The notes app on my phone is an archive of all the mundane tasks I’ve done in the past four years. My shopping list from a random day in June 2023 sits somewhere in the middle, whereby I apparently only needed pasta sauce and a small packet of chicken. I drafted an email in there in 2022, and my to-buy Christmas list from 2024 is still among the chaos. Nothing has been deleted or ticked off. My endless lists of places to travel and restaurants to try remain unopened.
I thought I was an organised person but looking at this, I realised I just write a lot down and do nothing with it. I don’t even refer to the endless shopping lists, and often come home missing at least two items.
So a month ago, I decided to try a more old-fashioned organisational method: pen and paper. The diary that’s been sitting in my bedside drawer for over a year finally made its appearance, and the yearly planner that’s hung in the kitchen for a year, left blank, actually had some ink drawn on to it.
The little squares marking each day passing by remind me of my grandmother, who loves calendars. Every Christmas my siblings and I compete to buy her one with the cutest animals, and she transfers everyone’s birthday on in pen. As a kid I always checked carefully she hadn’t missed mine. Her weekly shopping list would be stuck on via a Post-It note, and changed each Saturday.
I always thought apps and online calendars and notes systems were faster and less prone to errors.
This month, I ditched my Notes app and instead each morning I spent a few minutes poring over my timekeeping, writing out my tasks for the day and what I’ll be doing each hour. My work meetings are planted first, my gym sessions into the same slot each day, even my meals and cooking times are meticulously planned.
It’s given me a sense of calm. There’s no last-minute Google Calendar pop-ups that remind me I have an appointment I forgot about in only 15 minutes time. It feels like a more efficient system, and each time I’ve actually transferred the thought onto paper it seems to etch in my memory. I’m forgetting less, and am on time.
Educational psychologist Dr Ahmar Ferguson says that taking notes by hand can lead to greater retention and deeper processing than typing notes on a phone. “Handwriting is a slower, more effortful process. This naturally encourages people to summarise, prioritise and make sense of information,” he tells me.
“Writing notes by hand also engages the brain differently. The act of writing by hand activates motor planning, visual processing, language systems and working memory simultaneously. This combination of cognitive and physical engagement can strengthen memory.”
A study in Frontiers in Psychology that monitored brain activity in students taking notes, backs this up. The research found that those writing by hand had higher levels of electrical activity across a wide range of interconnected brain regions responsible for movement, vision, sensory processing and memory.
As well as being on time, and improving my memory, the joy of writing my own shopping or to-do list without a notification popping up, clicking off my list to reply and forgetting about it, has been the biggest pleasure. My screen time has reduced by an hour each day, which was wasted scrolling and mostly acted as procrastination to the tasks I actually needed to put into a list and get done.
Daisy Fancourt, author of How The Arts Transform Our Health, says: “When we write, our attention is focused on that activity, meaning we’re less likely to get distracted by notifications and app switching, which fragments attention and weakens memory encoding. The act of writing also means the words became part of our procedural memory or muscle memory.”
It’s not just me that has tried, tested and loved the old-fashioned method. The new “it” bag among my generation is filled with crosswords, novels and journals. Labelled “analogue bags” by creators online, it’s designed to keep people off their screens, with some calling it a “scroll-stopping” bag.
It’s not just that. Entrepreneur and influencer Grace Beverley has built a business on diaries, with some costing as much as £44 for the year, and frequently selling out due to their hype on TikTok. Other methods include Ugmonk’s Analog, a box of index cards that help you organise tasks and plan the week ahead. The starter kit, that includes various cards labelled “Today”, “Next” and “Someday” and a card holder starts at $99 and a subscription is available to receive more cards.
Although it seems overpriced, I see why people go for it. Every evening when I physically tick off my to-do list I get a sense of satisfaction, like it was a test and I’d passed that day with flying colours. If I do miss a task, I simply write it on my page for the following day. The system works, and I was stupid to think technology could keep up with the way that’s worked for my Nan for almost a century.
My kitchen calendar is my new pride and joy. December’s page was filled with Christmas meet-ups, a vet appointment, activities with friends and meals out. Walking past it each day not only reminded me what was coming up but that I had a life. The blank months beforehand looked sad in comparison.
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In full Boomer style, I even organised a meeting with friends on the phone (a call whereby we actually spoke, not a quick, “are you free next weekend?” text). As I waited for them to look through their messy digital calendars I had mine in front of me, the days that I was free were jumping out and waiting to be filled in. Within five minutes the call was done and ink placed on the pages.
I was more productive with my diary. Planning my day each morning gave me both a sense of urgency and calm. At 1pm I’d walk the dog as I’d instructed myself. It worked wonders; there was no sitting on my phone and scrolling, I knew what I was doing and when, and hours didn’t fly by when I was dragged into a task I forgot about. Even my cleaning went into my diary – an hour each evening, a few on the weekend. The house looked better, and my cortisol levels dropped. It’s like opening my diary gave me extra hours back.
I realise now that I cannot blame the Notes app for my lack of organisation beforehand, but the distraction of it being placed on my phone, when I can easily click off a list and scroll Instagram or reply to a text, was the problem. There’s research about Gen Z’s attention spans and how we can’t concentrate, and to solve it we need one thing: a good pen and a diary.
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