Benefits of using pen and paper vs digital tools

When writing anything on a keyboard (any digital mean) the writer’s visual attention may shift between the motor input location (the keyboard) and the screen. In this respect, typewriting may be described as more abstract and phenomenologically detached than writing by hand (Mangen, 2014). This division between motor input and visual attention may at least partly explain findings in studies where participants report that, when writing on a digital mean, the act of typing can be separated from thinking and listening, whereas writing by hand is felt to require and enable focus and concentration (Park and Baron, 2017). As one of the participants in Park and Baron’s (2017) study expressed it:

“[Handwriting] helps my brain to think. When I’m writing on paper it helps me to actually take in the information more, where when I’m sitting in front of a digital device I just feel like — I ... blank out. So that’s why I think that with handwriting you have to actually engage more. You have to concentrate on what you’re actually writing, where typing, you can just blank out. ”

A great tool that could help with analyzing, organizing, prioritizing, keeping track of your tasks, thoughts and goals, is using a planner/journal.