I Threw Out My AI Tools and Went Back to a Pen

I run an AI company. I threw out my AI productivity tools and went back to a journal and a pen.

Not because AI does not work. It works. That is not the problem.

The problem is that my memory is limited, and AI made that worse.

What was actually going wrong

Every AI conversation has to be untangled afterwards to work out whether any of it was useful.

Where does the train of thought start? Where does it end? Somewhere in a forty-turn conversation there were three good sentences and a decision I actually made, and they are now buried in a transcript that reads like two people thinking out loud — because that is what it is.

So the work does not disappear. It moves. Instead of thinking the thing through, I think it through with something, and then I have a second job: reading back what we said and deciding what counted.

And there is the plainer cost. Time spent conversing with AI is time not spent doing. A conversation feels like progress in a way that staring at a hard problem does not. That feeling is the trap.

What went on paper

Four things, and none of them are clever.

A to-do list, to get everything out of my head. Not to organise it. Just to stop carrying it. The value is the emptying, not the list.

Cross off what is not mine to do. This is the step that does the work. Half of what lands on the page belongs to someone else, or to nobody, or to a version of the business from six months ago. What is left after the crossing-off is the actual priority list, and it is always shorter than the original and always more uncomfortable.

A daily log of my conversations. Written by me, so the context ends up in my memory rather than in the AI's. This is the one that changed the most. When the context lives in a tool, you have to go and get it, and going and getting it costs more than remembering it would have.

Brainstorm on paper before I prompt. So that when I do go to the AI, we need fewer rounds to get anywhere. A prompt written after ten minutes of thinking beats twenty minutes of conversation trying to think.

The handwriting part

There is evidence for the handwriting specifically, and it is more interesting than the usual productivity folklore.

A 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychology by Van der Weel and Van der Meer put high-density EEG nets on 36 university students and had them either write words by hand or type them. Handwriting produced far more widespread connectivity across the brain — the theta and alpha patterns between parietal and central regions that are associated with memory formation and encoding new information. Typing did not.

Two honest caveats. The participants wrote with a digital pen on a touchscreen rather than pen on paper, though the researchers expect the result to hold for real paper. And it is a study about writing single words in a lab, not about whether journalling makes you a better operator.

But it points the same way as the experience: the writing is not a record of the thinking. The writing is some of the thinking. Outsource the writing and you have outsourced a share of the thought that would have come with it.

More AI do, less AI think

This is the line I keep coming back to, and it is the whole argument.

If you ask AI to do your thinking, you get a worse result than if you already hold the mental model and hand it one very good instruction.

It is the same shape as the checking problem that sinks most enterprise AI projects. AI takes away the thinking and hands back the verification, and verification is harder when you never built the model in the first place. You cannot review an answer to a question you did not really understand. You can only decide whether it sounds right, which is exactly the failure mode these systems are best at producing.

Hold the model yourself. Then hand over the doing.

That is not a retreat from AI. Everything I described earlier about what AI actually took out of our cost base still stands, and none of it has been switched off. The tools are doing more of the work than they were a year ago. What changed is where the thinking happens, and who is holding it.

The journal costs about four dollars. It is the cheapest thing in the stack by a wide margin.

If you want to talk about where AI should be doing and where it should stay out of the way, come and have a chat with us — or get this kind of thinking weekly.