250: Pen to Paper

The Analog Advantage: Why We Should All Carry a Notebook

Nole flies solo this week to discuss a personal habit he started for simplicity that turned out to have powerful scientific backing: carrying a paper notebook and pen. Frustrated with missed notifications and the constant need to pull out his phone for reminders, Nole made the switch to analog note-taking for daily tasks.

This episode dives deep into the science that proves this "old-fashioned" way is actually superior for learning, memory, and cognitive health.

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Transcript

Nole (00:13.827)
Welcome back to the Fire You Carry Podcast. We got another solo episode for you today. Unfortunately, it's just me today. Last week you had just Kevin, I think the week before that you had just me.

I'm not even gonna promise you anything, but what I am gonna tell you is that today's episode is about something that I started doing for a certain reason that I thought was pretty good, and my wife sent me a video that taught me a bunch of stuff and I realized it was a lot better than I originally thought it made me want to expand on that thing that I was doing. And that thing that I was doing was putting a paper notebook in my pocket along with a pen. It's life-changing.

That might be a little bit of an oversell, but the principle here is really interesting. The science behind it is interesting and I found it interesting. So I think you will too. I'm not sure I can say interesting anymore in this intro without it sounding a bit ridiculous. So thank you for listening. Enjoy.

Nole (01:41.474)
So I've been trying to figure out what are some things that I can do? What are some tools that I can use to be better organized, to remember things better. And at various times I've tried different things. And at this point in my life, I kind of have a shotgun blast attempt at doing this. So I have multiple places where I take notes and reminders in my phone, multiple different places, probably three total. And then those are linked to my computer. So I have those there as well, you the cloud.

type stuff. So apps like Evernote where, you know, a note made on your phone, you can get on your computer, that type of thing. Those are great. And I find them useful, but the problem is, is that I don't discipline myself enough to go look at them often enough. So I'll make a note in that or in Google keep or some other phone app. And I'll think, okay, cool. I'll go back and check that and then I'll remember it, but then I don't go back and check it. The other thing I do

fairly frequently that I want to make sure I come back to is I use Google reminders. So I'll have my phone and someone will say something. My wife will tell me, Hey, you need to text so and so about this. And so I'll pull my phone out and I'll say, Hey, Google, remind me on Tuesday to call max. And I do that fairly frequently, actually multiple times a day. I do that. I did that for this event that I missed.

One of the things that I've been trying to do in my life,

Nole (03:24.397)
All right. So I don't know if you heard that, but my phone is listening and it, created that reminder. So Max is not going to get a phone call on Tuesday because I won't see that reminder. I won't do it. So that's part of the problem, right? With, with my current way that I'm doing things, I'm trying to be off my phone. We all are trying to be off of our phones. And so I don't always look at my phone when there's a notification. In fact, usually I have my

notifications silenced so that my can't hear my phone. And this has its pros and cons, but a lot of times that silent notification will happen and to live up in the notification bar. I'm busy doing stuff with the family and I just won't look at it. And so then I won't make the phone call. I won't show up at the thing. And that's part of the problem, but I'm trying to do something that I think is good, right? Our buddy shook came on the podcast and he talked about how he has a dumb phone.

And I think that that's really admirable. There's a few reasons why I feel like at this point in my life, I can't do that yet, but I'm trying to unplug as much as possible. I'm not on social media, which has been great. I do have a smartwatch. I have a Garmin watch, but I have all the smart features turned off. So it doesn't give me any notifications. It is paired to my phone because it communicates with Garmin's app, but my watch never vibrates and tells me that someone texts me.

It doesn't do phone calls. I have all that turned off. So it really is just a watch. It's a fitness tracker. That's what I use it for. That's nice. And you know, when I get home, I put my phone away or turn the notifications off. I do these things. And recently I had

I had this idea and I thought I've been trying to be a guy who does the bullet journal for years now, probably for the past five years, I've tried to be that guy. And I just had to be honest with myself and go, I I'm really good at doing it for a month or maybe two. And then I completely walk away from it. I I've carried that thing to and from work almost every day for the past year and I've never opened it. I just.

