On Notebooks

A journey through my personal history with various types - and even the basic concept - of notebooks, with a tour of my current companion

I have a serious problem. I buy more notebooks than I know what to do with. Of late, I have ascribed this to preparation - buying in bulk so as to have a storeroom of sorts to always be drawing from. The trick, however, is to avoid the temptation to buy at a far more steady pace than I use.

Some of this is rooted in the classic canard that all one needs to fix themselves or figure things out is more stuff; or the parallel yet equally-enticing notion that an event, a trip, or a life will only be made complete by having the right thing. “This vacation will be a disaster unless I am able to get this new jacket before we go,” “I’ll only be able to finish this project if I buy this new computer,” “I won’t be able to truly appreciate my records unless I get these fancy new speakers,” and so on. The notebook thing is similar. Sometimes it’s, “this specific idea needs the right book to not only contain it but express it’s importance,” and sometimes it’s a more generalized “I can only think of myself as a serious writer if I have the exact right notebook to communicate that.” To the world, or to myself? I don’t think it takes supernatural-level insight to know which.

It’s funny that I never, until very recently, traced all of this back to childhood. When we were young, my brothers and I used spiral notebooks to write all of our own short stories, novels, and movie scripts. We also used them to draw individual portraits of our favorite characters (or any character) from Jurassic Park - including, in an act of particularly sad projection, a version of myself as a swagged-out, gold-chain-and-earring-wearing feeding specialist (even in my wildest fantasies, the best I could imagine for myself was food service¹). Our grandmother always referred to these notebooks as our “tablets.”

I struggled for years to find a “system” that worked for me or that fit what I needed. As someone with a lot of disparate ideas and interests, and with a combination of diagnosed OCD and likely more than a mild touch of undiagnosed ADHD, I felt the need to enforce both organization and compartmentalization. This would often manifest in having a separate notebook for each individual idea once it felt “big” enough, though what inevitably happened is that multiple ideas would run out of juice or I would lose interest in them (see the aforementioned ADHD), leaving me with a handful of books in which I had only used a few pages at most; I never wanted to repurpose or keep using them for alternate purposes though, because I didn’t want to feel like I was giving up on any of those ideas.

The other thing that constantly stymied me was picking the perfect notebook - one that was the right size or type for any use of it I could think of. Usually I would think I found the One only to start using it and then quickly found another that felt more right, and then getting so excited about that one that I would hop straight into using it before I finished with the old one, which lead once again to the above problem of having too many half- (at best) or partially finished (at most, in both senses of the phrase) notebooks laying around.

There have also been those that, for one reason or another, have been intentionally left unfinished. When we first discovered the mass on Tiffany’s ovary a couple of years ago, one of the first trips we made was to the store to buy a notebook specifically for writing down questions for the doctors, taking notes at her appointments, and overall journalling and documenting that entire journey. At a certain point, I got so overwhelmed by just trying to navigate that whole ordeal that the documentation fell by the wayside, and that particular book has sat untouched ever since. It’s a lovely one, too - a hardcover faux-level composition sized notebook that I wish I had bought more of because I would love to keep using them but I only got the one and have yet to be able to find more just like it, and it doesn’t feel right to keep using it for other purposes.

I had another notebook that I was using specifically to journal Sammy’s earliest days after birth, the idea being that I would someday gift him a detailed account of the first year or so of his life. A beautiful notion that crashed immediately and head-on into the realities of parenting a newborn, a job which leaves little to no room for such extraneous pursuits no matter how noble they may be.

Regardless, the revelations within these anecdotes are two-fold: at my most vulnerable moments, or in the most important and significant phases of my life, I turn to writing. It’s how I figure out and make sense of the world and even how I most often figure out what I think and how I feel about things. Expressing myself verbally has always been difficult, frustrating, and unsatisfactory to me; when I put pen to paper, everything makes as much sense - sometimes more - than it does in my head. But beyond that, the act of physically writing something down becomes for me a measure of importance and something of a spiritual act. There is something not just lovely but sacrosanct about the memory, weighted as it may be by the context of the time, that one of the first things Tiff and I decided to do in the face of the greatest challenge we’ve faced is go by a notebook together. So that we could write our way through it.

There is also the added dimension, as I creep into middle age, that it helps with memory. I’ve always had a fairly good memory, at least for certain things, and yet the one-two punch of Covid lockdowns and becoming a father has left my entire world for the last five years or so in a complete haze. I implore anyone who asks me to do something or remember something to email or text me because if they do not, I will absolutely forget. I assure them that this isn’t a joke, but a promise. Writing things down has become an invaluable way for me to build back and supplement my memory of late.

So I make no apologies for my arguable over-dependence on notebooks. They are not just records of a life but also talismans. And yet despite this long-standing importance, it has only been recently that I’ve been able to settle on a relationship with them that makes sense for me and embraces their true potential while also alleviating the habit of committing myself to too many at one time and streamlining my overall use.

