Transcription
It would be a gross oversimplification to say that the only difference between digital and paper planning is personal preference. As a behavioral scientist who's obsessed with organized, come and sustainable productivity, I became slightly obsessed with looking into the science of what to plan and organize digitally and what to plan and organize on paper.
If we've never met before, hi, my name is Dr. Jamie. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist and in this video we're going to do a super deep dive into the differences of using a digital planning and personal organization system compared to a paper planning system. We're going to take a nerdy dive into the research and I'm going to show you why I personally use a hybrid system based on dozens of behavioral science studies done on the subject. But don't worry, I'm going to break it all down for you on this master class on the topic. This is the only video you'll ever have to watch on the differences between digital and paper planning. And by the end of this video, you'll totally know what you should be doing using what medium.
I've been offline for a moment because I have been dealing with a nasty cold. I apologize if I still sound a little sick, but feel free to grab a coffee, a tea, a snack, and let's jump on in. All right, let's start with the bottom line up front. There are no randomized control trials or behavioral science studies looking at the difference between a notion dashboard and a bullet journal system. There are studies looking at the difference between using digital or paper systems for parts of planning and personal organization and decades of research looking at the different components of planning. So let's start off with defining what I mean by personal planning or life organization. We can break personal planning down into its psychological components. If you did that, it might look something like this.
One component of what we do in planning is looking at the big life strategy. So that's things like understanding your core values, understanding what season of life you're in, what's important to you right now. This big picture strategy can also involve things like long-term planning. Things like five or 10 year plans or the vision that you have for your life.
Another part of personal planning is goal setting and working toward goal attainment. That's things like how do you decide on what goals you're going to be pursuing? How do you maintain accountability and take consistent action toward those goals? And things like general follow-through. I'm going to call this goal setting and attainment.
Finally, planning might involve some sort of personal life organization system. That's things like capturing things within an inbox. How are you managing your tasks? How are you managing your events or your calendar? And how are you managing additional information? Things like resources or things that you have to sort maybe for use later.
Let's start with big picture strategy. That's things like figuring out where your current value systems are, what your core beliefs are, things like your major life vision. This kind of thinking and planning involves engaging multiple brain systems. You have to think about the memories that you had in the past and translating those experiences into wisdom moving into the future. You're also considering your emotions in your current state and thinking about how you feel about where you are right now. It also involves things like logic and reason centers of the brain when you're trying to think through what can you logistically handle moving forward.
In a famous study done in 2014 called the pen is mightier than the keyboard, researchers compared students taking notes on laptops to students taking notes on paper. They found that laptop users recorded more information because we're simply faster at typing things out. But students who wrote by hand were better at understanding big picture concepts. And the study highlighted two important things. First, we type faster than we even think. We're not necessarily processing the information when we're moving from listening to information or collecting information and then typing it out. In fact, the part of your brain that deals with straight transcription or copying is different than the part of your brain that's thinking about synthesizing information. Writing things by hand forces you to slow down, summarize, paraphrase, and synthesize the information. This concept is called desirable difficulty. And when we're talking about things like your life strategy, your values, your direction, and things like long-term meaning making, this is really a generative process that requires you to do that type of higher level synthesizing. So this type of big picture overall life strategy might be more effective if done on paper.
Another concept that's not talked about as frequently in this planner productivity space is a concept of context-specific learning. That's this phenomenon we see that information learned in a specific physical or spatial context is more readily remembered or recalled within that specific physical space. So if you develop your big picture strategy in a particular notebook, you're more likely to remember it when you open up this notebook again. The same isn't true for a computer. Most of us use our computers and our phones for almost everything. Work, YouTube, email, doom scrolling. So there's no strong connection between sitting at your computer or typing on your keyboard and your overall life strategy. That's why paper could be a really powerful strategy for anchoring you to your north star. If you're someone who tends to plan on paper, you can be reminded of that big picture strategy by coming back to the notebook over and over again.
We'll go through one more study looking at the differences between writing and typing at a neurological level. This study found that handwriting produced more complex and widespread brain connectivity when compared to typing, especially in regions linked to memory formation and integration. That means that writing things out might be better suited for the kind of reflective meaning making work required when you're deciding what really matters to you, what season of life you're in, and your general life direction. This study also provides scientific support for the next type of planning that we're going to be talking about which is goal setting and goal attainment. My coffee is not good today.
