[vasco]

I still do it and it has worked for me from being an individual contributor, to leading a team, to leading a part of the org that has a tree of ~50 people across multiple contexts.

The way I see it, if you know the best way to retain information, why would you stop using it. I note down almost everything during meetings, 1-1s, agile rituals, etc. Very rarely I move things to a computer, most things I just need to write down even if I never read them again, others I re-read, others are to-dos. No organization, just a flow of braindump, and lots of little drawings everywhere and arrows connecting things and so on. If you'd read it you'd not understand anything, both because the handwriting is atrocious and because there's practically no structure.

[smeej]

> if you know the best way to retain information, why would you stop using it.

Because I can type something like 10x as fast as I can write by hand (I'm both extremely fast at typing and fairly slow at writing), but the recall benefit is not 10x.

I can recall anything I hear or see well enough that I'm not looking at double-digit multiples of effectiveness for any method over nothing, much less between methods.

The sheer volume of things I can take down typing with 9 fingers on a keyboard vs. writing with one pen outweighs any day-to-day advantage of how much better I would be able to recall the few things I would have the time to write down.

[sevensor]

Likewise. Same reasons, same process, and I've found it just as helpful in middle management as I did when I was an individual contributor.

There's an additional benefit. This is the reason I started doing it in the first place: many years ago, as a junior engineer, I was obliged to spend long hours in daily meetings. I found that the only way I could avoid actually falling asleep was to take detailed, copious notes. It was only afterwards that I discovered I was retaining information better and forming a big-picture view of the work. Also, what took me another decade to discover, is that nice stationery -- which for me means a fountain pen and a good notebook -- can make this a positive pleasure.

[randomdata]

> if you know the best way to retain information, why would you stop using it.

I wonder that myself. Earlier in my career, when the internet wasn't so great, we had to rely on textual communication for everything. This left the ideal 'paper' trail to look back on for reference. Everything well communicated, everything perfectly retained. It was unbelievably efficient.

Now that the technology has improved, easily transmitting voice and even video, there is a curious push in that direction. Communication quality has declined dramatically as you now have to suffer through a bumbling stream of consciousness instead of words someone put effort into writing, which adds significantly more human time involvement to get a point across, and once spoken the information is automatically lost save even more human best effort to retain what can and never perfectly so.

I likely shiny newfangled tech as much as the next guy, but there's a time and a place. Why we stopped using what worked best boggles the mind.