One of the fixes I tried for this was a brief flirtation with digital notebooks. I bought a used Supernote Nomad that I used quite heavily for the first few weeks or so that I had it. And while I loved that I could create multiple different notebooks for specified uses and scenarios within one single device that could go anywhere with me, I found that the digital note-taking experience - and especially the transfer and retrieval/referencing process - was not ideal. I prefer taking notes in a completely analogue manner - it suits the way my brain functions - and I like being able to quickly flip through pages rather than having to scan or scrub through a series of digital files. This was both after and before I stated trying to write and takes notes on my iPad, which I actually liked better but still ran into some of the same overall issues with digitization, in addition to which I simply do not want to stare at a screen anymore than I absolutely have to these days and I don’t want to have to charge the things I write with or on.

I tried to then port the organizational approach of the digital notebook/iPad to an analogue system - a multi-notebook portfolio that could hold various different books for various different purposes (one for work, one for general notes/ideas, one for newsletter writing, etc.). But even this didn’t really take or feel right for me.

In the end, what I had to do was embrace chaos. I realized that I didn’t want anything that was going to force some kind of organizational method. I’m 42 years old, and thus at a point where rather than try to impose a new way of organizing my world, I have to make my world suit my strengths and adapt to my weaknesses. Better for me to take what’s natural to myself and perfect that than trying to squeeze myself into some external ideal. What ultimately feels best and most natural to me is having one single, messy, chaotic notebook that basically serves as and becomes an extension of my brain.

I talked a bit last week about my fraught relationship with notions of productivity. There is indeed a sub-industry of productivity hackers and productivity influencers that I have been exposed to as I have entered the online notebook/journaling space in search of answers or options - because nothing can be purely a hobby or simply about nourishing one’s soul or deepening us as people, everything must be some kind of hustle or grift or be bent in some way around work and capitalist expectations of production in all senses of the word. What these people finally gave me was a model to work against. While these kinds of hacks may genuinely work for some personality types, I am happy to work in complete opposition to - even in admittedly one-sided antagonism against - such modes of thinking and doing.

My current notebook is a repurposed bamboo sketchbook. I bought a few of these super cheap only to fall for them and realize that there was no reliable way to ever buy them or replicate them again, which is okay because it firther forces me to embrace the above-mentioned messy eclecticism. The way I use it is simple. I write down any and everything that occurs to me as worthy of being written down - every stray idea, phrase, bit of dialogue, etc. - while also using it as necessary to plan out or even write longer pieces, and/or jotting down anything that I feel I will at some point need to reference or remember.

My current notebook in the wild

In short, I use it for everything. I make no attempt at really compartmentalizing, allowing entries and jottings of every type to not only coexist within but sometimes on the same page, much as these disparate thoughts, ideas, and memories co-exist within my brain. Sometimes this is pretty straightforward - work notes with a quick sketch or stray idea/phrase (or drawing of my supervisor and colleague) dashed into the margins:

I’ve also been using it to keep track of progress on the textbook, as well as at times sketching out ideas for chapters or, at the very least, thoughts on organizing pre-existing materials that I’ve written for class within the framework my co-writer and I have devised:

Book notes

Sometimes it means cramming stupid visual jokes or ideas into any available extra blank space:

It also houses not only daily to-do lists but even grocery lists. Note the one entry here that remains un-crossed off, an evergreen conundrum for a working professor who also has a family and a life of his own that he would like to be able to at least partially tend to:

Right alongside full handwritten drafts of newsletter pieces, like this initial version of last week’s post:

There are, as I’ve come to understand, formalized versions of exactly the kind of thing that I’m talking about that have long been used. I’ve seen mention of bullet journals (though have not dug much deeper as they seem to be a bit too structured and dogmatic for my tastes) and commonplace notebooks, which serve as repositories of collected knowledge, quotes, excerpts, etc. I’ve also gotten validation from other people who seem to use methods similar to mine, or who value the use of notebooks in general. I’m not doing or presenting anything new here, though mine may be approached in a more uniquely haphazard way than any of the above.

The other thing I find so valuable about this method is that it keeps everything I write in my notebook completely spontaneous and un-self-conscious. I have tried keeping a more traditional journal or diary, and I have always ended up revolting against the practice because it ends up feeling so constructed - I would write not for myself but for the person I imagined eventually reading it (in my mind no doubt because it had been published or housed in a library’s collection². This is another reason why productivity-based journaling does not appeal to me - if I’m doing it for any reason other than to do it, there’s already a layer of artificiality to it.

As such, I hesitate to say that it keeps me productive, but it does keep me on rails and it fulfills one of the same core functions as this newsletter, which is that it keeps me writing in some form. And when I’m writing regularly, that usually means that I feel more well-adjusted and less anxious or depressed. Even if all I’m writing about is how anxious and depressed I am.

-cs

1. I also used to draw baseball cards of myself, an imagined future only slightly less believable than feeding genetically-engineered dinosaurs for a living.

2. Next to picture of me feeding dinosaurs no doubt.