PASADENA, Calif.–New research might have you reconsidering that old school pen and paper if you want to remember more of your notes, a new report has found.
Writing on Inc.com, James Sudakow, author of “Out of the Blur: A Delirious Dad’s Search for the Holy Grail of Work-Life Balance,” noted that technology plays a critical role in how everyone works, and yet he had a recent experience that he said “has me rethinking how quickly I completely abandon old methods. It also turns out there's science behind it.”
“The other day, I led a long, full day meeting with an executive team. The meeting went great, the team made a lot of important decisions, and there were lots of next steps I had noted diligently in my notebook,” wrote Sudakow. “Then after 12 hours of hard work, I got in the car to drive home only to forget that I had left my notebook on top of the car with the banana I was so excited to eat. I looked in my rear view mirror in a panic as the notebook flew off the car on a crowded major highway.
“Feeling like I was in a bad TV commercial, I pulled over immediately and tried to remember the notes I had taken. To my surprise, I remembered almost everything,” Sudakow continued.
Sudakow said what he discovered is that his ability to remember all of that information might have simply been because he took the notes with a pen and paper instead of using my laptop.
It’s not crazy, he added, noting recent research studies have found that my situation isn't unique.
The Research
The research was conducted with college students. Some were allowed to take notes during a lecture on a laptop and others had to go old school and write with a pen, Sudakow shared.
“Surprisingly, the students who took notes with pen and paper remembered far more than their peers who had a laptop,” he wrote. “In addition, in a follow up scenario, both sets of students were allowed to go back to their notes and use them as cheat sheets when asked to talk about the key points from the lecture. In this case also, the students who wrote notes with pen and paper did better.
“First and most obviously, those with laptops were tempted to do other things on the computer which simply wasn't an option for the pen and paper group. By default, the pen and paper crowd was listening more intently to the lecture,” Sudakow continued. “In addition, there was a surprising correlation between how much the students wrote down and how much they remembered, and it was the reverse of what you might think.”
The ‘Key Part’
According to Sudakow, the laptop group had much more detailed notes, while the pen and paper group wrote down far less but had to think about what they were choosing to write.
“It turns out that act of thinking about what was being written was a key part of the way the information got absorbed better into their brains.”