Nole (05:40.136)
Right now where I'm at in my life, I just, I'm not good at it. It's a little too time consuming. It's, don't really know, but it doesn't really work for me. And so I have all these great lists and plans and stuff in there that when I was motivated, I did do and build, but then I don't stay in it. And so it just goes nowhere. So I thought I'd really like to stop taking notes and reminders on my phone because it doesn't seem to be working. And then that's just one more time when I have the phone out.

I'm constantly pulling my phone out and telling it to remind me of stuff. And I'm trying to not pull my phone out. But if I'm using that to set reminders, which are important, right? I have to remember to, you know, for example, call max on Tuesday or show up at this event that I didn't show up to. I need to do that. So what am I going to do? Okay. I'm to put a notebook, a little paper notepad in my pocket and I'm going to carry a pen. And it just so happens I've already been carrying a pen. have this awesome tactile turn pen.

There was a gift from a guy who came out to the program. He's a friend. His name's Matt, Matt Lieb. And I love this pen. I carry it. I don't write anything or even check off the, the worksheets at work, the inventory sheets and stuff that I have to check off. I use this pen because once you've used one of these pens, and this is what Matt told me when he gave it to me, you don't want to write with anything else. This pen is awesome.

So I carry this pen, I was already carrying it. So I threw a notebook or a notepad in my back pocket and I started carrying it around. And I've started trying to discipline myself that when I have something I need to be reminded of, I pull this out, I draw a little box, cause you gotta have a box so that you can cross it out when you're done. And then I write the note, the thing with a date or time or whatever. Now this requires me to go into my pocket periodically, ideally once a day at least.

and review what I've written and there's no order. It's just, I'm just filling pages as I go. And then I go back and review. So in that sense, it's a little bit bullet journal where there's no, there's not any like necessary structure that you have to have, which is a little bit initially hard for my brain because I'm like, I want the important things on the top, but no, it comes to me, I got to call max on Tuesday. I just open it up and on the next available line, I draw a little box and I write that down.

Nole (08:00.533)
and then I close up and put it back in my pocket. So I was enjoying that and I've been doing that now for probably a couple of months. And then my wife, Heather, she sends me this video. She actually sent it to our whole family and it's about handwriting and it's talking about this study that was done at Harvard or Princeton. And it immediately made me want to do more of what I was already trying to do and being somewhat successful at. I do like it. I still have a lot of days where I just forget to pull it out of my pocket and look at it.

So there are things that I'm still possibly missing, but I'm getting better at it, right? I'm building the habit and I am less often pulling out my phone and telling it to remind me of something which I do like and do appreciate and does, it does feel good. So this study that was done, basically took college students and it made them watch a Ted talk and take notes and half of them.

had laptops and took notes on the laptops. And the other half had paper and a pen or paper and a pencil. And they took notes by hand. And then they tested them afterward to see who knew who had retained the most knowledge from this Ted talk or class or whatever they were watching. And across the board, the handwriting folks scored 20 % higher than the people taking notes on the laptop. And so they found this fascinating.

And they started to do more in depth looking into it. And they found a lot of really interesting stuff. And I'm going to kind of summarize the high points, the points that I found interesting. And then I'm going to talk about why I think this matters for me and why it might possibly matter for you. So what they found was the people taking notes on laptops were actually taking much more in depth and much larger quantities of notes.

People can type really fast. So you can sit there and listen to a lecture. And a lot of people can literally type almost the entire thing out verbatim. So the laptop people had in a lot of cases, almost a perfect transcription of the Ted talk or the class, the presentation that they were being given. Well, handwriting people, you looking at their notes as an outsider, if you didn't know what the content was in the Ted talk, if you hadn't sat through it, or even if you had,

Nole (10:17.138)
It often didn't make any sense to another person looking at it because you can't write by hand as fast as someone talks. It's not possible. And so what that means, what they, what they know and what they learned also deeper through this study is that when you're typing on a laptop, the information is flowing into your ears and your hands because you've practiced typing. If you've been around school or education at all, it's just, it's just flowing out onto the page, the digital page.

the screen. Whereas if you're handwriting and the person speaking is presenting an idea, they're making a point. You can't write that entire thing out. And so you have to take in that idea. You have to process it. And then you have to put it down in a short enough sentence or two that summarizes or, or will remind you of what you just learned later on. So when you're taking notes like that, it's

giving your brain an extra step of actually kind of translating and then explaining to your future self what you just learned. And so there's a different level of a process there. It's not just going in your ear and straight to your hands. You have to work on it, which makes it really interesting just from a strict note taking in the context of a classroom in that the laptop user, his notes or her notes would be valuable.

