RedBooks were most of the work we had done for a specific client printed out in tabloid size bound into a spiral back book and put on a large shelf system.
We also had a matriculate digital folder system with projects, searchable and the same pages as PDF plus much more accessible from your computer.
Guess which one we used the most?
With the RedBooks it was very easy to pull out the book and look through it for inspiration, talk about how we did this or that and so on and with the book we only put in the things that where somehow relevant.
The computer folders on the other hand had everything because, yeah well why not. But what they had in quantity it lacked in human relatable tangibility.
Computers are great when the amount of information become so waste that it's impossible to manually search through it all or if you need to share a lot of your things with other people.
It turns out that for all the great things computers can help us do it still haven't solved tangibility.
I say this as someone that is trying to use a physical notebook more & better, and looking for good organisational/notekeeping schemes.
A book is usually open in front of me with a pen at the ready. An application.. well it depends, but best-case scenario is that it's in a easy-to-switch-to window and is natural to just get the idea down without jumping through hoops.
As an aside from a sufferer of ADHD, I think Augmented Reality tech would be a killer platform for an in-place TODO/Note/Reminder/assistant.
I would agree with what you've said to a point, but this kind of statement needs expanding.
For my wife and I, we're using Wunderlist (bought my Microsoft in 2015) and we can assign things to each other, star them as important, comment on tasks, leaves notes, set reminders, and so on. It's a... wunderful (har! har!) app and so far it's UI doesn't get in the way. I'm just waiting for the moment we hit the limitations of the free version and have to spend nearly AUD$130/user/year (USD -> AUD) to maintain its place in our household.
Platform issues and friction is far too high. Even just loading up the browser, or context switching to a different tab. Plus... if your work is of mathematical nature, it's an added headache.
It's amazing how well organized you can be when you keep track of stuff better.
Another thing I've done is started keeping a sort of checklist/timeline for morning, mid-day, and end of day to make developing habits easier as well as just keeping up on to-do stuff. One of the most useful things has been to add some elements from things like this, which is a significant quality of life boost: http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2016/02/evening-ritual
Also, journals are great for facilitating things like CBT for anxiety, depression, ADHD, etc.
there's something satisfying about physically crossing off a list when a pen after spending 10+hrs typing
My solution is a dynamic todo called myTinyTodo [1], a very simple app where I can sort stuff by project, deadline, importance, etc.
Committing to do a thing in a given time period should be kind of a big deal. If you don't need to commit to a thing in a specific time, then just leave it in a more general master list (e.g. monthly, or generic) and commit to it when you have the time.
Everything without built-in three letter agency spying... I use Moleskine.
However for work I like Asana. Paper would be too impractical...
The trick that I made work is to have two to-do lists: daily and quarterly.
For daily, it's simple. I have a variation of the Bullet Journal [1], but interleaved with meeting notes, ideas, etc.
But many ideas are bigger than what you can accomplish/benchmark on a daily basis. For those, I have two pages per quarter that I fill with "quarterly goals". I try to keep the list under 20-30 items and keep them high-level. Every week, I look at the same two pages and make sure that I am making progress toward them. If not, I go back to my daily notes and see if I worked on the right stuff the previous week. This is a variation on the idea that I stole from Aaron Levie [2].
For me, the tactile/tangible nature of paper note-taking, as well as its flexibility in formatting, has been incredibly useful.
[1] http://bulletjournal.com/
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3021586/most-productive-people-b...