Most of my projects are born out of scribbles on paper, system diagrams with boxes and little arrows to try to describe the system I want to build or my thought process written down like in this post.

When I get it on paper and everything feels right I start creating the codebase but I have to get it down first, feels like I remember it more after I save my thoughts to external paper storage.

I have over the decades tried every combination I can think up or have read about for designing things and I always land back in the same place, A4 5mm square pad (cheap but not the cheapest) and a really good (but not expensive) set of ballpoints in black/blue/red/green (and mostly it's black anyway).

There is something about the complete free form nature of pen and paper that makes me think better, I bought a nice ipad/pencil a few years ago thinking that would replicate it but it didn't, it was closer but not close.

If it's something I want to keep I just take a photo but vast majority of notes are transient anyway.

Agreed, I used to role my eyes when my professors asked me to do things like pseudocode (which I still don't do too much) but the act of writing an outline for the general structure of a program always helped me get over the initial hump of starting a new project.

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