Merlin, please, pretty please find something like these videos to start a Monday. There was something overwhelmingly impressive about that video, and part of the impressiveness is the feeling that I didn’t ‘get it’ or have to ‘get it’ but rather it got me by my tail and put some starch into my week. Perhaps the one thing that it showed me is that we continually create systems around knowledge (permanent, such as books or music or movies, and ephemeral such as what we might be planning to do, our NAs, Projects, Areas of Focus, etc.), but in the end, the systems are complicated, they change continually, and they all suck up bandwidth; however, as soon as they crack and fall away, we are left with knowledge in its essence. That experience is charged and potent, both intellectually and emotionally. Great post!!

I’ve found that paper allows me to encode things into my brain in a stronger way than a computer can.

I have avoided buying some sort of eReader for books, because even though it uses more paper, the information gets to my brain stronger.

I also use paper for writing notes for work, as I will remember and act on them. If I write my notes on my laptop, I find that acting on notes I’ve typed don’t get done as fast as notes I’ve written down.

I can’t place a “stickie” on an office door, and I have yet to find an app that outright beats the scratch paper on my desk. When I find a device that so easily fits my communication workflow, I will welcome it as a liberator.

My problem is that all my thinking and notetaking is mindmapped. No mindmapping software I’ve ever seen can handle me inventing fonts on the fly for visual puns, and I’m not sure that handwriting recognition can handle text that curves to fit inside a doodle or over a colored arrow from one branch to another.

I’d love to try doing all my mindmaps on a tablet, which would convert my writing to searchable keywords, but I don’t think any machine is up to the work I wring out of markers.

As for the index cards: these are more likely to be replaced with tech some day. Then again, having to manipulate physical objects seems to keep me from overcomplicating the system…

“The Myth of the Paperless Office” by Sellen and Harper to just about everyone involved in self-organisation and I’d recommend it to every sodding “productivity” software and hardware developer too. It’s not that I believe paper is irreplaceable, but once you see things through the lens of the book’s concept of “affordances” you see just how limited our technology still is in various ways.

Merlin is absolutely right that it’s all about blending, but I have to say that I’m not completely convinced about the storage argument. Hard drives just aren’t archival and backups aren’t that convenient. And once you go to burning things to CD you’re back in the realm of the library catalogue…

And “read only” isn’t always as easy to implement as it should be. I do lose bits of paper and things mailed to me, occasionally. But it’s a lot more frequent that I accidentally delete an email that I had intended to keep.

Oh, and while I’m ranting… Google is nice, but it’s amazing how much easier it can be to work with a set of information that has search and categories and a hierarchy to help you navigate with. Tags are categories without the hierarchy, which is nice, but tends to be dependent on volume usage to make them work. That’s why flickr and delicious (for example) are so popular, when you have to tag your own stuff you’ll find the less easily tagged stuff just doesn’t accumulate categories beyond the immediate “aide memoire” ones.

Because I’m a scientist (hence, obsessive/compulsive - “one two three four five!”), I have issues with disposing of paper data. Not only do I hoard data (again, scientist, = obsessive/compulsive), but I’m fearful that someday I won’t be able to access digital forms of data. I’m not talking hard drive crash - I do routine redundant backups - but concern over proprietary data formats and accessibility in the future.

Perhaps this fear was instilled in me during those formative middle-school years when I upgraded Word 5 to Word 6 on my Mac Plus and was no longer able to open my Word 4 documents containing my baseball card inventory.

Is anybody worried that someday you’ll decide not to keep paying out the (orifice) for the next grand upgrade of Your Favorite Software? Then how will you access all of those files you tossed in that Archive folder?

I’m still paying for upgrades for certain software titles mostly because I want access to my files should I desire to, not because I’m still actively using the software. What happens when you keep current on your OS upgrades, only to discover one day that it no longer runs those older versions of apps that you decided not to upgrade?

I start to twitch when I consider all of the time I spend creating and grooming all of those digital files and how I’ll feel if someday I wish I had made paper copies of them all (“one two three four five!”) Will PDF be around forever? Will MS Office always be able to open files from all prior versions? Will I always own a Mac? Will I always be able to access data when I need it (think electromagnetic pulses, solar flares, power outages…)? Maybe…but I’m not willing to rely on it.

Paper will always be my friend.

When I physically write things down on paper (or my Hipster PDA), I tend to absorb it a lot better. It has a sponge-like effect on me. There’s a sense of permanence there, something that I just don’t feel when I’m using the digital format. Don’t get me wring - I’m a total gadget nut, but I like the low-tech gadgets that are effective as much (if not more) than the high-tech ones.

Because I’ve been doing stand-up and writing sketch for the past few years, I’m used to carrying around paper and a pen (and the Fisher Bullet is a blessed instrument to write with, indeed) because inspiration strikes at any given moment. When I implemented the “paper process” to other aspects of my life, it was fairly seamless.

Plus, it’s way lighter to carry around a couple pads of paper than my MacBook Pro.

really great. I have a two lecture on understanding searching on the internet for my students which that basically compresses into three minutes….

And it’s definitely more entertaining.

Our organization routinely uses paper-based data from 50 years ago, and expects it to survive in human-readable format for another 200 years. But preserving digital data for even 10 years requires careful attention to format and media obsolescence, often requiring conversions to keep the data viable. Until we have future-proof digital formats and media, paper is still our best friend.

This reminds me… A couple months ago, on a MBW episode, Merlin, you recommended some scanner/pdf solutions and you said you would elaborate on that on 43f at some point. I thought this was related to reducing your reliance on paper. How did your scanning experiment go? -ah ps: best wishes to you and your wife

I do a lot of creative work on paper, including a lot of paper prototyping for web applications. Those prototypes often involve lots of post-its and cut up index cards and such, all of which get shuffled around to fake interaction. Even if I wanted to save the scraps, it’s a big effort to reassemble the paper prototype.

So a digital camera is great. It’s less fuss than a scanner, and I can import stuff into iPhoto or and then into all sorts of other apps. The results aren’t perfect, but they are good enough. I pull the pictures into omnigraffle and draw on top of them if I need to clean things up.

The important point for me is to have the right tool at the right moment. My ubiquitous capture moments are nullified if I can't put pen to paper. Those are the tools that are most effective for me.

Besides, without paper, Found Magazine wouldn't be as much fun.

UPDATE: Limitless paper in a paperless world