Handwritten notes
For me, writing notes and ideas by hand is an important first stage. There are fewer distractions in a notebook. If you write digitally, you go immediately into editing mode - rewriting words, cutting and pasting, chopping and changing. Sometimes that’s important, but there’s an advantage to just letting the thoughts sit around for a bit before getting the scalpel out.
I mentioned in a Physical notebooks that I'd experimented earlier this year with taking notes by hand. My experience summarised:
For notes and actual writing, however, I found them stifling. Writing by hand is much slower than using a full keyboard. Worse yet, decades of shaping my brain around the digital writing experience made it very challenging to write without a backspace key at hand. I'm so used to just typing my thoughts and using the backspace key to refine every sentence as I'm writing it.
Tom makes a good point in his post. The inherent slowness of writing by hand is, perhaps, a feature not a bug. I want to try again to make a habit of handwritten notes.