Two things - one is that since I started doing the Julia Cameron “Morning Pages” exercise which is basically writing longhand into a notebook filling three pages first thing every morning my creativity and productivity have taken off. My writing is pretty lousy too but in fact I very very rarely read ANY of what I write in those notebooks. That’s not how it works. It’s the writing itself that does the job. The other is - I’m currently reading Being There by Andy Clark - where he sets out the concept of the extended mind. Basically what he says is that our minds don’t work just within the confines of our brains. Rather we use being in the physical world to extend our cognitive functions. A simple example he gives is doing a jigsaw where the physical manipulation of the pieces working in association with the pattern-recognition functions of the brain lets us complete the puzzle. I reckon paper does that for us too. I reckon that although lots of us can use the net and technology to extend the functions of our minds, paper really makes a more PHYSICAL demand on us and maybe it lets parts of our brains work that technology doesn’t do so readily. By the way, thanks for this post - it’s stimulating - and thanks for the Bruce Chatwin technique reminder Markus - I’ve never done that with my moleskines - but I will NOW!