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Spending 15 bucks on a notebook is the best investment you can make right now

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Re: Spending 15 bucks on a notebook is the best investment you can make right now

#11

Post by jobigoud »

I write between one and ten pages in my journal every day. I quit paper more than ten years ago though. The arguments for analog in the second part of the article are dwarfed by the advantages of digital in my opinion I mean, search? backup? classification? highlighting? filtering?

I think a note-taking system is the type of application that is so close to your mind and so personal that it should evolve with you. For the past two years I've been using my own streamlined/lightweight application. It has a minimalist UI (basically a tree view outliner and a rich text box), a reduced feature set, it is maintenance free, and it grows with me. It is full of personal conventions, shortcuts and whatnot. When I don't have access to it I feel a piece of my brain is missing.

You start developing a system to organize, then you fine-tune it, you find patterns in your own notes and you "officialize" them, turning them into first class organization atoms. When you do that for long enough, it completely diverges from any other persons systems.

Re: Spending 15 bucks on a notebook is the best investment you can make right now

#12

Post by ececconi »

Funny, I use a lot of technology products to systematically track what I do in a structured way: Foursquare, Calendars, Asana, Evernote, Fitbit, etc.

I use a physical journal for exactly the opposite reason. It's my non-systematic way of thinking. What I write in it is unstructured and very personal. I like it because it's what I do, think about, and reflect on when I'm not thinking about the boundaries of the system I'm recording something in.

Re: Spending 15 bucks on a notebook is the best investment you can make right now

#14

Post by zzalpha »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #9

This article seems more about logging what you do, not about buying a physical notebook. The medium chosen is irrelevant without a system. I know plenty of people at work who keep all of their notes on random notebooks, but they're not at all organized. Some of them quite literally just turn to the first clean sheet of paper within the notebook to jot down notes about the program they're working on, the meeting they…

Well, there is one clear benefit to a notebook: studies indicate it results in better long-term retention in memory. For example:

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/22/095679761452...

Now, personally, I actually use a mix. I'm in a managerial position, so my work tends to be divided between longer-term goals and interrupt-driven activities. For the former, I keep a list in Vim (https://github.com/aaronbieber/vim-quicktask).

For the latter, I write them down on physical paper.

I won't claim there's any merit to this system, it just happens to work for me.

Incidentally, I wouldn't dismiss things like "mindfulness" so easily. "Mindfulness" is more easily understood as concentrating and focusing on the task at hand, doing it with care and deliberation. There's something to be said for the slower, more methodical process of physical writing (and may be linked to those memory retention results I mentioned previously).

For example, it's one of the reasons I tend to do focused reading on paper, away from the computer. That is, if I'm reading a technical paper, analyzing a report, etc, even if I have a digital copy, I tend to print it out, leave my computer behind, and read it in a quiet place where I can be "mindful" of the process of reading without distraction.

Re: Spending 15 bucks on a notebook is the best investment you can make right now

#15

Post by zzalpha »

runj__ wrote: post #6

I've had a Moleskine notebook in my bag for the past 4 years, it was just this year I started using it almost every day. TODO:s, quick calculations, poems, the start of a novel. The feeling of pen to paper is difficult to compare to anything else. I enjoy writing on a good keyboard as well but it really is two different kinds of writing. Finding a good pen was difficult since I am prone to losing things and didn't wa…

On pens: don't balk at spending money on a good one. Like you, I have traditionally had a history of losing pens. Like, all the time.

But after writing with my boss' fountain pen, I was so enamoured with the thing I went and bought a Lamy Al-Star. As far as fountain pens go it's cheap, but it's still a $60 pen.

And guess what happened? I started being a hell of a lot more thoughtful about where I put the thing. After all, it's a $60 pen. You're a lot more careful with a $60 pen. :)

Re: Spending 15 bucks on a notebook is the best investment you can make right now

#16

Post by jeremysmyth »

matwood wrote: post #8

I agree with the points, but not for $15. Spiral notebooks are ~$1? I have a stack of spiral notebooks journaling my workouts going back almost 10 years at this point.

...and I've a stack of spiral notebooks jotting my daily notes going back about 15. Any phone call, I take a couple of lines of notes. Any meeting, there's another few lines (or a few pages depending).

Flight numbers, names of people I speak to, todo items, commitments, it's all there. Usually things end up getting transferred to something else (a planner, a contacts application, my multi-kb "notes.txt" file), but that first scribble doesn't need me to handle lockscreens or login passwords or bootup time, and it might be exactly the sort of thing I need to pull me out of trouble weeks, months, or years later.

Re: Spending 15 bucks on a notebook is the best investment you can make right now

#18

Post by DvdMgr »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #9

This article seems more about logging what you do, not about buying a physical notebook. The medium chosen is irrelevant without a system. I know plenty of people at work who keep all of their notes on random notebooks, but they're not at all organized. Some of them quite literally just turn to the first clean sheet of paper within the notebook to jot down notes about the program they're working on, the meeting they…

(I'm the author of the article)

This is the comment that most gets to the point. The blog post was about writing, not about giving Moleskine all of your money. The introductory and conclusive sections are independent of the tool one uses to keep records and logs, and those are the main points I wanted to get across. In hindsight, I have to admit the title I chose is misguiding.

The medium really should be one's own, very personal choice. In the article, I tried to justify my choice with the reasons that work _for me_. I've tried going digital many different times, but I like the directness of a notebook too much, and I tend to get distracted easily by flashy icons on the screen. A system is only as good as one's ability to use it.

Re: Spending 15 bucks on a notebook is the best investment you can make right now

#19

Post by DvdMgr »

zzalpha wrote: post #14
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #9

This article seems more about logging what you do, not about buying a physical notebook. The medium chosen is irrelevant without a system. I know plenty of people at work who keep all of their notes on random notebooks, but they're not at all organized. Some of them quite literally just turn to the first clean sheet of paper within the notebook to jot down notes about the program they're working on, the meeting they…

Well, there is one clear benefit to a notebook: studies indicate it results in better long-term retention in memory. For example: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/22/095679761452... Now, personally, I actually use a mix. I'm in a managerial position, so my work tends to be divided between longer-term goals and interrupt-driven activities. For the former, I keep a list in Vim ( https://github.com/aaronbieb…

That's an interesting article.

The point you make about mindfulness is exactly what I wanted to express, just written in a much clearer way. Thanks for the comment!

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