Ask HN: Paper pad "self-prompting" as rubber-duck-with-a-context-length?

The conventional advice of speaking to an inanimate object never quite worked for me, as it presumed that speaking emphatically is the most direct mode of that person's natural communication. For myself, it is written communication that comes more naturally and direct, having trouble with indecisive awkwardness of mental-backspacing in the middle of a sentence, and often forgetting what the prior self-conversation was talking about.

However, while typing into a monologue channel is indeed fast and direct and augments my poor mental context-length of verbal communication, the ephemeral, delible nature of uncommitted text undermines the purpose of being forced to formulating a "good-enough" communication as a cognitive device to reifying a thought that would otherwise be in flux.

What I have found to be a good balance that achieves both committal pressure of speech and a longer context-length of text is writing on a tearable paper pad with ink and not pencil. You are still allowed to cross-out words in a pinch but the spatial cost of this means that there is still a slight pressure to force you to stop and formulate before committing, without being debilitatingly permanent.

Essentially, you manually hand write a chat log while mentally alternating between the role of a prompter and a silicon ducky, making a point to delineate between the two by drawing a horizontal line across the page.

I'm wondering if I'm alone in this or if anyone here are also similarly idiosyncratic to have this work for them as well?