There are several tools, open-source and commercial that allow the creation of beautiful presentations, drawings etc. It is self evident that a commercial project requires the proper quality of documentation, including drawings and schematics that can be disseminated within the corporation, printed in various forms and even more, edited by another person or group, pass through a review workflow etc.

Learning how to use and becoming proficient with such a tool requires significant investment in time and effort that may really pay back in a corporate environment.

Yet, for hobby or prototyping work where a single person develops a bespoke project in one single piece and without having to produce a PCB, normally one faces two options:

1. Create a handmade sketch within a few minutes
2. Spend several minutes or hours trying to figure out how a line can be split, how you can make a curved angle, how to create a new component in the component library before you use it etc. And all this, using a program that you used to know very well in its previous version a couple of years ago!

Usually the second option ends up in doing absolutely nothing, ending up in a fully undocumented project. On the other hand, a hand drawing contains at least the same amount of information and is even enhanced with notes, arrows, underlines,references etc. leveraging on the knowledge we have built up as children in the use of a simple pencil.

It is obvious that on certain occasions, I consider the amount of time spent to the so called “productivity tools” disproportionate to the benefit they produce, especially for people who work or operate with a big spectrum of activities. This is not an abolishment of such tools but rather an initiation of a different method of thinking and working, which is not based on the transliteration of a pencil to its electronic/digital form, as it happens in most such tools. Until we figure this out, the pencil sometimes wins!!!