Hack Spirit Editorial Team
In most meetings there’s one person who opens a notebook while everyone else opens a laptop. They have a pen that’s clearly theirs. Their pages are full of things that would be far easier to find if they’d typed them.
They know that. It hasn’t changed anything.
A notebook doesn’t reveal someone’s personality. But it does change how capturing and working through ideas feels: the pace, the physical experience, the relationship with an unfinished thought. Spend enough time around people who write by hand and you’ll notice a few habits come up again and again.
1. They think slowly on purpose
Handwriting is much slower than typing. For a lot of people, that’s the whole appeal, even if they wouldn’t put it that way.
When you can’t get everything down, you have to decide what matters while the other person is still talking. A laptop makes it easy to capture every word. A notebook pushes you to pick out the important bits and put them in your own words.
That difference showed up in a well-known 2014 study published in Psychological Science. Psychologists Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer found that students taking notes on laptops tended to transcribe lectures word for word, while those writing by hand summarised more. The longhand group also did better on questions testing conceptual understanding.
The picture isn’t that simple, though. When researchers repeated the experiment in 2019, they didn’t find a consistent advantage for handwriting. The honest takeaway is that neither method is automatically better. What seems to matter is whether you’re processing ideas or just recording them, and for many people, the slower pace of a pen nudges them toward processing.
2. They rewrite their lists instead of editing them
A digital to-do list carries everything forward automatically. Items added in March are still sitting there in October, untouched and quietly guilt-inducing.
Paper doesn’t do that. When the page fills up, you copy the list onto a fresh one.
And in the copying, some items just don’t make the trip. If a task doesn’t survive being written out by hand for the fourth time, it probably wasn’t going to happen. The small friction of rewriting becomes a natural moment to prune.
There may be more to a written list than pruning. In a 2011 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that unfinished tasks tend to keep intruding on our thoughts, but making a specific plan for them reduced that mental nagging. Writing down what you’ll do and when can help quiet the background noise, whatever tool you use.
3. They’re comfortable with a mess
Open the notebook of someone who really uses one and it’s chaos. A shopping list next to a work idea next to a phone number with no name attached.
No tags. No folders. No search.
This can drive tidy people slightly mad, while the notebook’s owner is usually unbothered. They know roughly where things are, or they don’t and it turns out not to matter. A messy notebook says very little about how organised someone is elsewhere. It just means the notebook is a place where they don’t have to be.
4. They leave the screen when they’re stuck
Big decisions and stubborn problems tend to send them to paper, sometimes without them realising.
A blank page allows a kind of thinking a document doesn’t. You can draw an arrow. Cross out a whole section and still see what you wrote. Put two unrelated ideas side by side just because there was space.
Conventional digital documents tend to encourage tidy, linear thinking, and they seem to insist you know where you’re going. A sheet of paper doesn’t care. It’s common to end up with a page that looks like nothing and a conclusion you couldn’t have reached in a straight line.
5. They keep notebooks they’ll never open again
Full notebooks pile up: in a drawer, on a shelf, in a box that’s moved house three times.
Many are rarely reopened. Their owners often know this and keep them anyway.
Part of the reason is that an old notebook is a physical object in one person’s handwriting, and handwriting changes with mood in a way a font never does. You can tell which entries were rushed and which were written late at night.
It’s a record of living through a particular stretch of time. That’s a strange thing to throw away, even when it serves no practical purpose.
6. They sometimes remember where things were on the page
Some people who write by hand say they remember roughly where a piece of information sat: top left, next to that doodle, just before the coffee stain. Others feel that forming the letters helps an idea stick.
There’s some interesting research in this area. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychology used EEG to measure brain activity in university students and found that handwriting produced more widespread connectivity across brain regions than typing did. The researchers suggested this could be beneficial for learning.
It’s worth keeping that in perspective. It was a small study measuring brain activity, not a direct test of memory, and experiences vary from person to person. Handwriting isn’t a guaranteed memory upgrade. But for the people who feel it, the physical page gives information a place in a way a scrolling screen doesn’t.