to someone who missed the class because you could read them and it would be almost verbatim the lecture, but the handwriting person, your notes are going to be almost worthless to somebody else because they're short form. It's the way your brain works. It's the way your brain thinks. It's the way you're going to remember the information. And a lot of it is not going to make any sense at all. To this point, this is a little bit different, but it's, it's kind of the same. We recently did a change.

at work. So we switched from one engine to another engine. And for a variety of reasons that I won't get into and explain because they're too boring, this changeover was a lot more complicated. Normally it's one pile of equipment off one rig onto another rig, and it's just kind of straight across this one. We actually were pulling equipment from three different locations and we had to make a big inventory sheet and it had to be kind of a three columned inventory sheet. was much more complicated than it normally is.

Nole (12:42.301)
And I'm the fireman on the crew. So I got tasked with keeping track. So as we're doing the changeover and we're, putting the things and getting the rig all dialed, have the paper and I have my pen, my tactile turn pen from Matt. It's orange by the way, made of aluminum and it's a bolt action.

Nole (13:04.713)
It's just outstanding. So I make this list. I make this inventory list. It's got three columns and I take it. We're done with that process. And now I got to go about some other tasks in my day. So I take it and I put it on the table in the kitchen where I sit. I leave it there. And my intention is to come back and to translate that list and kind of clean it up and make it into a better list so that I can leave that for whoever does the change back a month from now.

Because I know that the list that I just made, makes all the sense in the world to me because I did it. But if I'm not there the day that they do the change back over, it needs to be clearer in certain ways. And there's certain parts of it that would make no sense to anybody. So I leave it there. Now, another well-meaning individual on that crew gets a request from our chief. He wants to see this inventory list. He wants to know what we did and where things came from. And he's kind of being a micromanager, so he wants to see this thing. And there's reasons for that too, but I'm not going to go into it.

It'd be an entire, another podcast. And we don't do that here. Talk about work, actual work, wood versus aluminum ladders anyway. So this individual well-meaning sees that my list is sitting there, takes my list because well, no, was keeping track, takes my list, scans it, emails it to the chief. The phone rings. The chief is looking at my list and he doesn't understand it.

It doesn't make any sense. And it doesn't make sense because as I was in the process of doing it, I wasn't taking super detailed notes and explaining things for future other firemen. I'm not doing it for Max at that moment. I'm just doing it for me so that I know. And then later on I'll go make it better for somebody else. And I was going to even type it up, right? So that they don't have to try to read my handwriting, but I hadn't done that yet. And so I can look at that list. And if I had not changed anything and I was there the day we changed it over,

We would have been totally fine. would have said, okay, that goes there. This goes there. This goes over there. Hey, no, what do you do with this? Let me look at my list. Okay. That's this goes over there. It would have been fine, but for anybody else, it didn't make sense. So that's where the handwriting versus taking notes digitally on a laptop, something with a keyboard and a screen. That's where it's dramatically different. All that silly story, just to reemphasize the point that the handwriting thing is, it's very different. It's a different way of taking notes.

Nole (15:31.173)
And it's less useful for the end user if you're trying to pass them off to somebody else. But at what point in your life are you really doing that? That's not really a thing that we do. The thing that we want to do is we want to learn. So if writing things out by hand is going to make you remember them 20 % better over typing them out on a computer, there's more behind this, but that right off the bat says I should be writing things down by hand.

As they dug deeper into the study, they begin to do brain scans. They begin to look at the brains of the people taking the notes with their pen and paper versus the people taking notes with their laptop. And so they're doing EEG scans and they're just seeing explosions of activity. There's neurons firing. There's all kinds of stuff going on. The brain is very active and it's, it's synchronizing across different, I don't know, spheres. What do they call them? Lobes? I don't know. Parts of the brain.

