Why Paper is the New Hot ‘App’
March 10, 2017
It wasn’t so long ago that business meetings weren’t full of people sitting behind their notebook computer screens or with their tablets and smartphones in hand.
Compared to making notes with pen and paper, electronic devices brought a whole other dimension to meetings. Meeting participants could not only take notes, but they could simultaneously attend to many of their other tasks, like replying to emails and texts.
Compared to manual paper note taking, entering meeting notes into a device also made the notes easier to access and review later on.
For all these reasons, electronic devices have ushered in a revolution in notetaking, and a host of other tasks, that used to be the exclusive domain of pen and paper.
So why have famous notepad and paper manufacturers like Moleskine and Leuchturm1917 reported record sales in recent years, including what some describe as ‘viral’ sales growth?
The Latest Killer App – Paper
There have been a number of studies with results that show multitasking is not the miracle answer to managing our limited time that we thought it was. Indeed, some studies show that multitasking can be bad for us and can result in ‘scattered brain syndrome’.
But more recently, newer studies are starting to suggest that more traditional ‘applications’, like note taking on paper, offer a number of advantages over electronic devices.
One study by Princeton and UCLA, conducted in 2014, showed that students who took notes on laptop computers performed worse on conceptual questions than those who took longhand notes.
Why might paper be the better app for note taking, goal setting and a number of other tasks that have recently been usurped by electronic media? Here are a few possible reasons.
1. Pen and paper let you focus exclusively on a single bit of information without the distraction of a new email, text or phone call
2. Visualizations on paper, like mind mapping and progress maps, which might be impossible on a tablet or smartphone, are easier to create and more effective at conveying their information on paper
3. Notebooks never run out of battery power. No one can estimate how much information is lost when you are distracted by a device that shuts down in the middle of a meeting.
Needless to say, laptops, tablets and smartphones are here to stay. And they can be effective for so many more things that a plain piece of paper. But it might be a mistake to ‘write-off’ paper completely.
