Combining Analog and Digital

There is a gentleman by the name of Steven Johnson.  He is the author multiple books, the creator of multiple companies and the father of multiple kids.  (Seriously, that is how he describes himself.)  He wrote on a website called Medium about something called a Spark File.  Created by one of the originators of the Blogger platform, Ev Williams thought that there had to be a better way to communicate and share ideas than Blogger, so he created Medium.

When Steven gets an idea about something, he jots it down in his Spark file.  Every few months he goes through every single entry in his Spark File and sees if there are additional connections or additional information that has subsequently come to light to make the ideas more full bodied.  While the idea of a Spark File is important to understand, I immediately gravitated towards the tools that he talked about:  Evernote and Moleskine.

For those that aren't aware, Evernote is a tool that allows you to share "notes" amongst the various platforms you may be using.  For instance, I have it running on my Windows machine at home, my Mac machine at home, my iPhone and my iPad.  All of these are kept in sync so that a note that I create on one platform is available on all of my devices. The other tool is, quite simply, nothing more than a notebook:  Moleskine.  It is one of the more popular notebooks because of the high quality binding, the elastic to make sure the book stays closed and the cloth bookmark built in.  People use them to jot down ideas and collect their thoughts.  Combined they make a tremendous tool to help prevent you from losing ideas.  (P.S. Never pay retail for the Evernot Smart Notebook by Moleskine.  Buy it from Amazon.)

The idea that really seems to work for me is actually the combination of analog and digital.  Yes, we live in a digital world but many of us are more comfortable writing a couple of lines in a notebook than bringing out the phone/tablet, bringing up the correct app and then typing in the idea.  For those old timers out there, did you ever wonder why your teacher wrote chalkboard (yes, I am that old) after chalkboard of notes and had you copy them down?  Study after study has shown that if you are forced to write something down the effort of memorizing, even just for a few seconds, and transcribing that information is more likely to make you remember it than just reading the information.  (That is why us old people have minds filled with useless information, like the different speeds of a record player and heck, even what a record player is.)

The combination of analog and digital, notebook and virtual notebook, is what is appealing to me.  Human beings are not digital by nature as we have fingers and toes instead of USB keys and HDMI ports, so, to me at least, that blend of old and new is where I think some of the best ideas will come from.  So, when we think of solutions for our clients, don't necessarily think of analog or digital, think of combing them to see what sort of solutions you can come up with.