What stays exactly the same
An electronic lab notebook is still your record of what you actually did — the same discipline of writing things down as you go applies either way. Switching formats doesn't fix a habit of sparse note-taking; it just changes the medium. If anything, a blank digital entry is easier to leave incomplete than a physical page staring back at you.
What genuinely changes
Searchability. This is the single biggest practical difference. A paper notebook is searchable only by your memory of roughly when you wrote something. An electronic one is searchable by keyword, date, protocol, or reagent — instantly, across years of entries.
Loss risk. A paper notebook is a single physical object — lost, damaged, or left in a lab you no longer have access to, and years of work go with it. An electronic notebook backed by a real database survives a spilled coffee or a lost bag, though it introduces a different risk: dependence on whatever service hosts it staying available and exportable.
Collaboration. Sharing a paper notebook means physically handing it over or photocopying pages. An electronic one can be shared with specific people or a whole lab, with control over who can see or edit what — without anyone losing access to their own copy.
Handwriting. This is the one people assume they're giving up, and don't have to. Photographing or scanning a handwritten page into a structured, searchable entry gets you the immediacy of pen-and-paper with the searchability of digital — you're not forced to choose.
Audit trail. Electronic entries carry timestamps and edit history by default; a paper notebook only has that if you're disciplined about dating every entry and never tearing out a page.
Where paper still holds up
Some fields and institutions have specific regulatory requirements around wet-ink, notarized, or witnessed lab notebooks — if that applies to you, check your institution's requirements before assuming a digital record satisfies them. And for pure scratch work you'll never need to find again, paper is still faster than opening an app.
The honest tradeoff
Moving to an electronic notebook trades a small amount of upfront friction (a device, a login, a few minutes of habit-forming) for a large amount of downstream value (search, backup, sharing, audit trail) that mostly shows up months or years later, when you need to find something you wrote a long time ago. For most labs, that trade is worth it well before the one-year mark — but it's a trade, not a strict upgrade, and it's worth going in with eyes open about what you're giving up along with what you're gaining.