Best of Both Worlds: Using Digital & Analog Tools for Productivity

Productivity means spending time on things that matter, not making yourself ‘busier’. Whether you’re a stay-at-home parent, an office dweller, or a remote worker, getting better at productivity brings ever-shifting goal posts.

Regardless of your profession, there are always different adaptations you can make to become more productive.

Despite the onslaught of marketing trying to convince you otherwise, increased productivity does not always equate to a digital solution.

In fact, analog is back!

The old-school method of writing things down happens to be one of the best productivity hacks ever, but digital is the only way to go for collaboration. See why a combination of digital and analog tools works to increase productivity. 

Going digital all the way: Pros & Cons

Some people like to go digital all the way when it comes to managing tasks for work and for life. There are tons of software solutions that deal with task management on both professional and personal levels. 

These tools can help you stay organized and aware of looming deadlines. With a software tool to manage your tasks and your life, your data will be more accurate, and it’s less likely to get lost. You don’t have to worry about throwing away the wrong piece of paper, as everything is documented in your task lists and calendars. 

There’s also a huge advantage with digital to remembering deadlines and important events. Automated alerts can make sure you never miss a meeting or a birthday. 

Another pro of the digital productivity style is analytics and reporting. Perhaps you want to measure your productivity. You can do that if you have a time tracker, and you can run reports to see how much of your time is billable and how much is spent on internal admin.

Some tools will let you go even further by visualizing this information, with features like Gantt charts and all kinds of graphs. These can help you grasp intellectually how your time is spent, what kinds of tasks take up the most of your energy, and which tasks are the most impactful. 

Then, of course there’s the convenience factor. One of the major selling points of any good productivity software is that everything is right at your fingertips, which is why most offer mobile apps and browser extensions. You can get to work wherever you want.

However, going strictly digital has its drawbacks, too. 

The biggest con of digital productivity tools is undoubtedly the distractions. If you’re trying to avoid multitasking, a proven way to decrease your productivity, digital solutions can make that very difficult.

It can be super tempting when you’re working on a certain assignment to click around into your other projects and tasks. Before you know it, you start drilling down and you’ve lost 10 minutes.

Or even worse, you can’t resist the temptation to switch tabs or apps to view social media, your personal messages, the news, or your favorite celebrity gossip site. Everybody has given into this temptation, and really the only way to make sure you stop is to put environmental restrictions in place, i.e. put your phone in the other room, log out of your social media, etc. 

I myself sometimes pull up everything I need to do for a project on my browser, then turn off the WIFI until I’m finished. That way I’m not tempted to check on the status of another project.

Finally, one of the more concerning things about going all digital for productivity, be it for your personal life or your career, is the lack of retained knowledge. Digital tools can help you remember important dates by alerting you, but they’re terrible at helping you actually retain anything you learn. Which is kind of a scary thought if you’re trying to increase your knowledge for your own personal growth. 

The benefits of analog productivity tools

For a lot of people, writing things out by hand is somewhat of a therapeutic experience. The physicality of analog tools is humanizing, which is why so many people swear by them.

Beyond the feel-good sensation that comes with analog, it may also help you learn better. Handwriting has been shown to have a stronger correlation with knowledge retainment versus typed or digital notes. They proved this in a study with university students back in 2021, and there was yet another study on the topic published earlier this year. In the most recent findings, brain imaging showed that when subjects wrote by hand, areas in the brain critical to forming memories were activated at frequencies that suggest learning is happening. This brain activity was not observed in typing whatsoever.

Handwriting may be great for learning, but analog overall has obvious drawbacks, most of which we don’t have to deal with if we don’t want to:

Physical documents on paper can easily be destroyed by spilled beverages, fire, or unruly pets. Really important documents like contracts and content for work need to be kept securely in the digital world on the cloud or a hard drive, in a software system, etc. 

There’s also the added time that it takes to manually copy things down. Busy people can often churn out what they need for work or life much faster on a keyboard versus handwriting it, and legibly at that.

Information that changes quickly or that needs to be shared with others can’t really exist in analog anymore, at least not for most businesses. Collaboration tools like Slack are necessary to maintain the flow of information, keeping teams productive and on-task. 

