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Finally ditched the pocket notebook for my phone and I'm kind of mad about it
I carried a little Rite in the Rain notebook in my back left pocket for almost 4 years, always with a Fisher Space Pen clipped to it. About 6 weeks ago I got tired of the edge of the notebook poking my leg when I sat down in my truck, so I moved everything over to the notes app on my phone just to see how it felt. I tracked it for a full month and the difference was not close. My old setup would get wet in the rain here in Portland and the pages would stick together, plus I kept losing pens when the clip snagged on stuff. With the phone I actually search my notes, and I found an alarm code and a part number in about 5 seconds that would've taken me 10 minutes of flipping. The one thing the notebook did better was jotting stuff down without looking, like when someone walks up to me at a job site. So now I'm weirdly torn. For the pocket carry folks, do you still run paper or did you go all in on your phone like I did?
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taylorhunt20d ago
I saw a thread on a bushcraft forum where a guy did almost the same test, carried a waterproof notepad for years, then switched to his phone for a month and never went back. His big thing was losing the pen too, said he went through like 6 in a single summer because of clips catching on stuff. What stuck with me was a comment from some old timer who said the notebook was never really about the paper, it was about not having a screen between him and the person talking. That part matches what you said about the job site thing. For me the tiebreaker is the camera, half my notes now are just photos of labels and serial numbers instead of me trying to write them down in the rain. The only time paper wins is cold, my phone dies out in the field in like 20 minutes when it's below freezing but a pen still writes fine.
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