Mind likes to run in circles with scissors at both hands and hurt itself while trying to think fast. Teaching it to walk slowly results in clearer and more refined results.
As why go in circles in own head when I can be moving forward with keyboard.
Life is same everywhere. It makes the same trade-offs. Fast growing plants have less mass, they are less dense, and if they are edible, they're less delicious and nutritious.
However, hard woods, strong plants and nutritiously dense foods grow slowly. It's the same for ideas, and human mind.
When you let your brain draw circles on an idea, you start to prune its illogical parts. When you put a speed limiter with a pen, you force your brain to reconsider what it just said to you, and as a result, you get better, more refined ideas in less time actually.
I have written elsewhere. I design my programs, their architecture and algorithms on paper, with a fountain pen. I keep lab notebooks. This allows me to refine everything before hitting my first key on the keyboard. I iterate less, produce more. The algorithms I design come out already refined to a certain degree, and when combined with architectural knowledge, their first iteration come out performant and efficient.
Let me ask you the same question:
Why bang my hands and head to a keyboard while trying to solve a problem while I can solve it with a cup of tea, a nice pen and paper and create elegant code in one go and enjoy all parts of the process, and spend less time as a result?
I suspect you made that up. Mint grows fast and tastes great. Watermelon grows super fast and tastes super great. And plenty of slow growing plants are plain inedible.
It is not even clear what you mean by "nutritious dense". But, my family used to grow both vegetables, fruits and even potatoes/herbs. Speed of growing and how nutritious or tasty they are does not seem all that much correlated to me.
> When you let your brain draw circles on an idea, you start to prune its illogical parts.
You will prune them even gaster and more reliably when you see own thoughts written.
I find it's beneficial for my memory, concentration and general brain fitness. Also, as a result, I write less code. What I write lands closer to optimal for the case at hand, so I debug and tune less.
All in all I enjoy designing software more and write better software at the end . Win-win.
Plus, fountain pens are nice.
Having all of the former pages on hand, made it so that I could cross-reference a current idea with one I'd already been sketching on some days or weeks back. I could see that I wanted to use the same card in 3 places, and then force myself to consider which one to put it in. I could sit and stare at something I'd written, and turn it over in my head, take a sip of my beer, and contemplate, "What are the motivations of this fictional character?"
I'd forced myself to start thinking more long-term. I ran a Pilot g2 down to about 1mm of ink remaining, filled the whole notebook out, got a new one.
It's a notebook with nothing important or classified, I regularly allow friends and family to scribble a page here and there, and have torn out a few bits to use as a kindling for a firepit with a faulty igniter.
But I still make time for writing by hand. I find it to be very valuable, because it forces me to think differently about things and sit with ideas longer. I also find journaling almost impossible to do on a computer but very accessible in a notebook.
Writing by hand is also portable and adaptable. You can write on paper, surfaces, and signs. You can write when there's no power. No subscription is required, it doesn't require firmware updates, and it never has connectivity problems.
I can understand why some people would be willing to say goodbye to handwriting, but it's a skill that I'm extremely grateful for and I would be very sad to see it disappear from the world.