Summer 2024. I’ve gone back to writing in a notebook.
On May 28, someone posted a deal from meh.com in a Slack channel at work about a sale on the Panda Planner by Rocketbook. I’d heard of Rocketbook during my recent obsession with e-ink writing devices, but this was an opportunity to check them out for $20 and maybe get a handle on my day-to-day better at the same time.
I bought one on-line and while waiting for it to be delivered, I bought another one, a plain Rocketbook Core, at Target. I also bought a bunch of colored Frixion pens. For a week, the novelty of writing again was intoxicating. My penmanship sucked, but I was able to erase my mistakes and scan the finished notes as a PDF into Google Drive.
Writing in a notebook reminded me of a time when I used to keep all my notes in a notebook. I’d abandoned those notebooks years ago after getting frustrated that I couldn’t find my handwritten information as easily as I could find notes I typed in some system on the computer.
Knowing full well that I had no intention of abandoning my digital notes that have taken so long to cultivate, I was, however, able to identify a gap in my system that writing my hand could potentially fill. The ubiquitous capture.
I went back through my bookshelf and found all the notebooks I used to keep and was disheartened by how many notebooks I started and abandoned. Spiral notebooks with 10 pages of notes. Composition notebooks with post-it bookmarks and an index system, but barely any content. A couple hard-bound journals with clever pockets and ribbon bookmarks. The elastic closure band had dry-rotted and lost its elasticity long ago. I took the time to hand-number the pages back then and one particular Picadilly Essentials started on page 29. The exposed spine glue inside reminded me that I’d ripped out those first 28 pages at some point. Lost forever. I don’t remember why. Even so, there was still about 1/3 of the book filled with notes from two jobs ago and several personal observations.
There is some type of weird integrity that bound notebooks have that plain, spiral notebooks do not.
Since my handwriting was abysmal, I decided to pull that notebook off the shelf and doodle in it. I certainly couldn’t make it any worse. Understanding the fragility of the Frixion pens (they disappear with heat), I picked up an 8-pack of my old, favorites: the Pilot G2. I wrote some pointless notes and drew faces. I doodled and make remarks about the notes that were still in there from 7 years ago.
When the Panda Planner arrived I spent an hour or so filling it in. I liked the idea of another calendar for some reason. Try as I might, I’ve never been able to mesh my personal Google calendar and my Outlook work calendar into a “single pane of glass”. This would be an opportunity for me to jot down the important events from both in a single place. Not every event needed to go in here – I still have the web-based calendars after all.
After the calendars, the Panda planner went off in some guided sheets for projects and habit tracking. Spaces for daily plans and weekly goals. There’s even a page with a “Commitment” that you sign and date promising to meet your goals and forgive your failures. This was a bit overwhelming for me. Not the commitment as much as all the structure. You’d think that someone with no structure at all would be happy to be given a guide to follow, but it felt restrictive to me.
I set the planner aside and used the inspiration to mock up a calendar in the bound notebook I was now calling my “Idea Farm”. Since the notebook is only 5″x8″ I was restricted to how much space I could devote, but managed a completely acceptable two-page per week spread where I could copy just the important events from work and personal calendars and jot notes and to-do’s that didn’t merit being in my electronic systems.
I counted the number of blank pages in the notebook and decided I had enough to potentially keep this system up for 6 months, through the end of the year. I identified another section that I could use for just random notes and thought it might be fun to keep my notes color-coded. Black for work notes, blue for personal notes. I may not always have my pens with me, so I’m not stuck to this system, but as long as I have all these colored pens, why not use them?
Now that notebooks had graduated to my latest obsession, I started binging notebook and journaling videos on YouTube. The YouTube algorithm worked it’s magic and fed me more recommendations than I could possibly watch.
I’ve noticed that girls make videos about beautiful bullet-journals and guys make videos about messy pocket notebooks.
After seeing the video recommendations so often, I returned to my bookshelf of unused (and partially used) notebooks and dug out a pocket notebook with notes from 2015 in the first ten pages or so. A buddy of mine gifted me a Fisher Space Pen last year, and I’ve been carrying it in my wallet every place I go. A notebook about the same size as my phone (but thinner) will be easy to carry. It’s yet to be known if this will improve my life or even be useful, but it can’t hurt.
Since I’ve been visiting that shelf of abandoned notebooks recently, I’ve taken the time to go through them and marvel at how long I’ve been keeping a journal of some kind.
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- The first journal entry in my collection of notebooks is from Oct 18, 1981. I was 12. I copied some inspirational quotes and logged my high scores on Asteroids. That notebook contains entries all the way up until 1986.
- I kept another notebook from the summer before my senior year in 1986 until the summer of 1987. That notebook is painful. You don’t write about happiness too much in high school, I guess.
- From 1997 to 2009 I kept an electronic journal very sporadically. A total of 32 entries in that time. Some page-long screeds and some only a few lines.
- From 2005-2009 I had a blog where I posted 52 entries before archiving them and taking down the blog. (But I kept the posts!)
- On Nov 12, 2009 I had an oil leak in my car. That car had been the bane of my existence for years up to that point and this latest issue was my breaking point. Rather than rant and go beat the shit out of the car with a baseball bat, I wrote about it. That journal entry was the beginning of a daily ritual for over a year. I made an entry every day and found that it suited me. I kept one file per year from 2009 through 2020. Eventually, I stopped writing every day, but I still made several entries a month when I complained or celebrated what was going on in my life at the time.
- In 2015, I’d read about bullet journaling and decided to give it a try. While I never stuck with the bullet journal method, to this day I write several bullet points about each day in a file. The “daylog” ran concurrently with my yearly Journals until 2020 when I stopped journaling but maintained “daylogging”. I’ve maintained a daily file of events and thoughts ever since.