Digital vs paper doodles, I tested both for 3 weeks and the messy one won
Last month I started a little experiment at my kitchen table in Boise. I did every doodle on my tablet for one week, then switched to a cheap spiral notebook for the next two. The tablet stuff looked clean, but I deleted 11 of them because they felt too perfect to keep. The paper pile got messy and wrinkled, yet I kept flipping back through it and even added notes in the margins. My buddy saw both piles and grabbed the notebook right away, saying the tablet ones looked like clip art. So which is it, do clean digital doodles still count as doodles, or does the messy paper version win every time? Curious what you all keep and what you actually toss.
Man, I get why the paper pile won for you. There is something about flipping back through a real notebook that a screen just can't copy. The wrinkled pages and the margin notes turn into a kind of record of your day, while the tablet stuff just sits there looking finished. I have tossed plenty of digital doodles myself because they looked too neat to mean anything. Your buddy grabbing the notebook says a lot. Clean can still be a doodle, but messy is what you actually keep coming back to.