Steve Wozniak, the uber-geek co-founder of Apple, gave a speech a few years ago when I was in the audience. I’d heard he carried four or five smartphones around at any time that he was testing out, so I expected him to read from one of them, or maybe from an iPad. When “The Woz” stepped up to the microphone, he reached into his sports jacket and pulled out a sheet of paper that looked like it may have come from a yellow legal pad. He unfolded it twice, looked down at what he had written, and began to speak.
The Woz reminded me of something I saw every day when I was at Levenger: people who know and love the latest technology frequently love paper, too. After speaking with many of them over the years, I’ve come to believe it’s because they appreciate appropriate technology, and paper is, after all, technology. I call it heritage technology. Pens and pencils are technology, too. And virtually all of what we count today as civilization was created by writing things down by hand on paper. Only in the last one percent of our history as a species have we been using anything else.
Rediscovering Comfort Food for Thought
Not that screens are bad. Like most of us, I love them. They have the ability to instantly morph to something different and update themselves as we direct—and often as we don’t direct. When we’re trying to concentrate on one thing, we’ll get an alert about something else. Sometimes this is welcome, but often, it is not.
From what I’ve seen, our chameleon screens are distracting many of us much of the time. To actually get work done, some of us, including me, try to apply some discipline. We may try to check email only at certain times of day. We may intentionally go offline. We may even try to use software to shield us from other software, although this seems like asking the family dog to watch a house full of teenagers.
I love my screens as much as the next knowledge worker, but I also recognize that I need some peace in order to get any real work done. When trying to get my mind around some big ideas (big for me, anyway) I don’t sit at my computer. I sit in a comfortable chair or sofa with a big sheet of blank paper before me and sketch my thoughts out on that old comfort food for thought—paper.
I’m not alone.
A young friend who is an undergrad at Stanford, and a wiz on her laptop, keeps her calendar on paper. “I just find it easier,” she explained. And author Tom Kelley of IDEO keeps all his notes on half-sheets of paper—one idea per sheet—and then uses a big table to shuffle them around and arrange them into the structure for his next his book. (Shameless Commerce plug: these half-sheets of paper are pages of Levenger Circa Jr. notebooks.)
On paper, we can reflect, gaze out the window, and return to the same page we left. Instead of it changing, we change. If screens are about going fast, paper is about going slow. If screens are where we connect with others, paper is where we connect with ourselves.
A Golden Age for Creativity
It seems to me we live in a golden age for creativity. We have our fast updating digital screens that daily find new ways to delight us. And we also have a cornucopia of paper and pens—heritage technology ready to be called into service. When all we had was paper and pen, that technology was very limiting. But today paper and pen have been liberated to do what they do best.
It has been a century since horses have been freed from being beasts of burden and engines of transportation. Today horses are recreational, and help us humans recreate ourselves. The same is true for sailboats, which became obsolete about the same time horses did. And in our present age, the same evolution is happening for paper.
Leave the heavy production to computers with their ultra-high resolution, touch-sensitive screens. But for recreating ourselves, paper—humble, glorious, quiet paper—is waiting for us to come home.
Steve writes more about the value of paper in the virtual age in his book, Holding Dear: The Value of the Real.
