I’m a writer, and the habit that improved my work the most this year wasn’t an app — it was writing by hand in a cheap spiral notebook

by Lachlan Brown | April 20, 2026, 1:23 pm

For most of the past decade, I treated notebooks as something to scribble in when my laptop battery died. Real work, I told myself, happened on a screen. Words per minute mattered. Cmd-Z mattered. The notebook was for shopping lists and the occasional reminder.

Then around the start of this year I tried something different. I bought a cheap spiral notebook, the kind with slightly rough paper and a cover that was already half falling off, and I started doing my morning writing in it. Not journaling. Actual work writing. Article ideas, rough drafts, problems I was stuck on.

I expected it to feel slow and frustrating. It did, for about a week.

Then something shifted. My ideas got sharper. I started catching half-formed thoughts I would have lost in the rapid clatter of typing. I started actually thinking on the page instead of performing for an invisible audience.

Almost a year later, I’d say it’s the single biggest improvement to my creative process. And it turns out I’m late to this. The science on what handwriting does to your brain is, frankly, more interesting than I expected.

The research is more striking than I expected

I have a psychology background, so when I started reading the research on this, I was a little embarrassed I hadn’t taken it seriously sooner.

One well-cited study is from 2014. Two researchers, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, ran a series of experiments comparing students who took notes by hand to students who took them on laptops. The laptop group wrote down more words. They captured more of what was said. By the obvious metrics they were doing better.

Then the researchers tested what the students actually understood. The longhand group did significantly better on conceptual questions. The laptop students were getting a transcript. The handwriters were getting an education.

More recently, two neuroscientists at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Audrey van der Meer and Ruud van der Weel, used a high-density EEG cap with 256 sensors to look at what was actually happening inside the brain during handwriting versus typewriting. Their study, published in Frontiers in Psychology in early 2024, came to a striking conclusion.

In their words: “When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard.”

And those connectivity patterns, they noted, are “crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning.”

When you write by hand, you’re doing something that looks much more like thinking. When you type, you’re often doing something closer to dictation.

Why slowness turned out to be the point

In Buddhist philosophy there’s an idea I keep coming back to: the way you do something is what you’re actually doing. The form is the content.

I’ve talked about this before but the principle applies way beyond meditation. When I type fast, I’m rewarding myself for output. The dopamine hit is the rising word count. The form, the rapid clack and the satisfying delete key, is what I’m actually practicing. Not thinking. Producing.

When I write by hand, the form is slower than my brain. I have to commit. There’s no Cmd-Z. If I cross something out, the cross-out stays on the page. The whole physical act forces me to think before the pen touches the paper.

I’d assumed that was a bug. It turned out to be the entire feature.

The slowness gives ideas time to actually form. Half-baked thoughts that would have been deleted instantly in a typed draft survive long enough on the page for me to look at them and go, “wait, that’s actually the interesting part.”

There’s also something about the lack of an audience. A blank Google doc has a kind of latent professionalism to it. The cursor blinks at you like a tiny manager. A spiral notebook does not care what you write. Nothing is being saved to a cloud. Nothing is being graded. You’re just thinking, in private, with your hand.

What changed in my actual work

A few practical shifts I’ve noticed over the past year.

My intros got better. When I draft an opening by hand first, I find the angle faster. There’s no temptation to start typing whatever generic sentence comes first just to fill the blank screen and feel productive.

I stopped losing ideas. There’s a specific kind of half-thought that drops in while you’re walking, or sitting with a coffee, or watching the traffic, that vanishes the moment you sit at a laptop, because the laptop demands a polished version. The notebook accepts the half-thought. I capture more of them.

My editing got more ruthless. Translating notebook scrawl into a typed document is itself an editing pass. Anything that doesn’t earn its place doesn’t make the transition. By the time I’m typing, I’ve already cut maybe a third.

And my thinking outside of writing got sharper too. There’s something about training your hand to keep up with your thoughts that bleeds into the rest of your day. Conversations feel more focused. I notice things I would have missed.

What this might look like for you

You don’t need a fancy notebook. Mine cost about a dollar. You don’t need a fancy pen. Anything that doesn’t smudge will do. 

What I’d suggest, if you want to test this for yourself, is a small commitment. One page a day. First thing in the morning, before email, before your phone, before anyone in your house needs anything from you.

Don’t try to write anything good. Don’t try to be profound. Just put the pen on the page and let your hand keep moving for a page.

For me this looks like sitting down with a strong black coffee, opening the notebook, and writing whatever comes for about ten minutes. Sometimes it’s article ideas. Sometimes it’s me working through a problem with the business. Sometimes it’s just rambling about whatever is bothering me. None of it is meant to be read.

The point isn’t the output. The point is the practice.

After a few weeks you’ll notice your typed work getting cleaner. Your thinking getting more specific. Your ideas showing up earlier in the day instead of arriving at midnight when you can’t do anything about them.

Final words

We’re all looking for the next app, the next system, the next productivity hack that will finally sort our brains out. I’ve tried most of them. I’m typing the final version of this from a laptop with about a dozen apps open right now that I genuinely use and like.

But the thing that actually moved the needle for my work this year was something humans had been doing for a few thousand years before software existed.

A piece of paper. A pen. A few quiet minutes.

Try it for a week. If it doesn’t change anything, you’ve lost a few minutes of your morning and a dollar on a notebook. If it does, you’ve got a tool that doesn’t need a subscription, doesn’t ping you, doesn’t run out of battery, and might just teach you what your own mind has been trying to say all along.

Lachlan Brown

Lachlan Brown is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Brown Brothers Media, a digital publishing network reaching tens of millions of readers monthly. He holds a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies from Deakin University, though his real education came afterward: a warehouse job shifting TVs, a stretch of anxiety in his mid-twenties, and the slow discovery that studying the mind is not the same as learning how to live well. He started experimenting with Buddhist principles during breaks at the warehouse and eventually began writing about what he was learning. That writing became Hack Spirit, a widely read personal development site, and his book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism became a bestseller. His work breaks down complex ideas into frameworks people can apply immediately, whether they are navigating a career change, a difficult relationship, or the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Lachlan splits his time between Singapore and Saigon. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, digital innovation, and the intersection of Eastern philosophy with modern life. His perspective comes from having built things from scratch, failed at some of them, and learned that clarity comes from practice, not theory.