Last week I spent three days wrestling with a data‑pipeline script. The API returned pages of JSON that—despite using cursors—felt impossible to checkpoint reliably. Every new edge case sent my code spiraling into complexity.<p>Then I did something old‑school: I grabbed a yellow notepad, sketched the entire flow, and within minutes I had an elegant design I was actually proud of. It was:<p>Simple to implement<p>Reliable in edge cases<p>Easy to debug<p>Why does sketching on paper work so well? Seeing the whole problem laid out on a single page seems to unlock our spatial reasoning in a way screens can’t.<p>I wonder where else I can be using this method to unlock a brain level, I often dont seem to utilize.