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My handwriting saved my brain when apps kept failing me
Everyone acts like you have to take notes on a tablet or phone now. Swear by it. I tried that for a whole year. In meetings, for plans, everything digital. My phone had a hundred tabs open. Lists everywhere. Couldn't remember a thing. Then my battery died during a big client walk through. Grabbed a legal pad from my bag in a panic. Wrote everything down fast. The next day, I could see it all. My messy notes made sense. I could flip pages, draw arrows. It stuck in my head. Now I think all those note taking apps just make you lazy. You type without thinking. The physical act of writing makes your brain work harder. I won't go back.
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finleys377mo ago
Remember reading that writing by hand actually builds stronger brain connections than typing. You have to process and shorten ideas instead of just copying words, which makes everything stick better. My own notebooks are chaos with circles and side notes, but I can recall those pages way clearer than any perfect digital doc. Makes you wonder if all that clean, searchable typing is actually worse for real memory.
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tylerchen7mo ago
How bad does your handwriting have to be for this to stop working? Mine is so messy the act of decoding it later probably burns the memory in deeper. Guess there's a benefit to being barely legible.
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nora6917mo ago
Does the benefit of handwriting change when you're dealing with ideas that need to be shared or worked on with a team? Like @tylerchen said, messy writing might burn memory deeper, but what if others can't read it? It seems like the personal memory boost might come at the cost of being able to easily show your work to someone else.
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william8647mo ago
But what if the messy writing is just for your own notes before you share a clean version?
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