Paper vs Digital Planning: Have We Overcomplicated Getting Organised?

I came across a post from Richard Branson this week where he was asked about his favourite piece of technology. His answer was, “My notebook. It’s also foldable.” Obviously, I loved it, but it also got me thinking about how quickly we’ve started to assume that if something is digital, it must automatically be more efficient. There’s an app for our calendar, an app for our to-do list, somewhere else for our notes, another one for habits, reminders pinging from our phones and probably an app somewhere reminding us to check all the other apps. I sometimes wonder if, in our constant search for the newest way to become more productive, we’ve actually made getting organised far more complicated than it needs to be.

I’m not anti-digital in the slightest. I use digital tools ALL the time and so much of my actual work happens on my laptop. My medium-term planning would always be digital, resources I want to reuse are digital and anything I need to share with another person will almost always be digital too. But when it comes to actually organising myself, planning my day, working out my priorities, brainstorming, taking meeting notes or getting everything floating around my head into some sort of order, I need pen and paper.

There is actually something in writing it down

I’ve always felt that if I physically write something down, I’m far more likely to remember it, and there is some really interesting research behind why so many of us feel this way.

A University of Tokyo study asked participants to record a fictional schedule using either a paper diary, tablet or smartphone. Those using paper recorded the information around 25% faster than the digital groups. When researchers looked at what happened when participants later recalled that information, they also found differences in brain activity and suggested that the physical and spatial information we get from paper, where something sits on a page, the act of writing it and the physical page itself, can give our brains additional information to work with.

More recently, a 2024 study looking at handwriting and typing found more elaborate patterns of brain connectivity when participants wrote by hand. I’m always cautious when I see research online reduced to “THIS proves handwriting is better”, because research is rarely that simple, but I do think there is something interesting behind that feeling of if I don’t write it down, I’ll forget it. For me there’s another benefit too: paper forces me to stop for a minute. There are no notifications at the top of the page, I can’t click into an email halfway through writing my to-do list and I can’t somehow find myself on Instagram ten minutes later wondering what I originally picked up my phone to do. And, I’m sorry, physically crossing something off a list will always beat a tiny digital tick.

Digital is brilliant at what digital does

This is why I don’t really understand why paper and digital planning are constantly pitted against each other. They do different jobs and, for me anyway, they work best together. My medium-term planning is digital. Documents are digital. Resources I know I’ll want to use again are digital. Anything collaborative or anything another person needs access to is digital. I would never deliberately make something less efficient just so I could say I had done it on paper.

My own rule has become really simple: if I need to share it, it’s digital. If I need to reuse it, it’s digital. If I need to think through it, plan it, prioritise it, remember it or simply get it out of my head, it will generally be pen and paper. I think the easiest way I can explain it is that digital is where a lot of my work lives, but paper is where I work out how I’m actually going to do it. Of course paper has drawbacks, I can’t search six months of handwritten notes in two seconds, collaborate with somebody through my planner or move Tuesday’s plans to Thursday without a slightly unattractive arrow, but I don’t need paper to do everything. I need each system to do the job it is actually good at.

I think the bigger problem is that we keep changing systems

This, for me, is probably more important than whether you choose paper or digital. I don’t think most of us need another organisational system; I think we need to consistently use the one we already have. We buy a new notebook, start a to-do list in our Notes app, put reminders into our phone, scribble something on a Post-it, download an app because somebody online said it changed their life and then wonder why our heads still feel completely cluttered. Your organisational system should be reducing the amount your brain has to remember, not leaving you asking, Where did I write that? Which notebook was that in? Did I put that in my calendar?

Pick ONE planner, choose your system and use it repetitively enough that it becomes automatic. If something comes into my head that I need to remember, I know where it goes. If I need to plan my week, I know where I go. If I leave a meeting with five things to follow up on, they go into the same system. You shouldn’t need a system to manage all of your systems.

So, paper or digital?

Rather than asking whether you’re a “paper person” or a “digital person”, I think there’s a much more useful question: where does everything in your life live? If I asked you right now where you keep your appointments, your to-do list, meeting notes, ideas, goals, weekly plan and the things you absolutely cannot forget, would you know immediately? Or are they scattered across five different places? Because I think that is the real issue.

So, if you do anything after reading this, take a blank page and divide it into two: PAPER | DIGITAL. Write down the things you regularly need to organise and decide where each one is going to live. What genuinely needs to be digital? What do you need to share or reuse? What do you actually think better about when you write it down? Your answer might look completely different to mine and that’s the point. There isn’t one perfect planning system; there is just the system that you trust, return to and use consistently enough that it becomes part of how you operate.

Before you download another productivity app or buy another notebook, look at what you already have and decide what each thing is actually for. Then give it enough time to work. Maybe we don’t need to keep finding new ways to organise our lives. Maybe we just need to get much better at consistently using the ones we already have.

Turn busy into intentional.