In the area of goal setting, we're going to look at three distinct psychological concepts that are known to be related to goal setting and more importantly goal attainment and what the science says about working through each of these processes on paper versus a digital format. We're going to start with identity based motivation theory. This is the theory that people tend to act in a way consistent with their identities or who they believe they are. This 2026 study found that people who are able to more vividly define and imagine their future self. So, how clearly can you picture that future version of you were more likely to achieve their goals? And this is where the benefits of paper planning versus digital planning start to get murky. See, things like vision boards that most people do digitally can help you further refine and visualize the goals that you're trying to attain, the person that you want to be or even the life that you want to be living. But the deeper processing and that internalization of who you actually believe yourself to be can be better done on paper. that sits at the intersection of cognitive psychology, social psychology, where people are deeply encoding their sense of self and who they are. So, this is the first time I'm going to recommend some sort of hybrid system. It might be really helpful for you, especially if you're a visual person, to start by looking at pictures or gathering up representations of who you want to be or the goal that you're trying to attain. But I don't think that should be done in isolation because going through the exercise of actually writing out what your particular goals are or who it is that you want to be moving forward can help you more deeply internalize or identify with that future version of you. And things like a vision board might be a good augment to help you refine that picture. The more I was thinking about this particular utility of visualizing your goals and your future self, the more I was getting nostalgic for the millennial vision board that people had up in their room. Maybe teenage Jamie was on to something because she clearly couldn't figure out how to get her hair under control. I think my hair is a 2000's throwback and this is a throwback reference.
All right. Right now, it seems like paper planners might be getting the win, but digital planners are about to come back because we're going to talk about two additional psychological strategies related to goal attainment. So, if you're planning your goals, it might be helpful to not completely throw away your digital apps just yet. The first one is this concept of implementation intentions. It was first described in 1997 and has been replicated in a variety of studies since then. This concept explains that we tend to be three times more likely to follow through on a specific action if we have a very specific plan on how we're going to execute that action. The original paper had a series of three experiments. in the first people who self- selected a difficult goal to accomplish over winter break and had a specific intention on how they were going to implement that fancy words of saying they had a specific plan for how they were going to get it done were more successful than people who didn't. In the second study, all of the participants were given the same goal and the people that had a specific plan for how to accomplish that task were more successful than those who didn't. Finally, in the third study, people that had prepared and had a specific plan were more readily able to take action, showing that planning helps to reduce some of that initial friction or barrier to action.
So, first let's state the obvious that it is better to plan than not to plan. But this is the key here where I think digital wins out when it comes to taking specific goal- directed action. It may be helpful for you to work your goals out on paper and even planning out how you're going to get there on paper. But a complete plan, the who, what, where, when, and why, many of those things might benefit from living in digital organization systems because several studies have found that the level of detail and specificity that you have in your plan further decreases the friction to take action. So things like a digital calendar might be the easiest way to capitalize on this science. Hear me out for a second. We already know the who. That's you. We already worked out the why on paper. Why it is that we're trying to attain this specific goal or why these actions are the important ones that'll contribute to us getting to our specific goal. But the what, where, and when, all of those variables could easily live in a digital calendar. Digital calendars allow you to add all sorts of rich context, things like the address, all of the relevant information that's going to help you get moving on a task or an action. And it also excels on the last psychological concept I'm going to touch on regarding goal directed actions.
When it comes to goal setting and goal attainment, sometimes the biggest barrier is just forgetting. The scientific evidence in psychology and in cognitive neuroscience suggests that forgetting or losing sight of a goal is a major, often overlooked barrier to actually reaching our goals. Usually, it's a lack of motivation or willpower that's blamed. But research shows that cognitive failures, things like memory lapses regarding our plans or intentions, are frequently the culprit. So, one common but totally addressable concern is how can we stop ourselves from simply forgetting what we said we were going to do? This study suggests that 50 to 70% of our everyday memory failures involve forgetting our intentions. Here's where digital planning and digital organization tools can start to win. Things like creating reminders in your calendar app or just reminder apps overall can help to address this normative human process of forgetting. When we do that, we're employing a psychological strategy called cognitive offloading. That's when we take a physical action or do something to reduce the burden on our brain power. In this case, we are asking an app to remember so our brain doesn't have to. This could be super beneficial in the area of goal planning and it's also really beneficial in this next area of personal life organization or more general life planning.
