In a corporate world every meeting now comes with an AI aide that happily spits out four pages of transcript-flavoured “notes” nobody will ever read. I go the other way: a fountain pen, decent ink, good paper, and two thirds of a page that is actually useful.

This comes from a long-time Org mode user, not a pen-and-paper romantic. For many years I kept my work notes in Org mode and I still think it is great. But after moving jobs I ran into the usual corporate friction: different permissions, different accesses, and Emacs on Windows do not go well together. Paper has no IT policy, needs no sync approval, and survives a job change untouched. So for work notes, I turned to pen and paper — and stayed because it turned out to be better at the job, not just easier to set up. More on the Org mode side of this in my C++ notebooks in Org mode post.

You cannot write as fast as they talk

That is the whole point. Typing — or auto-transcription — keeps up with speech, so it does not have to choose. Handwriting cannot, so it must. You listen, decide what matters, and distill it into a sentence or two.

A good meeting note is not a record. It is a decision about what was important: what was decided, who owns what, what the open question is. The slowness of the pen forces that decision in the moment, while the AI summary defers it forever — and deferred usually means never.

Already digested, no re-read needed

Meta-analyses on handwriting versus typing lean slightly toward handwriting Flanigan et al., but that is not why I do it. For me it is simpler: I am already digesting the info during the meeting, so I do not need to re-read it after. My two thirds of a page are the understanding, done once, in the moment.

The other half is trust. Every todo, name, or follow-up is written down, so it stops buzzing around my head and overloading my brain. If I wrote it down, I trust I will return to it and make sure it gets taken care of. The notebook is my inbox — nothing lives in my head rent-free.

Thinking and planning on paper

I reach for pen and paper in two situations: thinking through something, and meetings. Both are the same activity, really — turning a mess of input into a small number of lines that matter.

For thinking and planning it is sketches, arrows, crossed-out dead ends. Paper takes any shape without asking me to pick a template or a palette first. No battery, no notifications, no tab begging for attention. The friction is so low it disappears, which is exactly what you want when the thought itself is half-formed.

For meetings it is dates, names, decisions, and a small box around the action items. If it does not fit on one side of a page, I probably did not understand it yet.

Good tools matter

This will sound familiar if you read my split keyboard post: once you do something every day, the tool stops being incidental. A scratchy ballpoint on copy paper makes you want to stop writing. A pen you like, ink that shades a little, paper that does not feather — that makes you want to keep going.

My current setup (still evolving):

  • Pens: LAMY Safari, Pilot Custom 74, Platinum 3776 Century. The Safari is the workhorse — cheap enough to carry everywhere, tough enough to survive a bag. The Custom 74 and the 3776 are the step up for longer writing.
  • Inks: the classic is Waterman Serenity Blue. I have been using it since I was a primary school kid, and I still have notes from 15 years ago written in it that look like the day I wrote them. For more adventurous days: Sailor Souten, Waterman Inspired Blue, Waterman Tender Purple. For black that has to survive, Sailor Kiwaguro — pigmented, water and UV resistant, if that is a concern.
  • Paper: Oxford Campus refill pads, kept in binders — something I really loved upon moving to the UK. For quick notes and carrying into meetings, a reporter notepad. And Rhodia notebooks, which I think are genuinely excellent quality: smooth, fountain-pen friendly, no feathering.

Nothing exotic. The rule is the same as with keyboards or dotfiles: pick a few things, learn them properly, and let the habit compound.

Against the four-page summary

I am not anti-AI-notes. A transcript is a fine safety net when you need to check exactly what was said. But a safety net is not a summary, and a summary is not understanding.

The AI gives you everything, which is another way of giving you nothing to hold on to. The pen gives you two thirds of a page you actually thought about — and that, in my experience, is what gets read, remembered, and acted on.