The One Drawback of Going All Digital
For productivity and collaboration, using digital tools to jot down notes is great. But there's one thing that will surely suffer.
About a year ago, I gave up my trusty paper notebook. I never thought I could. It was a great little notebook and I loved it. But I started to use a digital note-taking tool, Evernote, and my team likes to put collaborative documents in Google Docs, Basecamp and 5pm. All of these tools are really amazing and make for an easy way to jot down ideas and have "virtual" meetings, but I always wondered how people could give up their pens for pixels.
But it has happened. ALL my thoughts and notes are now digital, be it business or personal!
Notes during meetings can be typed right on my phone and will automatically sync to my computer. I can easily share them with other people, too, and they can then add their comments directly in the document.
I can start a document with my team about what I want to discuss in our next meeting, so everyone is prepared.
I can clip or take pics of recipes, and automatically have my shopping list on my phone while I'm at the store. I even save my workout routines to Evernote, so that they're right there on my phone when I'm at the gym.
And the list goes on. All good (albeit, maybe a little anal retentive), right?
For productivity, it's great! There is one bummer in the whole "going digital" thing, though.
My handwriting now sucks.
I'm so out of practice it's now a problem! The pen in my hand feels weird if I'm doing more than adding my signature to something. My hand hurts every time I write anniversary notes to my team members for each year they work at my email marketing software company, VerticalResponse. And it's pretty embarrassing whenever I go up to a whiteboard.
I've completely lost the ability to have nice and neat cursive writing like I used to.
Help! Are you in the same boat? What do you do?
Did you enjoy this post? If so, sign up for the free VR Buzz weekly newsletter and check out the VerticalResponse Marketing Blog.
