Back in 2012, as a young assistant professor, I traveled to Berkeley to attend a wedding. On the first morning after we arrived, my wife had a conference call, so I decided to wander the nearby university campus to work on a vexing theory problem my collaborators and I had taken to calling “The Beast.”
I remember what happened next because I wrote an essay about the experience. The tale starts slow:
“It was early, and the fog was just starting its march down the Berkeley hills. I eventually wandered into an eucalyptus grove. Once there, I sipped my coffee and thought.”
I eventually come across an interesting new technique to circumvent a key mathematical obstacle thrown up by The Beast. But this hard-won progress soon presented a new issue:
“I realized… that there’s a limit to the depth you can reach when keeping an idea only in your mind. Looking to get the most out of my new insights, and inspired by my recent commitment to the textbook method, I trekked over to a nearby CVS and bought a 6×9 stenographer’s notebook…I then forced myself to write out my thoughts more formally. This combination of pen and paper notes with the exotic context in which I was working ushered in new layers of understanding.”
I even included a nostalgically low-resolution photo of these notes:
More than a decade later, I can’t remember exactly which academic paper I was working on in that eucalyptus grove, but based on some clues from the photo above, I’m pretty sure it was this one, which was published the following year and received a solid 65 citations.
I revisited this essay on my podcast this week. The activity it captured seemed a strong rebuke to the current vision of a fast-paced, digitized, AI-dominated workplace that Silicon Valley keeps insisting we must all embrace.
There’s a deeply human satisfaction to retreating to an exotic location and wrestling with your own mind, scratching a record of your battle on paper. The innovations and insights produced by this long thinking are deeper and more subversive than the artificially cheery bullet points of a chatbot.
The problem facing knowledge work in our current moment is not that we’re lacking sufficiently powerful technologies. It’s instead that we’re already distracted by so many digital tools that there’s no time left to really open the throttle on our brains.
And this is a shame.
Few satisfactions are more uniquely human than the slow extraction of new understanding, illuminated through the steady attention of your mind’s eye.
So, grab a notebook and head somewhere scenic to work on a hard problem. Give yourself enough time, and the enthusiastic clamor about a world of AI agents and super-charged productivity will dissipate to a quiet hum.
The post Forget Chatbots. You Need a Notebook. appeared first on Cal Newport.