And when they looked at someone typing on a laptop, the same notes or taking the same notes from the same lecture, it was pretty quiet. Now there was activity, but it was dramatically different, more of flickers and flashes, not these big explosions and synchronized stuff going on across the whole thing. They believed that part of that was the nature of the fine motor skills it takes to write with a pen and paper. And you would say, well, you kind of need fine motor skills for typing too. And

It's sort of true, but it's not really true. You're not forming letters. You've just got this memorized pattern in your, in your head of where the keys are. And you're just making it make words, which is, think is where the flash has come from, right? There's still something happening, but it's not as dynamic as actually having to form words and use punctuation and translate that idea into something that you can write down in time so that you can catch the next point. So that's super interesting. And even when.

The two groups were allowed to review their notes prior to the test. The handwriting people still did better. It got a little bit closer. So it was, it was less of a spread 20 % to 11 % difference at the beginning. And I think I can't remember. It was a slightly smaller spread. the laptop people caught up a little bit, but the handwriting people also bumped up a little bit.

Nole (17:53.818)
So the spread got a little bit smaller, but the handwriting people still did quite a bit better even when being allowed to review their notes. They even went so far as to try to tell the laptop people. And I love that the way I'm saying that it sounds like it's some sort of derogatory thing. The laptop people.

here. Anyway, they told the laptop folks, Hey, don't transcribe this thing. Don't take that detailed of notes. And they could it not, they couldn't do it. They still basically transcribe the thing because your brain, it just, that's what it's trained to do. And you just, okay, well I can, I can say all that and it's easier. It's the path of least resistance, right? You're not having to take that in and say, okay, how could I say that shorter or better?

What's a word I could use to remind myself of that principle, that type of thing. So even when they told them don't take full on those, they couldn't do it. They took this and they went even further beyond that. And they said, okay, well, does this work for people that aren't college kids sitting in a class or listening to a Ted talk? And of course, yes. Children learning other languages that are writing it out by hand do better than children who are simply doing it on a laptop or on an iPad and not just better, but quite a bit better.

people who have some sort of cognitive decline, some sort of cognitive issue and have issues with memory retention. When they give them handwriting kind of homework to do things to work on that are requiring you to write by hand with a pen and paper, their short-term memory improved by 30 % doing the same exercise on an iPad instead of writing by hand.

you get about an 11 % memory, short-term memory boost, which is great, but 30 % versus 11, it's obvious which one's better. So I originally went to this note-taking thing kind of from a place of just frustration with the phone and frustration with the fact that I just keep forgetting things and I seem to miss the notifications. I feel like they're there and then I swipe them away on accident or they just go away, I don't know, and I miss stuff.

Nole (20:09.925)
So I wanted to get away from that. Wanted to pull my phone out less, which I thought were all good goals. And when my wife sent me this video, then I realized behind this is a whole nother thing that made me actually want to go back to bullet journaling. I haven't done it yet, but it's in the back of my mind that I need to start writing by hand more than just taking a couple of notes in my notebook, right? Cause that's not the spirit of this, right? It kind of got me started in that direction, but I really want to start handwriting things.

And of course my wife is way ahead of me on this. She is reading the word and doing a prayer journal and she's writing constantly by hand and really has done that for a lot of her life. I want to get into that. I don't know that I'm going to dive back into the bullet journal method or what I'm going to do, but it's something that I want to do. There's another aspect of this that I do love. I do love the romanticism of pen and paper. It's just

There's just something cool about the old fashioned ways that are better. We know that they're better. And most people have asked, you know, is it better to handwrite a letter or is it better to type one? They're going to tell you it's better to handwrite one. We kind of intrinsically know this stuff. And it's always fun to see science come along and say, Hey, that thing that you knew, it's true. And here's the percentage of how it's true. And here's how it works. I love that kind of stuff. It's super fun.

So that would be my encouragement to you is to think about this. How could you implement something like this in your life? Where are some areas where you could kind of go a little bit more analog? Where can you get out the pen and paper?

There's a huge amount of convenience in the digital world and I'm still utilizing it. My work calendar is always going to be on my phone. FireSync is something I check every day. And we do have a paper calendar at home where I have my work days marked for my wife to see and for my family to see. But for me, it's on the phone. Maybe someday I'll walk away from that entirely, but I don't know. Anyway, the point being where are some areas where you can do stuff like this? Do you need to mute the notifications on your smartwatch?

