The Power of Handwriting: Embracing Slowness in a Digital World

In a world of endless tabs, blinking cursors, and distraction-driven design, writing on paper feels like a deliberate act of resistance. It’s slow. It’s tactile. It offers no shortcuts, no notifications, and no undo button. And yet, as a researcher, I find myself turning to pen and paper more and more often, especially when I need to think.

The slowness of handwriting is often viewed as a limitation, especially in tech-centric environments where speed is a virtue. But for me, that very slowness is its greatest gift. When I write by hand, I have to choose my words more carefully. I become aware of the shape of my thoughts, not just their content. Ideas don’t just appear—they unfold. They wander. They breathe.

Handwriting your thoughts lets you be free to place them on the page however you like. You do not have to follow strict guidelines, you do not have a structure, and you do not have limited support for a specific format. You can do whatever you want with your pen. For example, in this scan from my research notebook (a cheap Moleskine knockoff), I mixed prose, lists, and diagrams effortlessly. By refining what was written on these pages, I was able to write an open-access article published in Multimedia Tools and Applications.

There is also a kind of humility in writing by hand. You make mistakes. You cross things out. You can’t effortlessly delete an entire paragraph and start over. The page becomes a record of your thinking, with all its false starts and messy in-betweens. And that messiness matters. Research isn’t linear. Neither is thinking. The analog page embraces that.

Of course, paper is not perfect. Eventually, I digitize, I draft in markdown, I code, and I collaborate online. But those are later stages. The beginning—the unfiltered and uncertain beginning—still belongs to paper.

I write on paper because it gives me space to not know. It allows thoughts to simmer instead of sprint. I understood that thinking and creativity are not races, and the best insights often arrive when I stop trying to be efficient.

So, no: handwriting hasn’t become obsolete in my workflow. It has become essential.

And maybe, in choosing slowness over speed, paper over screen, I’m not just holding onto an old habit… I’m protecting my way of thinking that the digital world keeps trying to optimize out of existence.

A Small Note: Bringing Slowness to My Digital Workflow

As a small and quick note, I want to touch on how I am trying to bring the slowness of paper to my digital workflow. In the last period, I have been trying to write mostly in plain text. I do this in two different ways:

1. At an initial stage, when my writing is still in a rough draft, I use just plain text to avoid any kind of distraction from styling. Do we actually need to wonder whether a section of text should be in bold, in italic, or in other formats? For this reason, if I use this workflow, at this point in time I only use plain text—not even Markdown. Basically, my computer becomes a glorified typewriter (as a confession, I wanted to try buying and working on a typewriter, but sooner or later we have to face the fact that we live in a digital world that needs all documents in digital, and I am too lazy to just rewrite everything).
2. I try to use distraction-free editors. In this latest period, perhaps out of habit from my system admin days, I use Vim. This allows me to write with nothing on the screen other than my text (sometimes I employ the Gojo plugin for this purpose). I full-screen the editor and I just write.

A Disclaimer

This blog post does not aim to be a guide or to attack digitalization. I am a computer scientist: my job exists thanks to digitalization. This blog post just wants to present how I cope with my general lack of attention and my tendency to search for distractions, while being creative and productive, while still “feeling good” while accomplishing a task.