BARRY COLLINS
Zoom and Teams aren’t the only products to have proven their pandemic value in the Collins office
Zoom and Microsoft Teams aren’t the only products to have had a strong lockdown in the Collins office: there’s a surprising new (well, old) addition.
As clever as they are, Todoist, Trello and Google Calendar just aren’t as easy to check at a glance as a sheet of paper
The two-second delay while you wait for Face ID to kick in is enough to make me forget what I was going to write down in the first place
Around a year ago, I bought a Mac, and its clean lines and immaculate styling prompted me to implement a tidy-desk policy in my home office. Not only did I clear all of the clutter from the desk itself, but every night before logging off I’d make sure there were no downloads or other files littering the desktop. For the first time in my 20-odd years of journalism, you could walk near my desk without fear of triggering an avalanche.
A hat-trick of lockdowns, however, has seen a slight relaxation of my tidy-desk regime. Nowadays, there are two indispensable items that I permit myself to keep to the right of my Mac at all times: a pen and sheet of paper.
The well-chewed Biro and notepad had fallen by the wayside at Media BC headquarters in recent years. Notes were taken in OneNote; to-dos were logged in Todoist; interviews were largely recorded rather than relying on my ropey shorthand, then brilliantly transcribed by Otter.ai; even the pages of this magazine were proofed using an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil rather than printed out and daubed on by hand. Pen and paper saw about as much frontline service as Prince Charles.
Gradually, however, I’ve found myself reaching for pen and paper again. Why? The first lockdown – the one where this was all something of a culture shock and I was suddenly thrust into the role of supply teacher – required unprecedented levels of day planning. Previously, I could normally blunder through my to-do list in some semblance of priority order, but now there was a whole raft of additional duties being added to the inbox.
For the first time, I found I needed to plot exactly what needed to be done each day on a hand-drawn planner scribbled on a piece of A4, just to make sure I didn’t reach 9pm and find that I’d forgotten to edit a feature, submit my VAT return or give the kids lunch.
As clever and integrated and as cross-platform as they all are,
Todoist, Trello and Google Calendar just aren’t as easy to check at a glance as a sheet of paper next to my laptop. If I need to remind myself to send an invoice on Friday, I can scribble it down in two seconds: there’s no awkward scroll menus to set the due date, no prompt to set a reminder, no hashtag required to put into one of 12 different categories. I haven’t got time for that any more: Joe Wicks starts in half an hour and I’ve still got to work out what a “fronted adverbial” is.
With my focus constantly interrupted by homeschoolers trying to print off the whole of Wikipedia or practise their GCSE dissection skills on the dog, I’ve also found it increasingly necessary to print off my own work and then mark corrections with pen in hand.
And pen and paper have become vital accessories for one of lockdown’s tech essentials: Zoom meetings. I can’t clatter away on my keyboard when I’m taking notes on a virtual press briefing, because I type so thunderously that it sounds like a one-man band being thrown down a fire escape to the poor sods on the other end of the line. I’ve tried muting myself when not speaking, but then I forget to unmute and have to sit there while the folk on the other end do that fingers-in-ears charade to indicate that they can’t hear me. It’s far easier to scribble silently on a piece of paper instead, and just hope I can make sense of my increasingly erratic hieroglyphs once the meeting is over.
So I guess my point here is that no matter how sensitive Apple makes its Pencil or Samsung makes its S Pen, they’ll never match the immediacy of pen and paper.
Even though both styluses are fine for jotting notes (although you’re out of your overpaid minds if you think I’m using the Apple Pencil to enter URLs, Apple), you can’t leave tablets on all the time next to your laptop to give you a shuddering reminder of all the things you still haven’t done today. The two-second delay while you wait for Face ID to kick in or whip the phablet out of your pocket is enough to make me forget what I was going to write down in the first place. Ink and paper is, dear magazine reader, better in every sense.
Little wonder, then, that I find print-at-home daily/weekly planner sheets selling online for £20 or £30 a pop. And that’s just for the PDF download! I think it’s time I considered a career change. I must make a note of that…