After I finished up my core engineering classes in college a few years ago, I pretty much stopped using a notebook all together. To be fair, that’s not a complete shocker since my background is in computer science and I spend a ton of time stuck debugging in IntelliJ or solving merge conflicts. But I think I was an outlier even as a tech oriented person. To me, it never made sense to have a pen (which I always seem to misplace) and paper near me when I had the comfort of a google doc and iCloud notes.
Recently, however, I went from not having a pen in my backpack to having three notebooks I carry around. Why the dramatic change?
In the last two months, I’ve been spending a ton of time optimizing my routines, work styles, health, etc. (check out my post on tracking habits). A lot was changing in my life all at once and I started feeling more and more lost everyday through the rough patch. I started forming this toxic relationship of trying to plan everything out in a new google doc or starting a fresh life template on notion every few weeks. And tbh, it wasn’t working at all. I lost track of why I made any specific doc. I had like 7 different todo lists across my devices. I could never seem to find what I needed when I needed it.
Overall, it became obvious to me that I needed to hit refresh on the way I was approaching organization, creativity, and reflection. I decided I wanted to use my laptop solely for “work” purposes. There was a clear need for some partition between things I needed to get done vs things helping me get those things done. So, I went to the garage and pulled out three fresh notebooks. One was for for journaling, another for tacking daily goals/todo, and the last as a scratchpad. I didn’t have high expectations going in, but I did promise myself that I would try this method out for at least a month.
And as you probably guessed, it made my life significantly better. Each notebook has helped me declutter my mind and buy some time back.
Journaling every morning before doing any work has helped me force thoughts out of my head that are bothering me subtly. It’s pretty much giving your brain a chance to take a morning shit and feel lighter before you go about the day.
After journaling, I’ll go ahead and look at the todo notebook to see what I had left from the day before and create a fresh list. The benefits of having a list is pretty obvious so I won’t waste words selling the idea. One key benefit that I noticed was that the literal act of looking away from my computer and picking up a pen to cross out a task brought me a ton of joy. It also helped reinforce that things were getting done throughout the day which kept my stress level a lot lower than usual. Lastly, seeing my tasks on paper in once place makes it a million times easier to prioritize.
And then, for the remaining of the day, I keep my scratchpad right next to me in which I’ll write down anything that comes to my head while I’m working. It could be an unrelated question or a doubt I have about another task or even a sketch to describe a random epiphany I had. My main critique of the scratchpad so far is that I don’t actually come back and look at anything I write. Maybe I could form a system once a week where I review, but that seems a bit too structured for my taste. It’ll probably be the case that once I use the pad for long enough, there will be a thought that I remember which maps out to a previous entry. As of now, I’m treating it like a messy knowledge base.
But the thing that surprised me the most about adapting to the notebook trifecta lifestyle was the fact that it made my time working on the laptop a heck of a lot more efficient and fun! Simply put, I don’t dread opening up my mac in the morning because I go into whatever task with a lot more confidence. Before, when I would be trying to do everything on my laptop, there would be no clear distinction with what’s going on. That would lead to anxiety on my ability to complete the tasks. Which would lead to fear of failure on screwing up x, y, and z. Now, I feel a lot more productive and comfortable as I get things done and best of all…I only have 2 windows open versus the 17 I had before chrome blew up and restarted.