Paper

and how to use it

dynomight.net/paper

Paper is good. Somehow, a blank page and a pen makes the universe open up before you. Why paper has this unique power is a mystery to me, but I think we should all stop trying to resist this reality and just accept it.

Also, the world needs way more mundane blogging.

So let me offer a few observations about paper. These all seem quite obvious. But it took me years to find them, and they’ve led me to a non-traditional lifestyle, paper-wise.

Observation 1: The primary value of paper is to facilitate thinking.

For a huge percentage of tasks that involve thinking, getting some paper and writing / drawing / scribbling on it makes the task easier. I think most people agree with that. So why don’t we act on it? If paper came as a pill, everyone would take it. Paper, somehow, is underrated.

But note, paper isn’t that great as a store of information. You can’t search, cross-references are iffy, and it’s hard to copy or modify. Nobody I know really looks at their old paper notes very often. So don’t optimize for storage. Optimize for thinking.

Observation 2: If you don’t have a “system”, you won’t get much benefit from paper.

Say you want to do some thinking with paper right now. How would you do it? If you have no system in place, you’ve got some problems: What paper should you write on? Where does it go when you’re done? These are small problems, but they add friction. If you have to solve them, maybe you won’t bother using paper.

So solve them. Your “system” could be, “write on a notepad and throw the pages out at the end of the week.” Fine! At least you’re using paper now.

Observation 3: User experience matters.

Some pens and paper spark more joy than others. Use them. This is not frivolous. When more joy is sparked when you scribble, better thinking follows.

There are many other dimensions of user experience. Personally, I find paper with lines to be crushing and dehumanizing. But I recognize this is not a human universal.

Or, say you decide to write in a notebook. Good. But have you noticed that most notebooks either (a) close if left alone on a table or (b) have spirals or wires that are wider than the notebook itself and get crushed if the notebook is left in a bag between two books, meaning the pages don’t turn right, diminishing joy and therefore thinking?

Observation 4: Categorization is hard.

Probably somewhere in the world there’s someone with three notebooks labeled “work”, “hobby”, and “journal” and every time they want to write something it’s obvious which notebook they should use. But I’ve never met such a person and one imagines they spend their time sorting their underwear drawer or whatever rather than reading pseudonymous existential angst/science blogs.

I’ve tried many times to have different notebooks dedicated to different subjects. But I always find things run together and endless edge cases come up requiring new notebooks and I end up carrying multiple notebooks around and the whole thing is such a hassle that paper sparks no joy at all.

Paper systems I’ve used

In college, my “system” was to steal paper from printers (justified as “printing blank documents”), scribble on it, and then leave unstapled stacks of paper everywhere to get lost or crumpled in bags. Looking back, this wasn’t that bad.

Later on, I tried notebooks. Many kinds of notebooks. All the notebooks. But none made me happy. Besides the categorization and crushed wires problems, I sometimes (often) write things and later decide they are wrong and dumb and cross them out and write, “dynomight why are you so dumb and bad? why?” It drove me crazy to have this “trash” sitting around in the notebook. I tried having separate “scratch” paper and only copying the good stuff into the notebook, but this was too much work. I never found a solution.

Also, I loooooove having lots of paper all visible at once. (As I write these words, seven sheets are splayed before me.) Loose-leaf paper makes this easy, but notebooks make it impossible.

Then I decided to go all-in on notecards. The idea was that I could quickly try things, move the cards around, throw away stuff that was wrong, etc. And I could keep a stack of them in my jacket pocket, further decreasing my social status.

This is something wonderful about notecards. The fact that they’re so small somehow reduces the mental threshold to start writing, which leads to more paper and more thinking. And unlike a notepad, they’re durable and “permanent”.

Still, they’re small. It’s annoying to write/draw anything substantial. Worse, I found my life was gradually filling with stacks of notecards everywhere. I tried buying photo albums and stuffing the cards into them, but this was a huge chore and those albums are expensive and gigantic and heavy. The piles kept accumulating. I couldn’t beat them.

My current system, the first one I actually like, is this:

1. Buy three-hole punched printer paper.

2. Write on it.

3. Everything goes into a single-three ringed notebook in chronological order, no exceptions.

4. When that notebook is full, take the paper out, put a sheet of brown cardstock on each end, and put brass fasteners through the holes.

5. That “book” then goes on a bookshelf, never to be looked at again.