A while back I deliberately switched from thinking of new ideas primarily in my head to thinking on paper, using notebooks or text editors. I had a strong, intuitive sense that the quality of my insights dropped, and nearly stopped. But instead I spent five minutes writing down the ideas I’d had using the two different systems, and found that I had substantially more insights thinking on paper–and those insights were usually better. But because they were easier to obtain, I wasn’t valuing them as much.
It depends on the problem. For problems where outline-based thinking works well, I use Checkvist, which is very similar to Workflowy. If a problem doesn’t conform to that format I’ll generally use pen & paper. I don’t usually digitize paper, although I might copy certain useful insights into my spaced repetition deck on ThoughtSaver.
A while back I deliberately switched from thinking of new ideas primarily in my head to thinking on paper, using notebooks or text editors. I had a strong, intuitive sense that the quality of my insights dropped, and nearly stopped. But instead I spent five minutes writing down the ideas I’d had using the two different systems, and found that I had substantially more insights thinking on paper–and those insights were usually better. But because they were easier to obtain, I wasn’t valuing them as much.
If you say paper do you mean real physical paper? If so do you digitize it someway?
It depends on the problem. For problems where outline-based thinking works well, I use Checkvist, which is very similar to Workflowy. If a problem doesn’t conform to that format I’ll generally use pen & paper. I don’t usually digitize paper, although I might copy certain useful insights into my spaced repetition deck on ThoughtSaver.