There’s a particular relief that arrives the moment you open a notebook. Not the productivity kind—the “look at me, I’m organized” kind—but the quieter relief of doing something the human way: paper, ink, and the privacy of your own pace. It’s a breath of fresh air in a world that wants every thought formatted, uploaded, synced, searchable, and—if we’re honest—slightly performative.

That’s why it feels so different from how I spend most of my days.

Most days, I live inside a computer—coding, tracing bugs, pulling apart edge cases, and dealing with the layered complexities of AI infrastructure. It’s systems and dependencies, pipelines and latency, data and reliability. Even when you’re “off,” your brain keeps running like a service you forgot to shut down. You start thinking in diagrams. You start translating everything into inputs and outputs.

A computer is a wonderful tool. It’s also a noisy room.

Even when the screen is “just a blank document,” it isn’t. Behind that blank page are a thousand invisible doors: tabs waiting, notifications hovering, the itch to verify a fact or chase a link. Typing can make you feel efficient, but efficiency isn’t always the friend of thinking. Sometimes it’s the enemy—polishing the surface while the real idea is still trying to show itself.

A notebook doesn’t do that. A notebook stays put.

Writing by hand is slower, and that slowness is the point. It’s a filter. When your hand has to carry the sentence, your mind listens differently. The page doesn’t refresh. It doesn’t suggest. It doesn’t autocomplete you into a version of yourself that sounds like everybody else.

And then there’s the small surprise: I remember more when I write it down.

Not “remember” as in “I can find it later with command-F.” I mean remember as in it lodges somewhere. Handwriting presses a thought into the mind the way a seal presses wax—imperfect, textured, unmistakably yours. I can type a meeting note and forget it by lunch. But if I write the same line in a notebook, my brain keeps it.

That’s why my suit never leaves the house without a small notebook in the back pocket.

Not a big planner that announces itself like a life overhaul. A small one. Quiet. Dependable. The kind you can pull out without ceremony.

Because life doesn’t hand you ideas at your desk with perfect lighting and a full battery. It hands them to you in motion—between meetings, mid-conversation, in the strange dead space of waiting. A sentence you want to keep. A question you didn’t know you had. A small insight that evaporates if you don’t give it a home.

And yes, you can capture those things on a phone. But the phone brings the whole world with it. The notebook brings only the page.

It asks one question: What did you come here to save?

That question is the sharpest contrast with my working life.

In code and infrastructure, the goal is to remove friction: automate, streamline, eliminate human slowness. In a notebook, the friction is the feature. You can’t “refactor” a page the way you refactor a service. You can cross things out, sure, but the history remains—and that history is clarifying. It shows you what you thought before you corrected yourself.

On a computer, everything feels temporary. You can delete, cut, paste, revise endlessly. That’s useful for drafting, but it can also train you to treat your own mind like a document you’re constantly optimizing for approval. On paper, you’re allowed to be unfinished. You’re allowed to write badly. You’re allowed to contradict yourself and leave both versions there.

A notebook is forgiving in a way screens rarely are. It doesn’t judge your typos. It doesn’t underline your uncertainty in red. It doesn’t tempt you into making the sentence pretty before it’s true. Sometimes, the freshest air comes from that: truth before polish.

So yes—give me the laptop when it’s time to build, ship, and wrestle with the puzzle-box of AI systems. But give me the notebook when it’s time to think like a person again. When it’s time to notice what I’m actually noticing.

The small notebook in the back pocket isn’t a quirky accessory. It’s a tiny declaration of independence: My mind is allowed to be private for a while, and ideas can arrive without being immediately turned into tickets, tasks, or implementation details.

And in a world that never stops computing, there’s nothing quite as refreshing as opening a notebook and hearing your own handwriting say: here—slow down. Remember.