The long-term planning is said to be nothing more than a well-educated guessing. However, no one is likely to deny that the short-term planning is the strong prerequisite of high productivity and success. Its value is hard to overestimate because it is all about the efficient use of your most precious asset — time.

In the present reality when the time is as valuable as never before, planning is crucial.

Indeed, those who had managed to master their time appeared to adapt quickly to the new challenges of the contemporary world. Meanwhile, those who have never learned how to manage the time, prove to be left behind.

The rapid technological progress has already made a profound impact on the way we think, act, and work. It’s going to keep changing the way we live.

Moreover, the widespread adoption of the digital devices made people gradually migrate from the obsolete tools to the modern and advanced instruments of the 21st century.

We live in the world of mobile applications, digital calendars, and keyboards. Planning your time and making notes on laptops and smartphones rather than in longhand is increasingly common today. It’s no surprise, though. The simplicity, convenience, and functionality the digital devices provide us with made the old-fashioned pen and paper take second place.

Does it mean that classic paper notebooks are over and it’s all about the digital calendars now? Not so fast.

The physical planners have a number of significant advantages that are not going to be substituted by the mobile apps anytime soon.

Here are 5 reasons why paper planners are more efficient than digital devices when it comes to planning:

1. Handwriting Ensures Better Decision Making Process

Writing with a pen is an excellent way to absorb information and keep your mind sharp. Studies showed that taking notes and writing your plans down by hand helps people organize information and recall details better than while typing on your laptop or smartphone.

Unlike the regular typing, the writing with pen and paper requires the active involvement of your brain that is focused on processing information and reframing it in your own words.

The result? Paper notetakers’ brains are working to digest, summarize, and capture the heart of the information. This, in turn, promotes understanding and retention that are crucial when it comes to making important decisions.

2. Paper Planners Let You Focus On What Matters Most

Unlike digital devices, paper planners don’t have any sources of distraction.

One of the greatest benefits of paper notebooks, as opposed to mobile apps, is the reduction of internet-related distractions. People who use a computer to take notes or engage in planning face a plethora of distractions. Often, the things that kill a person’s concentration are:

• Incoming email messages, alerts, notifications.
• The temptation to surf the internet.
• The arrival of chat messages.
• Technical difficulties.

Handwriting eliminates these distractions and allows you to devote increased attention to thinking and planning as the writing process unfolds.

3. Paper Planners Add Importance To Your Notes.

Computers may dominate our lives, but mastery of penmanship brings us important cognitive benefits, the research suggests.

Improved memory, enhanced creativity and better comprehension of the consumed information. These are all the benefits of the simple handwriting.

The reason for that is your brain is designed differently. The handwriting was employed long ago and remained the main way of capturing any kind of information for centuries now. The old habits cannot be replaced this fast. Therefore, they still matter. Apparently, this is why the human’s brain performs better when the handwriting comes into play.

Besides, since the longhand indeed involves different cognitive processes, it allows you to pay more attention to what you’re going to write and focus more on the thoughts you jot down, instead of mindlessly typing them.

Ultimately, it makes your plans and notes feel more important. Put another way, you are less likely to forget what you’ve written down— appointments, events, tasks, ideas and any kind of lists. Moreover, the thoughts and ideas written by hand are going to stick with you longer, thereby making you developing them in your mind faster and more efficiently.

4. Custom Fit

Paper planners are all about personalization.

Although every planner comes off the printing press identical, the similarities evaporate when it reaches your hand. The way you use sticky notes and color coding, the highlighting and personal notes all reflect you as an individual.

Your planner becomes a creative footprint of who you are as a person and how you plan to get where you’re going. And the best planning system is one that you adapt yourself to work for you.

A paper planner gives you the flexibility to mold it into your own personal planning system without the limitations of some app programmed by computer experts rather than designed by planning professionals.

5. Convenience And Speed

It might seem counterintuitive but the paper planners indeed appear to be faster and more convenient than their digital counterparts.

Think about it for a moment. It takes two seconds to flip the planner open to today’s date and definitely a bit longer to get your device out of its case. Not to mention you have to turn it on, enter a password, find the app, launch it etc.

And you are likely to spend much more time doing all these steps than it would take for you to jot down your ideas or quickly schedule your appointment and close the notebook.

A paper planner is designed to help you do one thing — plan. And it does it very well!