Over the past couple weeks I have moved nearly all of my important/intentional work to paper.  I began to notice nearly a year ago that my writing flowed much more fluidly on paper, as compared to the computer screen.  Since then I have become increasingly aware of all the subtle ways that the screen distracts my thinking.  (As I write this I am working in a tiny G+ text window with a huge youtube embed just below, at least 20 faces [avatars] on screen in various places, dozens of icons of various sorts, etc, etc, etc).

The larger problem is that writing on the screen strips away context by its very nature.  Every word is printed in the same format.  There is no detritus to indicate that I have scratched out and replaced a particular word five times already.  There are no margins in which to leave notes for myself about what I had intended for a particular poorly structured sentence in need of revision.  

There is a finality to writing on screen that derives from the cleanliness of the interface.  When I write on screen I find myself spending more time searching through thesaurus.com than actually composing ideas.  I worry that if I don't express a particular idea correctly the first time, I will fail to notice it during subsequent revisions.  I have tried using various formatting tricks and annotations but such solutions are far more distracting than the equivalent behavior on paper. 

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Many of the same insights apply to general productivity.  Over the past several years I have experimented with all variety of digital To Do lists, bookmark archives, and numerous other organization/productivity/focus applications.  All have been enormous failures.  The only ones I have continued to use are those that allow me effortlessly capture articles or screenshots (evernote, read it later).  However, particularly in the case of evernote, I rarely ever return to these items in a systematic way.  They basically just allow me to purge things from short term memory that I don't yet know what to do with, without worrying that they are lost forever.
  
Moreover, decontextualized lists in general have almost no motivational impact on me.  I put things on lists, then looks at them later...think to myself, "Yeah I should probably do that stuff"...then I shrug it off and do something else.  The words on the page are too distantly removed from the seat of intrinsic motivation that might actually compel me to take on the task.

I have had dramatically more success as I have moved all this processing over to paper, which has allowed the flexibility to narrate my intentions (To Do's) in full sentences.  The process of narration calls upon both the explicit (what I intend to do) and the implicit (why and how I intend to it).  Tasks only move to a list format after they pass through this self-discussion and I determine that I am actually motivated to complete them.

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In the past it bothered me that analog records would be lost...that they would never be transcribed into digital format and therefore would likely be lost, destroyed, or otherwise remain unreferenced in the future.  Recently I have accepted that archiving for future reference is besides the point.

Any worthwhile material that emerges from analog writing will eventually be incorporated into a blog post or other digital artifact.  The final, high quality product will be available for future reference.  The rest of it is just intermediate cognitive processing.  It is the noise produced along the way.  It doesn't need to be saved for future reference.  The noise is not supposed to be neat and clean and searchable.  It simply needs to be externalized so it can be sifted for diamonds.

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I am curious whether other people have converged on similar conclusions...