Nole (22:19.662)
There's something to be said for not looking at your watch. I have had smartwatches before where there were notifications on it and I felt like it kept me from pulling out my phone as often, which is true.

see a notification like, don't need to worry about that.

spam email, whatever, and you don't pull your phone out. That's good. But I'm still looking at a screen every time a notification comes through, which on my phone is far too often. So looking at a screen all the time and the people around you still know you're looking at a screen all the time. Right. There's a certain level of rudeness when you're talking to somebody and you pull your phone and look at it. I do it. I catch myself doing it. It's no different if you have a smartwatch and you're talking to somebody and you're like looking at your watch, it might be worse.

Cause they can't tell if you're checking the time. Cause you got to stop talking to them. Cause it's been too long or you're checking a notification. It's just, it's not desirable. So maybe you need to do that. Maybe you need to throw a pen in your pocket. Make sure it's a pen. That's not going to bleed on your pants. Don't come get mad at me. If you, if you bleed ink into your pants, you could use a pencil anyway. Do you need to throw a notebook into your pocket? Do you need to taking notes, journaling?

reading the word in the morning and writing down a few things about what you got from it, what you feel like I was telling you, what you learned, what you saw, what you have questions about. I don't know, but I do know that there are a lot of areas in life where being different than the world pays off. And a lot of those ways are just different because we're modern and we just don't do that anymore. Pen and paper isn't as efficient as typing on a keyboard.

Nole (24:04.886)
but it's also not as good. And we kind of intrinsically know that. And now things to science and scientists, we know that it's true. It's not as good. There may be times and places when it's the right thing to do and it's appropriate and whatever, by and large, the old ways are often the better ways, not all the time.

Nole (24:26.572)
But in the context of this, maybe it's time to be a little bit different. Maybe it's time to stop taking notes on your phone. Maybe it's time to start actually journaling, whether that's a prayer journal or a gratitude journal like what Kevin does. Who knows? Think about it.

This has been the FireUCarry Podcast.

Nole (25:01.666)
All right. Our next class for the fire program. have to tell you, because if I didn't then the end of the podcast wouldn't, it wouldn't feel good. You would think, where's their mention of the fire program. feel cheated. So our next class is in January of 2026 and it will run ninth, 10th and 11th tickets are up and available. Link is in the show notes. We would love to see you out there. We're ready have a good group of dudes that are ready, committed to coming out.

So don't wait too long. This class fills up. So if you're to sign up, do it soon. All right. One of the things that you guys can do for Kevin and I and this podcast, I would like to start a small group of men. I actually already have the start of this going. And essentially what I'm looking for, what Kevin and I are looking for is we want, we want some feedback.

We want some consistent men speaking into this podcast, what we talk about, how we do things. We've been doing it for five years. Obviously we're struggling to get episodes out. I mean, you can tell, right? But we don't want to stop. And so something that I've been doing with some close friends of mine is bouncing ideas off of them, getting ideas from them, guest suggestions, things like that. want to do more of that, but I want to do it in a focused place with

with a group. So I'm going to bring those guys in who have already been talking about it. And then I would like you to join us as well. If you have any opinions or any thoughts or even just want to be a sounding board for Kevin and I to bounce ideas off of even to give feedback on episodes to tell us like that episode was totally lame and boring and totally trash. Don't ever talk about your jeans again. No, that was ridiculous. Why did you do that? That type of feedback invaluable to us. So the way this is going to work.

We're gonna use telegram, which is a communications app if you're not on it we can either get on it for this or not, but that's where the group's gonna be because it's really easy to Do both text and voice messages and have a group so I'm gonna put a link in the show notes to that group and if you want to join it and have some say in the future of this podcast or at least attempt to I'm not gonna promise you we're gonna do anything you want but but if you want to kind of help us guide and change and

Nole (27:29.938)
work on this podcast, make it better, grow it, whatever. That'll be the place to do it. I'd love your help. I already have a couple of names of guys that I know are going to jump in because I've already been talking to about this stuff, but I want you, I'm pointing at my computer screen right now. I want you to join the group as well. Cause I could use your insight. Kevin could use your insight. So find that link, join us on telegram. I'll give it some cool name.

And hopefully we'll see you there. But either way, we'll see you next week.

Nole (28:30.388)
then the end of the pa- the- then the end of the podcast wouldn't-

Nole (28:42.784)
That's a really interesting sound.