For me it was a ream of printer paper and a mug full of random writing implements.

IMO the platform is unmatched at rapid on-demand WYSIWYG visualization.

Not so great for a productivity app, though. Too easy to lose important information when it's on the same sheet of paper as a drawing of a graph algorithm that turned out to be wrong, and trying to remember whether x cross y positive implies x right or left of y.

I bet you could rig up a webcam, hook it up to a multimodal LLM, that can then instantly scan, sort, and archive all of the separate ideas on each sheet.

That would make it easier to not lose information, but I don't think it makes it any easier of a productivity app.