Pen and Paper

8th Light Apprenticeship - Day 11

At what point did people switch to primarily capturing their thoughts and learnings in electronic format opposed to filling paper notebooks with lists, mind maps and diagrams?

I am still somewhat attached to the paper camp, maybe it’s nostalgia. Around the office I can usually be found with a notebook in hand, and I am one of the few who captures personal appointments in a paper diary, much to the amusements of friends who simply state ‘I thought you worked in I.T..’

During this apprenticeship period, the act of writing things down helps me in the learning process. It’s difficult to make a quick sketch on a laptop. Its difficult to write across the page at an angle on a laptop, drawing arrows from here to there. It’s more effort to use different colours on a laptop. I can visualise the page I wrote something down on more easily than the black and white ‘WordPad’ I typed it on.

In some processes we are reverting back from electronic to paper. Take Scrum and it’s use of post-it notes. Or CRC cards, which we learnt about today, used to help design a system. You capture the responsibilities and collaborators of each class allowing teams to visualise how different entities work together.

Let’s not decommission the notebook and pen yet.