The Legal Pad that Preserved My Sanity

What I learned when I stopped chasing digital perfection and picked up a pen.

Several months ago, I attended a negotiation seminar led by Chris Voss. As someone who negotiates daily, on priorities, resources, and direction, I’ve long been drawn to the craft. I’d studied Chester Karrass’s structured bargaining methods, but when I first heard Voss speak, I was struck by his emphasis on tactical empathy: the idea that active listening is more powerful than talking cleverly.

I’m not very good at it, but I’m really trying.

He opened the seminar with a simple exercise. First, he asked us to write the phrase “multitasking is good and fun” and then go back and number each letter. While we did that, he kept talking. When asked, most of us remembered what he said. Then he had us try again, this time writing each letter and its number together: M-1, u-2, l-3. While we worked, he kept talking. This time, almost no one could remember what he said. The reason, he said, was attention. The second task demanded constant switching between small cognitive steps, which made it impossible to listen deeply.

That moment changed how I work. Voss made clear that when we bring devices into conversations, whether to take notes or check out, we think we’re being efficient, but we’re actually missing the moment. Presence, not productivity, builds trust. In today’s dispatch, I reflect on how that insight led me back to pen and paper. Not out of nostalgia, but because it keeps me focused, grounded, and fully engaged.

The big picture

For years, I was on a quiet quest for the perfect note-taking setup, not out of vanity, but because I genuinely felt my personal organization was lacking. I’ve cycled through every device imaginable: tablets with styluses, voice recorders, AI-generated summaries, cloud-synced notebooks. Each promised a system, one that would finally bring order to the complexity of my work. But beneath that search was something more elemental: a longing for clarity, for the feeling of being on top of things.

Instead of progress, I found stimulation. Elegant tools and sleek interfaces yielded scattered results. It felt like chasing a fix, not building a system. Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain clarified my goal: not information collection, but control. I misunderstood the power of note-taking. It’s not about perfect capture; it’s about useful recall. Notes aren’t archives, they’re launchpads: sparks that trigger action, insight, and clarity when needed. This happens when capturing is deeply connected to thinking, not just storage.

Ironically, it was the least sophisticated tool, the yellow legal pad, that finally helped me apply Forte’s ideas, with a helpful nudge from Chris Voss. Handwriting doesn’t scale. That’s the beauty of it. It forces choice. What you write is what you remember. What you remember shapes what you act on.

Capture what matters, connect what counts

I turned to the legal pad because things were slipping: conversations, commitments, next steps. I needed a system, not for knowledge management, but for personal reliability. One page per person, team, or priority area. Just a few lines after each interaction, things to remember. And it worked, immediately. I stopped letting things fall through the cracks.

But what surprised me was what came next. Writing by hand didn’t just make me more organized. It made me more attuned. I started picking up on things I used to miss: the hesitation before agreement, the emerging consensus, the subtle shifts that often shape the real outcomes. Paper slowed me down enough to actually notice.

Chris Voss calls this kind of attentiveness “tactical empathy,” the intentional act of truly hearing what someone says, how they say it, and what they might be holding back. According to Voss, real negotiation, and by extension, real collaboration, starts with presence. Not performance. Not multitasking. Just being fully tuned in to the emotional landscape of the room. And that presence is nearly impossible when you’re behind a screen. Writing by hand, he suggests, is a form of signal, one that says, you matter enough for me to slow down and listen.

Beyond presence, the legal pad helped me think. Not just capture, but connect. I sketch systems. Draw arrows. Build mental maps in the margins. Paper turns thought into landscape. And in leadership meetings, that kind of spatial, relational thinking matters. We’re not paid to take notes. We’re paid to make meaning.

This only works if you leave your devices behind. Full stop.

That act alone shifts your posture from passive collection to active presence. It signals, to yourself and to others, that you’re here, engaged, and leading with intention.

To think clearly, write by hand

I don’t take notes on devices anymore. Not in meetings, not in one-on-ones, not when the stakes are high. If the goal is to capture action and meaning, not just words, you have to write by hand. And it works best with paper.

That’s not a rejection of technology. It’s an embrace of clarity. Writing on paper forces discernment in real time. You can’t transcribe everything, so you learn to notice what matters: the key question, the shift in tone, the half-formed consensus. And when you write it down, you remember it, not just mentally, but physically. Where it was on the page. What you underlined. What you circled in the margin.

Mueller and Oppenheimer’s 2014 study revealed what many of us have felt instinctively: that handwriting strengthens conceptual understanding because it engages the brain more deeply. Typing captures more, but with less thought. Handwriting distills. It turns note-taking into decision-making.

For me, the legal pad isn’t just a tool. It’s a mindset. It says: I’m here. I’m listening. I’m not outsourcing this moment to an app. I’m owning it.

The bottom line

In a world obsessed with speed and sync, the legal pad gave me something far more valuable: presence. It didn’t just help me stay organized, it helped me lead with attention, clarity, and care. I didn’t just remember more. I decided more. Writing by hand created space between the noise and the signal. It gave me a way to filter, to frame, to reflect.

Note-taking stopped being an exercise in collection. It became a tool for discernment. For leadership.

In the end, I didn’t need a different device. I needed a slower hand.