I draw a lot to figure out engineering details. I used to make beautiful drawings in diagramming software (draw.io and the lil). But man, it took a lot of time. Now I scribble on printer paper unless it’s something I plan to share.

Fellows devs at my company think I'm strange, but I always have a cheap coil-notebook. It has diagrams, notes, doodles, minutes, checklists, mostly not even in order. I try to remember to write the date at the top of each page.

I just counted, 11 notebooks (b5, 60 pages) in two years, so just about a new notebook every 2 months.

Funny thing is, coworkers will now ask to use my pen and paper to flesh-out something together, as I'm certain it's the only paper and writing utensil in the building.

And yeah, draw.io or even an ipad with a whiteboard app aren't good replacements for me.

I didnt have one for a while and accumulated some kind of panic when it was needed.

You remind me of a joke that with good employees you need only one pen and they can all write.

> even an ipad with a whiteboard app aren't good replacements for me.

Curious. My first thought would have been "... because the line is physically displaced from the pen, of course"; but that doesn't apply there.

I can't really explain it; it's simply a preference. It may not actually be optimal efficiency. But I like the pen and paper.

my remarkable comes close enough for my similar purposes

It takes me ages to draw my diagrams (I use excalidraw) but I find it so enjoyable because it forces me to slow down and check what I think I know

Interesting observation indeed!

You are compressing thoughts/ideas to symbols. Via a visual feedback loop your mind can operate on more complex ideas as your working memory doesn't need to hold everything at once. The term "second brain" really applies here. While you're "doodling forth" you become proficient in your on-the-fly invented symbol language.

Key is also the slowdown effect of being careful to draw properly. It's like a harness for your thought process. Fixating your thoughts on paper is a way to be safe not to go astray; like a climber who puts hooks in the wall.

It's really more complex than it seems from the outside. A picture of a group of people drawing lines in the sand comes to mind. And one wonders - once again - how language came into the world.

A different funny that should be archived here with the above.

Assuming you can type well.

Take a sentence, put your hands on the keyboard with the intend to type it but dont do it.

Some time later dont try to remember the sentence but just put the hands on the keys and let them type. Its really funny seeing the text come out of your keyboard buffer muscle memory.

Some japanese guy said he played with the concept and reported that he could fit a whole paragraph or a list of things big enough that he couldnt recall it without using his hands. He could do an invisible abacus to recall it.

You can't think of a sentence and type it later without actively remembering it. You either forgot the sentence by then or you're able to recall it - just typing from memory without actively remembering is just not a thing that is possible. Muscle memory isn't built from thinking one time about what you'd do.