I think about this part of life planning or a general life organization system as consisting of five parts. And since I love to use acronyms on this channel, let's go with the acronym clear. An effective life organization system has some way of capturing all of the things that you need to do or all of the things that might need to come into your personal planning system. Then there should be a way of labeling or sorting everything that's coming in into these three buckets. events, things that require you to be at a specific time, at a specific place, actions or tasks that you need to complete, and finally a reference section, information that you might want to store for the short or long term. And really, when we're talking about a life organization system overall, we're talking about that cognitive offloading that we just discussed because an ideal system doesn't really require you to remember anything if it's working effectively.
If you're not completely convinced that cognitive offloading should be an essential component or at least an essential consideration when you're thinking about your personal planning, I would like to bring you back to the 1800s. One of the first recorded behavioral science studies conducted in 1885 by German psychologist Herman Ebinghouse systematically showed how memory fades over time. This produced what's commonly known as the forgetting curve. And when I first learned about this as an undergraduate was the first time I really felt seen because this person was in his home memorizing nonsensical syllables, systematically measuring himself and seeing how retention decreased over time. He didn't just do this once, he replicated it over and over again. I can't help but think we're related in some way. The point here is that forgetting is part of the human experience. Which is why I start off thinking about my personal organization systems as as really focusing on how to capture something quickly because we start forgetting things instantly. So I want my capture system to be quick and as seamless as possible. So which system is better for that quick capture, paper or digital?
There's actually a study on that conducted in 2021. The study was conducted at the University of Tokyo and found that people that use paper systems were 25% faster than those using digital systems. Let me break it down for you. They brought some students into the lab and they gave them a fictitious conversation between two characters. This included things like their plans for the next two months and included 14 different class times, assignment due dates, and personal appointments. Then they were asked to write down the fictitious schedule any way that they would usually write things down. So some people naturally use digital systems and some people naturally use paperbased systems. Now before you say there's probably innate differences in the people that used digital versus paper. They did start with an analysis of the two groups and they found that there were no significant demographic differences between the two. They recorded how much time it took the two groups to write down all of the details. And they found that people that naturally use paper systems were able to write down all of the different assignments and appointments in 11 minutes. Individuals that used tablets completed the task in about 14 minutes. And the slowest were the people that had their organization system in their phones. They took about 16 minutes to write all those things down. So, in terms of capturing the information, it could be quicker to capture things on paper.
Just so that I can finish off the study because I love reading studies through and if you're still here, you're my people, you might want to know some of the other findings that they had in the study. They waited an hour after they gave them all the information on this fictitious characters. And they found that people that use paper were also better able to recall and remember things like when assignments were due and even more complex questions like what assignment was due before another. Because this study was awesome, they also put them in fMRIs, which is a way of measuring brain activation in different regions. And they showed that greater generalized activation that we talked about at the beginning of this video where there was greater and more complex activation in individuals that were using paper systems. Specifically, more brain activities in areas associated with language, image visualization, and the hippocampus, which is an area known to be important for things like memory and navigation. This is likely related to other findings that we see in similar studies where the memory of certain events or pieces of information are related to different visual or spatial cues that we see more readily in paper planning formats. So when it comes to paper planning, we might also have increased memory, not just for where the thing was on the page, but we can also remember where it is in the book. And anyone that has used a notebook for long periods of time and has written down maybe a reference paper that they seem to come back to over and over again, you might find that you develop some muscle memory and you'll be able to go directly to the part of the book where that reference page is.
Now, before we completely dismiss a digital capture system, let's talk about how many people in the tech space are paid the big bucks to try to increase user experience or decrease friction in utilizing different apps. A common standard for user experience used to require that UX developers would try to decrease the amount of clicks that people had in a specific digital app. So they used to try to get it down to three clicks to have the optimal user experience, but that has fallen out of favor. And now people that are working on decreasing friction or trying to keep you on a specific app or trying to continue to hold your attention, they tend to focus on giving you the experience that you're getting closer to what you need. So, they focus on giving you feedback so that you keep clicking rather than trying to keep your clicks to under three. When I think about what this looks like in my own life, let's go ahead and hop into my iPhone. So, I have one click to actually tap my phone on. Then, I have to swipe it up. And even though I have notion in my homepage, I still need to swipe left to get to that homepage because I wasn't on my homepage before. I turned off the phone while I was on YouTube. And now I'm going to click into my notion inbox. And now I have the inbox and I have this set up so that I can touch a button for a new event, a new task, or a new note. So let's go with a new task. How many clicks is that? I'll leave a counter up here. Let's compare that to my use of a notebook. I have this pen loop here. I'm going to pull it up, open it, and we have these bookmarks here. That's about as long as it takes me to write a note.
