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Comment by uniqueuid | Hacker News Reader

Haha this was a great idea. It demonstrated that many of the hard problems of mobile productivity are "soft" problems in our heads and concepts, not hardware or software problems.

I wish the "note taking app" crowd would think harder about that.

There is a great book about the early age of hype and how it failed, called "The Myth of the Paperless Office" [1]. Would be great to re-read it and see how it holds up.

By the way, there still is a market for hipster PDA gear and some companies seem to make quite a bit of profit with it - here are beautiful note taking index cards with additional gear (dividers, archival boxes and so on) [2]

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/myth-paperless-office

[2] https://www.thejournalshop.com/brands/Foglietto

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The Myth of the Paperless Office seems less like a myth and more like a premature prediction.

As someone whose career started in 2011, I don't think I've ever used a company printer for anything but a convenient way to print out personal files. In fact, I don't think I've ever interacted with paper in a professional capacity except:

* to sign employment contracts (and even that's gone 100% digital in the past 5 years)

* my personal notebook that I use to noodle on ideas

Interesting. I was handed a stack of CVs to review by my boss today. They were all printed. So was my employment contract.

On my desk is a stack of paper for note taking, drawing and problem solving.

I am sure there are places that have gone entirely digital, but the best replacement for notepaper seems to be things like the remarkable, and it is a poor replacement. Paper is never going to need an update at an inconvinient time, never out of power, works with any stylus and is ready to be used immediately.

It is great if it works for you, but I think your office is an exception to the general rule.

I've worked at 5 different tech companies across that period (2 YC startups, 2 FAANG, 1 mid-size). It might be a US coastal tech thing, but it's certainly not a single office thing.

My accountant’s office is entirely paperless and has been for about 10 years now. They actually went on a crusade against paper around that time and bringing up the idea of dropping some paper off instead of emailing documents in is enough to visibly stress my accountant out.

It’s viable, even in the “paper” pushing businesses and at this point is a matter of whether an office has made the choice or not. Personally I still have a pad of paper for structuring some free form thoughts out before committing them to digital form, but I definitely deal a lot more with PDFs and web forms than paper because no one I deal with wants to deal with paper if they can avoid it (including me).

With more and more "office" workers working remotely there is less reliance on paper. I signed my contract digitally, never printed anything.

But I sometime write on my desk to take quick notes (but don't bother using paper).

To be clear, the book is significantly more nuanced than the title might suggest.

It's ultimately a study of affordances, thinking about what makes paper useful beyond merely storing information.

That's as relevant as ever, even if many of paper's uses have been superseded today.

> By the way, there still is a market for hipster PDA gear and some companies seem to make quite a bit of profit with it - here are beautiful note taking index cards with additional gear (dividers, archival boxes and so on) [2]

This can become the same kind of trap that the Hipster PDA was trying to save people from — focusing too much on buying tools and not enough on using them.

Oh yes, it's pure indulgence.

Which is not always wrong, I mean, people spend lots of money on nice pens and paper, and that is perfectly fine.

It's just that nice pens and paper don't guarantee nice thoughts.

Yup. I drool over JetPens.com, Field Notes, and Doane Paper.

I've long enjoyed the Exacompta brand for index cards because the paper is uncannily thick and nice to write on. But those rounded edges on the Foglietto's look super cool. Going to see if I can snag some of those now!

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