The 500-Year-Old Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci.

And why you should keep a notebook, too.

There is a wonderful story in Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci’s biography about when he was writing Steve Jobs’ biography. Steve told Walter that he had all these documents, notes and emails from the 1990s that he would retrieve and share.

Several weeks passed, yet there was no sign of these documents, so Walter wrote to Steve asking him if he had found them. Steve replied he had found them, but he and his best engineers at Apple had been unable to retrieve them from the discs.

As Walter writes,

“Paper turns out to be a superb information-storage technology, still readable after five hundred years, which our own tweets likely won’t be.”

I have a stack of CD ROMs with hundreds of photos I took in the early 2000s, yet I no longer have a CD ROM drive to view them. However, I still have a photo album of printed photos from the 1980s and 90s that I brought with me when I came to Korea in 2002.

Digital technology is fantastic; it has allowed us to take copious amounts of notes, save thousands of articles (which, it turns out, most of us never read) and has revolutionised how we do our work today with email, Microsoft Teams and Slack. It’s given us more flexibility about…