In spite of the data and in spite of my personal experimentation in this area, it is still a draw for me. So, I think paper and digital systems are about even because even though it might be quicker and easier to write things down on a notebook, and it might even help for long-term memory and recall, there's just not a lot of people that are constantly walking around with a notebook. And many of us are constantly walking around with a phone or a digital device. So in this case, life organization has less to do with digital versus paper and more to do with availability. And in this day and age, for a quick capture system, digital is going to win that battle every time. But that's not necessarily the case for the labeling portion. Ideally, for a friction-free life organization system that you're using regularly, you only need to take the time to think about your sorting mechanism or your sorting algorithm once. It's something that you want to decide, maybe revise every once in a while and then internalize as your standard operating system. And as we discussed before, when we are trying to process or work through a specific system or even develop a new system and then internalize that into our long-term memory, it's more effective to use some sort of paper system to work through that. But that might be one of the last clear wins for a paper system because next we're moving into event management.
Studies, including this one right here, show a clear benefit in keeping event information somewhere. Now, when you write things down in a physical calendar, you're more likely to remember the event, and you're more likely to encode it more deeply and understand complex relationships between your obligations, including what event comes before another event. And it also gives you a better spatial picture of how things might be far or closer to each other in physical time. And in studies using calendar usage overall as a way of cognitive offloading show that there is a relationship between cognitive ability and your ability to show up on time and be where you said you were going to be. fancy way of saying that people that maybe have higher cognitive abilities are also more able to be at a specific time and place like they said they would be. But what's interesting is when this task is offloaded to something like a calendar, we find that those differences in cognitive ability are wiped out. So simply capturing your obligations helps increase the likelihood that you're going to meet those obligations. But just like the capture system, writing things down on a paper calendar might have some added memory benefits, but those benefits aren't outweighed by the fact that most of us walk around with a digital calendar in our pockets at all times. That boost to memory that you get from writing things down in a physical calendar might be short-lived. Studies looking at retention are usually looking at people in a lab over the course of a few hours or maybe even a few days. But there are events that come to you or that you become aware of way in advance. Like I know that I have a wedding coming up in 6 months. And because of the natural forgetting curve, I know I'm probably unlikely to remember that off the top of my head, even though I might remember that a day or two after I received the invitation. So, digital calendars might be better for remembering things that are far off in the distance. And I've already touched on this, but having calendars that are rich with information could also decrease the friction needed to engage in a specific action or go to a specific event. Things like being able to embed a Google Maps link into an event might be really helpful for you and save you some time as you're driving out to the event. Calendar apps give you a convenient location where you can store relevant information like reservation numbers for a hotel room or even notes related to a specific meeting. Because writing in things like notebooks are usually done linearly, like you're filling out one page and then continuing on and maybe having unrelated things next to each other. That type of storage and organization is a little bit more taxing when you're trying to put all the bits and pieces together. There's also the added benefit of being able to move things around in a digital calendar. If you're someone who's sensitive to visual clutter or prefer not to have a messy calendar space, it could be really distracting to you to have things crossed off or arrows moving things around. Stay to the end of the video if you want to know how I use the best of both worlds for planning my events. And if you're still here, drop a blue heart emoji in the comments section because you're my kind of people.
All right, let's charge toward the finish line. Next up is how you're capturing your actions or your tasks. Is it better to do this on paper or is it better to do it digitally? When it comes to commitments to take actions, there have been studies looking at whether or not getting people to handwrite a commitment increases the likelihood that they're going to follow through on it. Specifically, there are studies that looked at doctors when they're trying to change specific behaviors. and if they actually write down a commitment statement, they've been found to be more likely to follow through on that action. There's also something called the generation effect, which is where research shows that physical or tactile processes of writing things down engages more sensory and a motor brain regions, which signals to your brain that this is something important. It specifically activates your brain's recticular activating system, which fosters stronger self-belief and a higher sense of accountability. But what I love about the action portion of life planning or your personal organization system is that this research focuses on observable behaviors. Some of the patterns that we see in these types of measurable behaviors are even seen in nonhuman species. I'm talking specifically here about the powerful impact of a cue on a behavior. There is something really powerful about a reminder on your phone, which is why so many companies ask if they can send you notifications. That's because we have both an interruption of whatever it was that you're doing and then a nudge toward a specific action. This is why I wasn't even thinking about Bad Bunny, but I get a meme from my husband on Instagram and suddenly I'm jamming to Bad Bunny songs for 45 minutes. Actually, the research shows that an interruption is likely to take about like 24 to 26 minutes. This kind of interruption followed by a cue to engage in a specific action that you can utilize to your advantage when it comes to your actions or your task list. You can choose to interrupt yourself and set reminders for specific actions or tasks that you need to do. And you can also decrease the friction by ensuring that you have all of the necessary information or all of the context that you need to actually engage in that task. So you have the interruption, you have the cue, and you're also making it super easy for yourself to do that action.