7. They’re a bit protective of their notebook
Ask to borrow it and watch what happens. There’s a pause.
The pages might have unflattering things on them. A half-formed complaint about a colleague. A thought that would sound ridiculous read aloud. A budget they’re not proud of.
That honesty may be part of the value. Psychologist James Pennebaker’s review of expressive-writing research described studies in which writing openly about difficult experiences was associated with improvements in some mental and physical health outcomes. The important ingredient wasn’t using a pen, but putting difficult experiences into words, and a private notebook may make that honesty feel easier.
A working notebook holds the unedited version of a person, and that’s exactly why it works. Nothing written for an audience gets to be that honest. The pause before handing it over isn’t secrecy. It’s knowing that what’s inside was never meant to be finished.
8. They’re comfortable with a page that stays blank
Open a document and the cursor blinks at you, as if demanding progress.
An open notebook doesn’t do anything. It just lies there being paper.
So you can stare at it for four minutes without writing a word and not feel like you’re failing. For many people, that makes an unfinished thought feel less urgent. It’s allowed to take its time.
9. They don’t expect it to be efficient
This is the honest one, and most notebook users will say it themselves without much prompting.
Handwriting is slower, harder to search, impossible to back up and awkward to share. Every objection is fair.
They’ve simply decided that efficiency is one thing to weigh, not the only thing. It’s the same instinct as walking somewhere you could easily drive to.
Why being unsearchable might be the point
Here’s something rarely said in the debate about paper versus screens: the notebook’s biggest weakness may also be its most useful feature.
Digital notes are built to keep everything. Every half-idea, every meeting note, every “remember to look into this” is saved forever and can be found instantly. That sounds like a benefit, but it quietly creates a problem. When everything is kept, everything looks equally important. Your notes app becomes a warehouse of things you once thought mattered, and every search drags old priorities back into the present.
A notebook works differently. Because it’s hard to search, things you don’t revisit naturally fade. The ideas that truly matter are the ones you remember, copy forward or act on. Everything else slips quietly into the back pages, and that’s fine.
In other words, paper does some of your prioritising for you. It lets you forget on purpose. In a world where most tools are designed to remember everything, a system that allows unimportant things to disappear can feel surprisingly freeing.
This also explains why so many people end up with a hybrid system without planning one. The notebook becomes the place for thinking, and the screen becomes the place for storing. The mistake is expecting either one to do both jobs.
Try this: the three-pass notebook
If you want to get the benefits of paper without losing the useful parts of digital, try this simple routine.
First pass: capture freely. Write in your notebook without organising anything. Meetings, ideas, worries, lists, doodles. Let it be messy.
Second pass: a weekly flip-through. Once a week, spend ten minutes skimming the last seven days of pages. Circle anything that still feels important. Don’t reread every word. If something doesn’t catch your eye on a quick skim, let it go.
Third pass: move only what survived. Transfer the circled items to wherever they need to live: your calendar, a shared document, a message to a colleague. Only this small, filtered set goes digital.
The result is that your digital tools stay lean and useful, while your notebook remains a place to think without pressure. You also get a weekly moment of reflection built in, which many people find is the most valuable part.
A simple test to go with it: when you flip through a month of pages, notice how much of what you wrote you actually used. If it’s very little, your notebook is mostly a thinking tool, and that’s worth knowing. If it’s most of it, you might need a better system for moving things out of the notebook and into action.
Final thoughts
Choosing paper over a screen isn’t a personality type, and it isn’t a statement against technology. It’s a choice about how you want to think: slower, messier, more privately and with fewer interruptions.
If someone at work keeps writing things down the slow way, it’s worth asking what they get out of it before assuming the habit needs updating. Their answer will tell you far more than any guess about their personality.
And if you’ve been living entirely on screens, it might be worth trying. Buy a cheap notebook, pick a pen you like, and see what happens to your thinking when it can’t go any faster than your hand.
