Spending 15 bucks on a notebook is the best investment you can make right now
magr.in
magr.in
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.
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.
The point you make about mindfulness is exactly what I wanted to express, just written in a much clearer way. Thanks for the comment!
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.