What digital makes worse than analog — personal growth/productivity/knowledge management edition

  1. Tendency to over-capture and auto-capture. Less likely to ever revisit, less likely to even remember that you captured something.
  2. Tendency for things to get lost – easy to proliferate repositories of stuff.
  3. Tendency to use tools like AI to over-produce and under-think.
  4. Tendency towards text (as that’s what keyboards do) – analog systems make it really easy to break out into sketching. Lack of photos/videos in analog systems forces description rather than mere replication. A poorer attempt at description (written or sketched) nevertheless cements our memory of the thing (see e.g. Sönke Ahrens) and our reaction to it, better than simply pasting or embedding the thing.
  5. Tendency towards distraction – easy to go down a research rabbit hole, which becomes a YouTube rabbit hole.