In a cardboard box under my desk there are twenty-two notebooks, filled over twenty years. They are not beautiful. Some have coffee rings, one has a cracked spine from being sat on in a train station, and a few have pages I cannot bear to reread. If the house were on fire, I am slightly ashamed to say that the box would be the first thing I carried out.
I should say what the notebooks are not. They are not diaries, though they contain days. They are not productivity systems, though they have held a great many lists. And they are certainly not profound. They are simply a place to put things down before they disappear, and over two decades that modest function has turned out to be one of the most useful habits I have.
Lower the bar until you can step over it
The notebook that gets used is the one with no standards. I made this mistake early, buying handsome books with thick paper and then freezing in front of them, convinced that anything I wrote had to be worthy of the binding. Those notebooks stayed mostly empty.
Now I use cheap ones, and I give myself permission to be useless in them. Half-sentences are welcome. So are lists of errands, arguments I lost, the name of a book someone mentioned on a train, and long angry paragraphs I would never show anyone. The only rule is that I write the date at the top. The lowest possible bar is the one you will actually clear every day.
What goes in
People ask what to write, as though there were a correct answer. There is not, but over the years I have noticed that certain things earn their place again and again.
- Observations: a sentence overheard, a thing I saw, a detail that made me stop
- Questions I do not yet know how to answer
- Fragments of arguments, written down before I forget why I believed them
- Things I have read, with a line on why they mattered
- Decisions, with the reason, so my future self can check my reasoning
- The small embarrassments and stray feelings I would otherwise lose by evening
The last category is more valuable than it sounds. A feeling written down within an hour of having it is a primary source. A feeling remembered a month later is a story.
Two kinds of pages
I have come to see that I write two quite different sorts of pages. The first is capture: quick, messy, unedited, written at speed in whatever space is available. The second is thinking: slower, usually at a desk, where I am trying to work something out by writing it down and discover what I think in the act of putting it into sentences.
Capture feeds thinking. A week’s worth of scattered notes will often contain, if I read them together, a pattern I had not noticed while I was living through them. I do not decide in advance which kind of page I am writing. I only notice, afterwards, which one it became.
The point of writing it down is not to remember it. It is to stop carrying it.
Reread it, or it is only a habit
For years I filled notebooks and almost never opened them again. Writing felt like the whole job. Then one winter I spent a weekend rereading three years of pages in order, and I understood what I had been missing. The notebook is not mainly a record. It is a way of listening to yourself over time.
Now I do a short review at the end of each month. I read the past few weeks with a pencil, mark anything that still seems true or interesting, and copy the best handful of lines onto a single page at the back. It takes twenty minutes. Almost every idea I have been proud of in the last decade started life as an ignored line that I rediscovered during one of those reviews.
A word about paper
I am not a purist about this. I have used apps, and I still use one for lists and for anything I need to search. But for thinking, I keep returning to paper, and I think I know why. A notebook has no notifications, no other tabs, and no way to be anything except what it is. It cannot ask for my attention. It can only receive it.
Paper also slows the hand to roughly the speed of thought, which is a useful speed. When I type, I tend to capture. When I write by hand, I tend to decide.
A page from the box
To make this concrete, here is the sort of page I mean. It is dated a Tuesday in March, years ago, and it is not impressive. At the top, in hurried handwriting: “Why do I always rewrite the opening last?” Below it, a list of three groceries and the name of a plumber. Then half a page about a conversation with my sister that left me unsettled, ending with the line, “I think I was defensive because she was right.”
I would never have remembered that last sentence. The conversation itself has gone entirely. But the sentence is still useful, because it records the moment I noticed something about myself, and I have seen versions of it in my notebooks ever since. A notebook is the only reliable record of the quiet realisations that do not become events.
A first month, if you are starting from zero
If you have never kept one, the main danger is overcomplicating it. Here is the plan I give friends who ask, and it has worked for most of them.
- Buy the cheapest notebook you can find, plus a pen you like. Nothing precious.
- Write the date at the top of a new page every day, even if you write nothing else.
- For the first week, write three lines: something you saw, something you thought, something you want to remember.
- In the second week, add one question you do not know how to answer.
- In the third week, reread everything and underline one line you are glad to have.
- In the fourth week, copy those underlined lines onto the last page, and decide whether to continue.
Most people continue. Not because they were told to, but because somewhere in the third week they discover that their own earlier notes are interesting company, and that is a discovery that tends to stick.
What a notebook teaches you about yourself
After twenty years the most surprising thing in the box is how consistent I am. The same worries recur in different clothes. The same small pleasures show up year after year. I had always thought of myself as someone who changes quickly, and the notebooks politely disagree.
They have also taught me that most of what felt urgent, at the time, was not. I can read an entry from a decade ago describing a crisis in the most vivid terms, and I cannot remember what the crisis was. That is oddly consoling. It makes the current crisis a little easier to carry.
If you do not keep a notebook, start with the cheapest one you can find, and write the date at the top of the first page. Then put something down, anything, and do the same tomorrow. In a few years you will have a box of your own, and you will understand why I would carry it out of a fire.