Now, my paper caveat here is that this type of digital system, this interruption and queuing is only superior after you've identified what it is that you need to do. If you're just getting a notification, do your next task item, that might not be as effective as bring the return to the post office. the process that you have for prioritization, engaging with your to-do list, and then selecting what it is that you actually need to do and when do you actually want to do it. That might benefit from you doing some deliberate processing or deliberate planning, thinking about how you choose to handle and prioritize specific tasks. And you guessed it, when you're doing that type of deep processing, it might be beneficial to work that out on paper first. I don't have any specific studies to site, but I do have over 15 years of working with individuals in both therapy or individual coaching clients. And I've found that the physical act of writing and rewriting task lists for people that are using paper planning systems does have the ability to help them focus on prioritization and also help them prune down their list. So when people have excessive lists that seem to just get bigger and never smaller and smaller, those people tend to benefit from actually writing out lists and rewriting them over and over again, either on a daily or a weekly basis because there is that desired difficulty that we have when we're actually writing things down by hand. And we have to justify the amount of effort that it's taking us to rewrite a task over and over again. I personally overcome this barrier by actively engaging with my task list on a weekly basis, but more on that later.
Let's finish off with the last portion of a complete life organization system, and that is some sort of reference section. This is going to be really simple and it's about how you maintain these bits and bobs or little chunks of information that are not immediately useful. They're not related to a specific event or maybe even a specific task, but it's just general information that you might want to keep for reference later. Here's where I think digital is the straight winner because there is a limit to our cognitive capacity. We know that historically we've only been able to juggle 7 to nine pieces of information in our active working memory. Some more recent literature has shown that we're actually decreasing the amount of working memory that we have and maybe as a species our cognitive abilities are declining a little bit and that might have something to do with what's called the Google effect and that is the idea that people are relying more and more on storing information in digital areas. So we know the knowledge or information is always going to be there when we need it. So, we're not taking the time to encode and store information in our long-term memory because we know that we can just look it up if we really needed to. If we look on the bright side, this does mean that we have more access to information because Google or our digital organization systems just have a larger capacity than we probably ever will have. Part of what cognitive psychologists study when we think about memory is not only our ability to encode and store information, but our ability to retrieve that information when we need it. It's a really effortful process that's imperfect in humans. But within digital storage systems, we have this nifty search bar that we can use to search and recall the information. Which leads me to my conclusion that the science supports that digital systems are better at storage capacity and better at general recall. So, if we're looking at the reference section of our personal planning or organization, digital is the way to go.
Now, let's bring this all together to see how I've used the science to plan my own personal productivity system. Editing Jamie here. I just wanted to add an additional note because I want this to be like the definitive video comparing digital versus paper systems. There have been some arguments made here on YouTube that there's a difference in terms of distraction when it comes to using a paper planner versus trying to plan things digitally because when you're in digital formats, you can have the propensity to being distracted like you want to go online or open up a social media app or something like that. There have been studies looking at the difference between learning something or reading something on paper versus a screen. And there's some evidence that we tend to remain more focused when we're reading on a piece of paper. And they show that by looking at eye movements and seeing that we tend to remain more focused when we're doing things on paper compared to on a screen. So, if you're a person that tends to be distracted or finds that it's hard for you to stay focused if you are on a digital screen, then paper might have an advantage in terms of keeping you on task or keeping you focused.
Given the amount of studies that we reviewed in this video. I'm going to leave a link to the references down below. And I'll continue to update that notion file. But if you're interested in reading any of the individual studies that we covered in this video here today, I'll leave a link down below. And while you're down there, consider subscribing to this channel. I fully reworked my personal planning and organization based on this video and all the research that I've done over the last few weeks.
