OFF THE RECORD: This week, von Schlippe unpacks the gesture of a thoughtful husband, a redundant gadget, and what the neuroscience of handwriting reveals about how we think, work, and protect our minds in a leadership age optimised for forgetting.
My husband gave me a thoughtful gift. A digital notebook. The kind where you write with a stylus and every word is instantly converted into a searchable document, stored, indexed, and retrievable in seconds. It was objectively, a solution to a real problem. My workspace is an archaeology of single sheets of A4; ideas excavated from meetings, fragments of strategy, and half-finished thoughts migrating from the desk to the dining table to the inside of coat pockets. Important information noted in the top right corner of a page last seen three weeks ago. He’s watched me search for these pages with increasing desperation and decreasing grace. The digital notebook therefore, in every rational sense, is the correct answer.
It’s now sitting on the top shelf of my bookcase, collecting the particular dust that accumulates on well-intentioned gifts.
The failure was total and immediate. The moment stylus met screen, something closed. The thought process, which on paper has the quality of a conversation—unhurried, associative, occasionally surprising—became transactional. Paper waits for you. It doesn’t notify you of anything. It has no battery life. It’s slow in exactly the way that thinking requires slowness, and patient in exactly the way that a good interlocutor is patient. When I write on paper, I can see my thinking move. On screen, I’m merely transcribing.
My husband, to his credit, recognised the situation and replaced the digital notebook with a book: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. It was the correct prescription. The practice of moving a pen across paper is over 800 years old and has produced (among other things) da Vinci’s anatomical sketches, Marie Curie’s research notebooks (still radioactive, still held in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, still occasionally requested by researchers who must sign a waiver), and Picasso’s Moleskines. The common thread is not genius, it’s the physical act of thinking through the hand.
The notebook costs less than a coffee. The ROI is by any measure, disproportionate.
There is now substantial research to explain why the screen failed me. A landmark 2014 study by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer published in Psychological Science found that students who took notes by hand retained and understood material significantly better than those who typed, not because they wrote more, but because handwriting forces the brain to process and summarise in real time rather than transcribe. In 2023, a Norwegian study published in Frontiers in Psychology used an electroencephalogram to show that handwriting activates far more of the brain than keyboard input. Visual processing, motor control, and memory encoding all engage simultaneously. Typing by comparison, is neurologically uneventful.
The dementia research adds a longer arc to this. Another study in The Gerontologist found that regular journaling was associated with stronger cognitive reserve and a measurably reduced risk of Alzheimer’s. Those who kept journals over their lifetime showed a 53% reduction in all-cause dementia risk. The mechanism is the same. The motor-cognitive loop that handwriting activates builds neural pathways that screen-based interaction does not.
Consider what this means against the backdrop of how most of us now work. The average knowledge worker switches between tasks or applications every 47 seconds, according to Gloria Mark’s research at the University of California, Irvine, and takes over 23 minutes to fully regain deep focus after each interruption. We sit in meetings where half the room is simultaneously managing emails. We hire people for their multitasking ability when two decades later, research confirms the human brain does not multitask very well. It switches rapidly and at significant cognitive cost. What we have always called efficiency has been in many cases, distributed attention producing mediocre results across multiple fronts simultaneously.
For those of us in media or creative industries, the blue light exposure compounds this. Digital editors and social media teams routinely log eight to 10 hours of screen time per working day. The behavioural patterns this trains include rapid context-switching, stimulus-seeking, and a tolerance for shallow processing are not the patterns that produce the work we are most proud of.
Which is perhaps why Gen Z as the first fully digital-native generation, is driving the most conspicuous analogue revival in decades. Vinyl records, once assumed to be obsolete, have now outsold CDs in the US for three consecutive years. In 2024 alone, 44 million vinyl records were shipped, compared with 33 million CDs, with vinyl revenues reaching their highest level since 1984. Film camera sales have also surged globally, driven overwhelmingly by buyers under 30. And print magazine readership among 18–34 year olds is growing, not declining, according to PAMCo’s latest data. These are not acts of nostalgia, they are acts of deliberate friction. A generation raised on infinite scroll is choosing with some intention, an experience that does not refresh automatically.
As a publisher this makes my heart move in ways I will not describe in a business column. But it also has a straightforward strategic implication: attention is now the scarce resource, and the formats that command genuine, undivided attention—print, live experience, the handwritten note—carry a premium precisely because they are slow. Luxury has always understood this. The question is whether the boardroom has.
I am not a doctor. But if I were to prescribe a performance intervention for a senior leadership team, it would not be another productivity application. It would be a notebook—paper, unlined if possible—and the instruction to use it for 30 minutes before opening a screen. Research on journaling as a cognitive and emotional tool is now robust enough that several major health systems have adopted it as a clinical recommendation. The McKinsey Global Institutewa estimates that focused, uninterrupted thinking time is among the highest-value activities an executive can engage in. The notebook costs less than a coffee. The ROI is by any measure, disproportionate.
My husband’s first gift was a great idea that didn’t work. His second, a book about the history of thinking on paper, reminded me that the tool we keep trying to replace has been producing extraordinary work for eight centuries without a software update.
Until next time, stay off the record.
Welcome to Off the Record, your new pass into the margins of luxury leadership. Each fortnight, Bettina von Schlippe, Co-founder of Beyond the Boardroom and Publisher-at-Large at Vogue Singapore, distills what’s shaping the region’s luxury landscape, from closed-door perspectives, to unfiltered insights, and the quiet shifts that haven’t made the headlines just yet.