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

magr.in

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

#6

Post by runj__ »

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 want to spend astronaut money on something I would just misplace. I'm using a Muji 0.5mm black gel pen right now which really suits my needs.

The way the ink flows out when you keep the pen to the paper for a bit, how it shows where you took a moment to think. How thin strokes shows how you wrote something in a hurry. Black boxes throughout where I decided on a different word or spelling. Pen and paper shows the work and tells more of the story.

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

#7

Post by hoopism »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #5

Why do all these Moleskine and fancy pen lovers have to sound like fucking Patrick Bateman? Jesus.

I write crap on my hands.

If it's real important I email myself a reminder.

It doesn't looks cool at parties and coffee shops... but my laundry gets done and I usually remember my wife's birthday.

I wish I could placebo myself into believing a fancy notebook would make me a better version of myself... I am sure it works for a lot of people... I have tried... I feel like an idiot trying to find reasons to write crap down.

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

#9

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

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 were just in, their grocery shopping list, etc. If I ask them about it an hour later they will spend a few minutes flipping through the notebook to find it, if they find it.

By contrast, I keep a daily log of everything I'm working on with a series of time-stamped Notepad files in a "Work Logs" folder on my work laptop. That's the system I developed after about two weeks working here, and four years later I can still open up stuff from 2011 if I need to. The fact that it's in plain text makes it easy to search through the directory as well for words or phrases.

I'm not saying my method is better than what the author has chosen, it works for me. It could easily be an Evernote notebook if I felt like it, provided that there was some organization method. That is its functional value. Everything else that the article seems to dwell on--tactile feedback, "mindfulness", the tangible growth of the journal as you fill out more pages--these all seem geared towards simply making you feel productive rather than actually be productive.

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