Hi Anna,
I recently discovered your site, via the Plain Text Project, and I am so glad I did!
I feel like I have a split personality, going back and forth between digital (scan everything! Minimalism is the goal!) and analog (if the cloud disappears, I’ll still be fine; more joy in paper; let’s go to the office supply store!).
And I come from a family of letter writers, where choosing the right stamp is part of the fun, and where we geek out on pens, pencils, notebooks. So I lean towards the analog.
My two questions are around permanence:
For your handwritten plan for the week, how long will you keep that? Months, years? Other than helping you map out your two-week windows, does it also serve a long term purpose, like a place to revisit to see what you were doing in the past?
If you have checklists, or take notes, that are specific to a major project, how do you approach the analog vs. digital tradeoff? For example, we are moving soon and I have been taking notes on different insurance companies and their policies, and I also have a checklist of places I need to call about address changes. For these, I’ve been using digital (Apple Notes), since it seems easier to manage (i.e., portable across devices), and search. At a higher level, I find that I am more likely (and find it more enjoyable) to look back on notes I’ve taken by hand (example, a diary of what I was up to years ago) rather than something hidden away in a digital file. But with something like Insurance policies, I don’t think I’ll be looking back at these notes nostalgically, which means digital is fine : )
Thank you again for your insightful, useful, and fun site.
Thank you for writing in, and for your kind words! You ask a couple of great questions about when to choose between digital and analog, and about how long to keep various kinds of notes.
And you have great examples in your letter: a handwritten planner, and digital notes about choosing a new insurance company.
Let’s look at all this in light of two themes: purpose, and pleasure.
You want to be clear what your notes are for (their purpose), and you want to choose the most fun way – what gives you pleasure – to keep those notes. Because we can! We have a choice!
What’s the purpose of your digital insurance company comparison notes? They’re helping you complete the project of choosing a new insurance company. You’re looking at websites, maybe making phone calls. Your digital notes program will record websites and phone numbers and maybe even open the sites or open the phone function.
What’s the purpose of a planner or daily diary? It’s to keep track of your time and activities. It also requires, well, planning. Reflection. Focus. Maybe even some daydreaming. You’re thinking not just about one narrow project with a finish line like choosing an insurance company, but about your life as a whole as you travel through time.
What’s the purpose of a letter? It’s to build and to sustain important relationships in your family.
As fun as fountain pens and notebooks are, analog is useless (and therefore not pleasurable) for linking to insurance company websites, or creating checklists with phone numbers (I transpose numbers often enough that I prefer copy and paste), or syncing automatically with multiple devices. IMHO for insurance company comparison notes, digital wins, er, hands down here.
Planners or daily diaries: this depends on, well, what makes it more of a pleasure for you to track your time and tasks. For me, it is simply more fun – and allows me to focus better – when I use pens, pencils, and notebooks to manage my daily and weekly plans. However, it is NOT fun, not a pleasure for me personally, to keep an analog-only calendar. So I keep a digital calendar because it does indeed sync to multiple devices; and I don’t have to carry a dedicated separate notebook to the hair salon to put a new appointment on my calendar. I copy digital calendar information into the handwritten planning notes when I plan with my paper notebooks. Handwriting digital calendar information into notebooks also reinforces my memory of my commitments to others.
Letters: in your electronic letter to me, you write, “I come from a family of letter writers, where choosing the right stamp is part of the fun, and where we geek out on pens, pencils, notebooks.” Part of your sense of identity as a family is that you share delight in analog tools and materials. So, in your case, analog wins here.
Okay, so now we get to questions of permanence.
Insurance company comparison notes: What would a later purpose for these be? Will these be interesting to you, or useful later? Ummmmmm. I can’t think of how, can you? As you mentioned, you won’t be looking back on these notes nostalgically. And if you were to evaluate insurance companies again five or ten years from now, those policies and costs would be outdated, and most of the contacts would have moved on. This is the kind of information that expires.
Planners or daily diaries: Let’s assume there’s no legal reason to keep these, and that it is purely a personal decision. What’s the purpose of old planning notes? As you bring up, it might be nostalgia, reconnecting with your past self. More on that below.
And handwritten letters, of course, can become treasured family heirlooms; connecting multiple selves with the past and may be kept for generations or even stored in formal archives.
So, you asked what I do with my old handwritten planning notes. For the most part, I shred them. To be honest, I don’t find volumes of my old daily plans that interesting. (Who cares how many times I went to the drycleaner?)
However. Sometimes seeing your plans from Times Past is kinda cool. So I paste a few sample pages from those planning notebooks into one of my comp books.
My composition notebooks are snapshots of my life. I draw things in those, write things in those, paste my old business cards in there, paste in tickets and decorative paper cocktail napkins, all kinds of things that make me laugh and jar my memory.
There are so many ways to create interesting notes for Future You to look back on. For my comp books, I often use Lynda Barry’s review frame method (see #4, in the previous link). I don’t do that every day, but try to do it a few times a month.
I like looking back on a variety of things, not just my errand and task lists.
What do you enjoy looking back on?
That’s what you should note down for Future You’s enjoyment, and keep.
Methods, A. (2017) ‘Preserving Old Letters in the Digital Age’, Archival Methods Blog, 4 January. Available at: https://blog.archivalmethods.com/preserving-old-letters/ (Accessed: 26 July 2024).
Hess, J. (2024) ‘Re-Noted: 6 Ways to Use a Diary’, Noted, 29 January. Available at: https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/re-noted-6-ways-to-use-a-diary (Accessed: 25 July 2024).
Copy and share – the link is here. Never miss a post from the Analog Office! Subscribe here to get blog posts via email.
Wondering how to manage your paper-based or hybrid paper-digital systems? Ask me a question.