Every meaningful thought I have had at work in the last three years was first written down in a Muji A5 notebook with a Kaweco fountain pen. Not in Obsidian. Not in Notion. Not in a Google Doc. On paper. And I write software professionally, so this is not the flex of a person who avoids screens for a living. It is the compensation of a person who spends 10 hours a day looking at them.
The digital tools are excellent at storage and retrieval. They are terrible at thinking. What thinking wants is friction — a slow input speed, a limited character set, a page that cannot be undone, a shape that cannot be reorganised without effort. All of these are properties of paper and all of them are actively resisted by digital tools.
The workflow: I think on paper, then I transcribe the useful bits into digital when I need to share them or store them long-term. The transcription is doing work — it is a second pass, an editing step, a chance to notice which thoughts were actually good. About 40% of what I write in the notebook never makes it to the computer. That is by design. That is where the notebook is doing its job.