A few weeks ago I wrote about the return of 3×5 cards. I’ve seen them trending for the past few years, but using cards to keep notes has been something I’ve dabbled in since I was at least in middle school. I was always fascinated by them. Or perhaps by their potential. Cards are versatile, portable, and most of all moveable. That is, they’re not stuck somewhere in the middle of a notebook, they can be moved so that they’re associated with other, related cards.
As I’ve probably noted elsewhere, I’m familiar with the Zettelkasten method, and plan to write about my relationship with it. I was surprised when I saw the trend catching on in social media and realized that I had nearly “invented” the same method myself (albeit, decades after Luhman did and without the strenuous cross-referencing).
Our relationship to paper is older, deeper, and more varied than any other analog technology out there.
David Sax
I’m of an in-between generation. I was too early to have cellphones in my school years, but late enough that technology was a fascination and a part of my life, and clearly something I would need to know about in my future.
At this point, I have saved more logins to dead note-taking apps/sites than I do to live ones. I’m sure I’ve lost more digital notes to “bit rot” than lost paper notes to flame or flood. I like digital note methods, I use more than one, but I seem to always fall back on paper, in one form or another.
Paper doesn’t need to boot up. A card or notepad will not shove an ad or notification in your face while you’re opening it. I can’t even tell you how many ideas have flown out of my head just in the brief wait for the note app to come up. Paper won’t crash. And it will be accessible even if the wireless network goes down, or you haven’t been able to plug into a charger all day.
No hate to the apps, because you can’t beat the search-ability, or the ease of duplicating/sharing digital content. But these days I have a smartphone in one pocket, and in the other is a pen and a bundle of cards.
Maybe that’s a new product idea: a smartphone case that has a pen loop and space for cards.