck there for an hour, before deciding that this way of working is not for me. There I went, grabbed my fountain pen and a clean notebook. For some reasons, my brain got unstuck by scribbling here and there.
....scribble....scribble....scribble....
Put down an initial ToC for the talk: "I don't like it", draw a line all over it and start over. After two or three attempts and always referring to the pages I was throwing away, I got a pretty clear idea of the direction my talk will go. Some minor refinements later, an arrow here, a line there to move things around and I was ready to start writing the main corpus of the speech. For whatever reason, the act of writing itself got me going. Is it the connection betwen my hand and my brain? The absence of latency in the response time of the "device", while writing on paper? I have no idea, but I feel that something is missing, if I try to put down my ideas directly on a computer.
I need that physical connection. Probably it's because how my brain is wired, or how I was educated in school.
I'm fine writing short posts for this blog directly on a computer, but I have serious issues doing so for any kind of complex or structured content. Same thing goes for architecting systems, designing data structures or software in general.
I started to think about this after reading articles of digital devices, with e-ink monitors claiming to provide "an experience like writing on paper", for around $600. How many recharges and notebooks can I buy with those money? In the end, I can put a label on a notebook and archive it and it will stand for, probably, my whole life. On the other hand, I need to manage and take care of the data on any digital device, spending hundreds of dollars to get a worse experience, compared what a piece of paper and a pen give me.
I strongly believe that I'll continue to work that way until I retire.