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Which one's better? Analog or digital note-taking?


In the information economy, there’s a lot more noise rattling our everyday activities.

Notifications are the bane of our attention — it distracts us constantly, and no matter how we mute them, it creeps in to our subconscious.

Ding! There goes our mindful eating, getting captured with a single alarm.

Let’s face it, it’s hard to miss some notifications because some of those come from our beloved ones.

Whoever designed the notification feature on our phones, computers, or tablets, they have created gifts and curses.

We, as the citizens of the internet, read information every day.

Whenever we see a line of thought that’s insightful, we will capture it.

Even in the offline world, capturing insights improves our learning.

But there’s a debate among people who write information.

The analog way vs. the digital way.

Two camps that coincide with each other.

Here’s the honest answer: There’s no right process to write a piece of content.

Analog and digital writing both have advantages and disadvantages.

Here are some advantages of analog writing:

  1. It has fewer distractions.
  2. You can remember better because it’s a tactile experience.
  3. It’s faster in capturing your fleeting memories, and fosters deep work.

Here are some advantages of digital writing:

  1. You can see the connections between your different lines of thoughts.
  2. It has instant and precise search capabilities.
  3. You can share it and receive feedback faster.

If you want to produce the best content, how about you combine both methods?

Here’s the biggest difference between the two methods:

Analog permits us to make mistakes.
Digital allows us to fix them.

We don’t need to compare these two. What we need is to use these two methods to produce great content.

The harmony of the two will produce a zen garden-like content. It's serene and powerful.