The case for a hybrid approach

I’m going to make a personal case for handwritten notes and lists. There’s something so satisfying about writing down your tasks with nice penmanship, referring back to the list visually, and then getting to strike through victoriously when it’s complete:

It’s physical, it’s visual, and I think, humanizing. Plus I love to doodle.

More than the comfortable human-ness that comes with physical writing, I honestly believe that I retain handwritten information better than when I type it out or simply read it/see it/hear it. 

For that reason, I always manually write things down during important meetings and when I am trying to learn more about a new subject for personal growth. 

On the digital side, I can’t live without PSOhub to manage my invoices and billable time. My Google Calendar is another one that I couldn’t go without to help me remember important milestone deadlines.

I also use Airtable and Slack because my clients live in those platforms. Because I work with international remote teams, we wouldn’t be able to produce results without digital collaboration tools like these. 

I have tried using software for daily to-do lists like Trello, Wunderlist, and more for both work and personal life. At the end of the day, I prefer to write down my daily and even weekly lists. For whatever reason, I’ve found that if I do them only digitally, the tasks don’t seem as urgent. 

Blending digital and analog tools gives you the best of both worlds. Incorporating both helps you stay productive and efficient while also staying human.  

Use digital productivity tools for:

• Invoice management - This should go without saying that one should never keep a solely analog record of invoices. Invoice management is best kept in the hands of digital tools, where dates, times, and payment amounts are unalterable and secure.
• Time tracking - You can track time for free using the stopwatch on a smartphone, and that’s like the lowest form of digitalized time tracking. For work, always use a timesheet tracking app that you can activate on your computer, phone, etc.
• Contract management - Like invoicing, not keeping a digital record of your contracts is dangerous, and since businesses need to maintain these correctly for legal purposes, it’s even more reason to go digital.
• Collaboration - Handwritten lists are great, but what are you supposed to do if you need to brainstorm with a colleague in a different time zone? Sharing documents and sharing ideas is just plain easier with digital collaboration tools like Teams, Asana, etc.
• Managing work tasks - If you work on a team, your team probably needs to see your task status, so that they can then do their jobs before or after the task lands on you. For task management for teams at work, a digital tool is absolutely essential. 
• Planning events like weddings - If you’ve ever planned a wedding, you know there’s an insane amount of moving pieces. Weddings, birthday parties, group vacations, and more are easier to plan when you have an app to help you.
• Personal construction projects - Building anything requires a plan, and constructing your own house, your own she-shed, or your own treehouse is a complicated endeavor. Project management tools can really help with this, as you can break down the project into smaller pieces and plan the timeline. 

Use analog for:

• Goals - There’s a lot of evidence that writing down your goals is a more effective way to mentally prepare for actually achieving them. Visualizing and writing down what you want to achieve can imprint goals in the subconscious, making you more prone to shift into realistically attaining them.
• Knowledge you want to retain - If you want to learn more about a new subject, be it for work or personal enrichment, it’s a good idea to manually write down details. This goes for taking tests and developing a new skill as well. 

Use a hybrid approach for:

• Journaling - There’s a legitimate case for keeping your journaling in the digital world: it’s more secure and your musings can’t get physically damaged. There are also now apps that can essentially report on your journal data, which depending on your personality and goals, could be helpful. Analog journaling has a lot of benefits as well. The physical act of writing out feelings, dreams, hopes, and fears is therapeutic and often recommended by professionals like psychologists and counselors. 

• Daily to-dos & weekly breakdown - Digital to-do’s for the day and week have obvious perks for productivity; they can be shared easily with others and you can leverage alerts to help you stay on task. But the analog versions still hold up well, helping you to cement your upcoming tasks in your subconscious by physically writing them out. There’s also a satisfying strike-through to look forward to. 
• Calendars - For anyone who has regular meetings, a digital calendar is non-negotiable. Not only will you never miss a meeting, but you can easily set them up with people across the world using Google Calendar. At the same time, analog calendars are great for family collaboration, as you can write down birthdays, activities, and trips in a place where everyone can see them. 

Experiment for best results

To increase your productivity, a hybrid approach of digital and analog tools may be the best for your brain to run on all cylinders. Exactly how that hybrid approach looks should depend on experimentation. Like me, you can try putting your personal to-do’s in digital format for a couple weeks to see how it feels. Or vice versa.

Once you find the winning combo that not only makes you more productive but makes you feel good as a human, you know you’ve hit the sweet spot.