All of my thoughts are clearer on paper. The decent ones become comprehensible, the flaws in bad ideas pop out of the page.
This is a common sentiment, the benefits of externalization is well known and people have been advocating for analog tools as long as the digital/analog divide has existed.
But, there's something special about paper. So much fidelity, from line width to the indent of each stroke on the page. Those incidental details are what let my brain grab onto the ideas as objects. Brains are made for spatial reasoning on the physical world, not logic and rote memory. So give it space and detail to latch onto.
The flattening of detail which makes whiteboarding the shorthand for quick design kills the magic of paper, and the uniformity of the digital world is even worse. They're good tools to be clear, just not for this stage of clarifying the concept of an idea.
Of course, this is most helpful with things like diagramming, layouts, structured outlines. Anything where the location of things relative to other things matters. Nothing shows you usability issues in a layout or the physical constraints faster than trying to logically draw it out on a page.
Even purely conceptual ideas feel clearer, ideas which are only made up of more ideas with no clear hierarchy. I don't organize the paper in any traditional sense. I rewrite the same thing in the same way four times intending to change how it's laid out to see if it makes it any clearer, but realizing as I try that I can't find another way to do it.
I start columns of "bullet points", but there's no grouping or even bullets. Even the phrase bullet point makes it sound more organized than it is. It's the minimal phrases to get the idea tied from my brain down to the page, which happen to be in a vertical series. Even then, the columns scatter at odd angles and arbitrary start points before I even realize, and I end up drawing boxes and sections to corral them back into sanity.
The lines aren't connections or structural sections, there's no mindmap here. I just need some sort of anchor point to use as a mental crutch for remembering what's what while I group it in my head. Arrows happen, but they're extremely rare. I prefer to keep explicit connections rushing around in my thoughts where I can change them faster.
I have no satisfactory explanation for why this process works. But it does work, at least for me.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
I'm certain this is related to my aphantasia. I'm good at mental spatial reasoning, things like folding up flat diagrams into shapes or seeing how two objects should fit together, but I'm only seeing a flash of the exact thing I need to solve the problem, not the holistic image. I can conjure mental images from memory, but they come up in static flashes. The classic "imagine an apple" pulls up a specific red apple with a defined lighting, shape, and color, but it's always that one apple and only for a moment.
I can't properly manipulate it. I can logic myself into seeing the image at a different angle, or with different attributes, but it's like trying to assemble a photorealistic image out of a collage. I can't imagine anything from scratch. I suspect even that apple is a memory of a generic "image of apple" I saw once and no longer remember the context for.
As for persistence, best I can do is continually force myself to reload the image, as if it's strobing in and out. It's nothing like seeing something in real life, where it's just there.
Is this a common experience? It's never seemed like a big enough deal to bother a medical professional about, or even seriously research.
But I've never heard anyone describe anything like it, and according to the basic tests I don't even have aphantasia. High fidelity, good at spatial reasoning. But I can't do anything with it, it's gone too quick. I don't feel like I'm seeing.
I think I use paper like this because I just need something which won't disappear like the images. Any additional organization is superfluous, because I'm still working in my head.
That's why the title is paper boxes. Sounds like something else entirely, I know, but it's a tenuous reference to a song which gives me a similar feeling. This is how my brain works apparently.
Does any of this make any sense at all?
- Rew