Lately I even removed some part of my project management tooling to replace it with paper. Very short term actionable data is more productive on paper for me.
Where typing fails me, though, is anything other than writing regular, linear text. The moment I expect needing to write a lot of math formulas, or drawing any kind of diagram, I get my paper and pens. Writing by hand is amazingly flexible.
Once, as an exercise I attempted to transcribe my Statistics notes into LaTeX. I was perfectly capable of inserting the proper math notation, but I never realized how versatile layouts can be so easily made on paper. Things like alternating writing sizes (doable in digital, but usually ends up looking horrible), varying levels of indentation and line height, margin notes, asides, ease of diagrams (again, doable digitally, but time-consuming), notation (crossing things out, circling, arrows, etc), and so many other things. Typesetting for print or digital requires a complete change of layout and even approaches to presentation. You don't realize how much freedom the blank paper gives you until you try translating it to the digital document.
Until you need to change them.
It's significantly easier to change formatting on a typed document than handwritten.
I can express with a pen using symbols, drawing, spacing, diagrams, flow...
Too many people confuse taking notes with transcription, or forget to take in consideration the cost of context switching.
Also we’re not really talking about note taking, more by which mean you put ideas on a written support.
I am under the impression that people who spent the majority of their formative years on pen and paper will in mostly be more comfortable thinking on pen and paper, but increasingly I feel that the lack of practice in hand writing will put a lot more friction in that process, tiping the balance in a different way.
Also there’s a flurry of study floating around about university students who can’t think while typing (and It’s usually about note taking to get back to your point), but it feels counter to my own experience, and I wonder if it’s not an effect of the studies done on students who just came out of a decade of pen and paper learning. Just like how children can have a hard time reading and understanding the meaning at the same time, or how their first years of writing is really taking an input and transforming it to an output.
It is definitely true for me. One of the main reasons I default to typing is not the speed, but the fact that my handwriting is absolutely abhorrent, and I feel displeasure from just looking at it. I suppose it could be improved with training, but I generally didn't find time for it yet.
I admit it is not rational but it's just how I feel.
For coding problems or algorithms for instance, I honestly find it way easier and faster to type, even pseudo code or sequence diagrams (basically ascii art at that point). It specially helps to be able to move around blocks or ident/deindent, bold or format whole portions.
For more architectural or organizational problems, hand writing on a blank canvas is more efficient. Not faster in my case, but the freedom is unmatched.
Funnily enough, for math with equations and lot of symbols, I’m not proficient enough to have a free flow of ideas that I jolt down on paper mindlessly. There’s so much friction from the start that the burden of formating in a software for instance is negligeable compared to the struggle I’ll have to come to the right exceptions.
I've been half-heartedly considering learning shorthand. I still like taking notes by hand, but I often realllllly wish I had a mostly verbatim record of some meetings.
As a data point, I can confirm that too - for me it also seems that writing something by hand is significantly more helpful to learning/remembering it than typing. Because of that, during my university years, while I often took lecture notes on the computer, I would rewrite key points on paper several time, to make them stick in my head.