[beat]

Paper is my favorite programming tool. The beauty of paper is that it's easy to find out when you're wrong, when you're pursuing the wrong path, without going deeply in and getting distracted by the small-scale details of the code.

This gets right back to the design thing.

[jschwartzi]

To put it another way, it's far less time-consuming to edit a Word document than it is to update an entire production system.

[beat]

No, I need to get away from the computer completely. Word docs (or any other computer typing) is still bound by the computer structure and the computer distractions.

With paper, I can draw graphs of relationships, write tables, add notes to things I drew earlier, etc. It's far more expressive, and far faster, than any computer tool I've tried.