When it comes to my big picture life strategy, life organization, vision boarding, I do that in a combination of paper and tablet. Now, if you're interested, there have been some studies looking at the difference between handwriting something on a piece of paper and writing it on the tablet. What they have found is that knowledge acquisition, so picking up facts is equitable if you are reading something on a tablet, on a screen, or on a book. But when you're actually producing or generating something, there is increased activation and increased encoding. When they compare writing on a tablet to writing on a piece of paper, the neuroscientists believe that it's that tactile portion that we're missing when we're writing on a tablet and the smoothness of it that's causing different regions or parts of your brain to activate or not activate. Spatial reasoning and spatial relationships also tend to be different when you're doing something on a tablet versus on paper. It seems like we might be biologically programmed to look at physical spaces differently than digital spaces. So, when I'm doing things on a tablet, I'm trying to look for apps that most closely resemble how I would do things on paper. I really like Apple's free form app. So, I can zoom in, zoom out, and it also gives me that additional spatial context because I can zoom in and know relationally where I've worked through different parts of my big life strategy. I also do parts of the deep reflection and synthesizing things into themes within my paper planner. After I have it all organized and put together, I do move it over into my notion system for long-term storage. So, I'm not using the notion system to actually do the work of figuring out my values or my life strategy, but I am using it to store it so I can see differences year overyear.
In terms of goal setting, I do it the same way. I use a combination of writing things out on my tablet and working through it on paper. Once I've broken down my task into the specific actionable steps, it's going to go into my larger life organization system as particular tasks that need to be completed. And I schedule those tasks into specific time blocks. So, it becomes an event in my calendar. and I have all of the information related to taking that action within that calendar event.
I have two ways of capturing things on the go. I either go through the process of clicking all those clicks to get into my notion inbox or I utilize this notebook which is my everyday carry. It's an A6 size so it's small enough to fit in any of my purses. I carry it around with me all the time and whenever I have a random note or anything that needs to come into my life organization system, it's going to start off in this notebook. I've done the work of having a pretty solid organization system. So, my labeling is really easy. I label things as an event, an action, or a reference, and I know exactly where things go depending on the label. I worked out that system by hand and then I codified it or recorded it within my digital notion space.
For events and action, I actually try to leverage everything that we've talked about here in terms of the science of memory and what increases the likelihood that you're going to follow through on an action. For events, they always start off in my digital calendar. Every month I go through the process of identifying major events that are happening that month and I write them down in my physical paper planner. That gives me a good overall view of major things that are happening, how close or far away they are from each other, and how I'm going to navigate through the month. On a weekly basis, I also look at my calendar. I review it and I physically write down the timed events that I have in my weekly spread. I worked in this redundancy on purpose because for years when I used a paper planner, I was more likely to remember exactly what I had to do on an everyday basis. And even though the calendar is better for long-term planning, I find that I want to fully understand my obligations on a weekly basis. And for some reason, just writing it down helps to solidify what it is that I actually need to do, the meetings that are coming up. It also solidifies or helps me touch on the specific actions that I need to do to prepare for those meetings. So having it in this spatial physical space is really helpful to me even though I still write everything down in my digital calendar. So there's a redundancy here, but there is a specific utility for that redundancy.
There's also a layer of redundancy in my task management system. I like to write down tasks as they come up during the day in my physical paper planner. I keep a paper planner open next to my keyboard whether I'm working at home or in the office. So when a new task comes up, I tend to write it in that physical planner. if I'm going to do it that day, it never goes into my digital task manager because I'm just going to check it off and get that little dopamine hit that I get from checking off the task. If I don't do the task by the end of the day, I'm going to migrate it over into my digital planning system because the general flow of my organization system is that I take the tasks that I have to do and I actually plug them into time slots. I make them events in my calendar and if they're not in my digital organization system, they could get lost. So, I tend to move my tasks that I wrote down on paper at the end of the day into my digital planning system. I don't want to discount that real dopamine hit that you get from crossing things off in a paper planning system. And it's just not the same. I haven't seen any studies. If you've seen some studies, let me know in the comment section down below. I bet we get a dopamine hit from clicking a checkbox on a digital system, but I bet that the increase of dopamine is greater when you're actually physically crossing things off or checking things off. That would be an interesting study for me to do. If you're interested in my entire digital planning system, I go through that in this video right here. And if you're interesting in how I'm augmenting that system with my paper planners or journals, check out this video right here.