I strongly recommend using handwriting instead of screens for taking notes, e.g. using one of those composition notebooks (which are cheap). Wasting paper as if it was a white board saves valuable time and energy, and worrying about logging is pretty ridiculous in the current climate change environment since the bad outcome will probably happen regardless of public opinion.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something seems to have gone horribly, horribly wrong with using screens and typing as a tool to assist with thinking.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something seems to have gone horribly, horribly wrong with using screens and typing as a tool to assist with thinking.
Just thinking aloud:
you can’t “think” when your computer is off / when you are away from the computer;
waiting for the computer to start is an inconvenience;
writing on a smartphone is inconvenient, the screen is tiny;
computers/smartphones contain lots of addictions, you don’t want expose yourself to that whever you try to think (an offline analogy would be to only do thinking in a pub).
Computers definitely have a lot of downsides, but man I can just type so much faster than I can write in a notebook, and the resulting writing is so much easier to process.
A solution I recommend is having a room with an open laptop that has an open document and will not go into sleep mode, and having a “quiet room” with no screens were most of the thinking happens. Or, simple stand up and walk behind the laptop. The important thing is not to be gazing into the screen while thinking. And to maximize distance from any smartphone.
you can’t “think” when your computer is off / when you are away from the computer
Since most of what I think about is policy/cybersecurity/foreign affairs, this is categorically untrue in my case. Depending on a computer to think about those kinds of things is a massive liability, because on those topics the internet is often not on your side. But that might not be the case at all for things like quantitative thinking or software engineering.
I strongly recommend using handwriting instead of screens for taking notes, e.g. using one of those composition notebooks (which are cheap). Wasting paper as if it was a white board saves valuable time and energy, and worrying about logging is pretty ridiculous in the current climate change environment since the bad outcome will probably happen regardless of public opinion.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something seems to have gone horribly, horribly wrong with using screens and typing as a tool to assist with thinking.
Just thinking aloud:
you can’t “think” when your computer is off / when you are away from the computer;
waiting for the computer to start is an inconvenience;
writing on a smartphone is inconvenient, the screen is tiny;
computers/smartphones contain lots of addictions, you don’t want expose yourself to that whever you try to think (an offline analogy would be to only do thinking in a pub).
Computers definitely have a lot of downsides, but man I can just type so much faster than I can write in a notebook, and the resulting writing is so much easier to process.
A solution I recommend is having a room with an open laptop that has an open document and will not go into sleep mode, and having a “quiet room” with no screens were most of the thinking happens. Or, simple stand up and walk behind the laptop. The important thing is not to be gazing into the screen while thinking. And to maximize distance from any smartphone.
Since most of what I think about is policy/cybersecurity/foreign affairs, this is categorically untrue in my case. Depending on a computer to think about those kinds of things is a massive liability, because on those topics the internet is often not on your side. But that might not be the case at all for things like quantitative thinking or software engineering.