I’m a big notebook fan. I can walk into a stationery store and feel an urge to buy a nice notebook or a good pen. I’ve always liked books in general, and writing. One of my yet-unfulfilled dreams is to build a writer’s cabin where I can think and write without distractions.
I recently read The notebook, a post published by my friend and fellow blogger Glyn Normington. He describes his relation to notebooks (the kind that is made of paper). It made me think about why I no longer use notebooks.
I used to use notebooks a lot, both for personal journaling and for professional note-taking. My drawers are full of old notebooks with notes of various kinds.1 But somewhere along the path, I stopped using notebooks. Before reading Glyn’s post, I hadn’t really stopped and reflected on it.
I think there are number of reasons why I moved away from physical notebooks.
I can type much faster on a keyboard than with a pen. That means that the distance from thought to words becomes smaller when I write at a computer. When writing on physical paper, I often feel limited by my hand-writing speed.
Physical notebooks are not searchable. I often found myself looking for an earlier note, browsing through the pages of my notebook searching for that thing I remember writing. On a computer I can just hit Cmd-F and fire away.
It is hard to link notes together in physical notebooks. I guess you can use page numbers to refer from one page to another, but being able to add a link to another related topic is very powerful.
It is easier to add links to external web pages or attach a photograph taken with my phone.
These points actually apply to both personal journaling and professional note-taking. In my profession as a software developer, I’ve built a kind of “personal knowledge-base” which contains ideas, links, and quotes of all kinds, bound together with a lot of links.
On the personal journaling side, I often find myself wanting to add tags or topics to journaling notes. If I write about how I feel about a particular aspect of my life, it is interesting to be able to go back to earlier notes on the same subject.
Today, most of my writing is done in Obsidian. I have found it to be a very nice tool for any kind of writing, with a very nice Markdown-powered live-view editor, and powerful support for linking and tagging. And with its wide array of plugins, it can be extended to do almost anything.
I keep my personal journal in Obsidian as well as my professional notes. I write this web page though Obsidian. I keep my recipes and training log. Pretty much anything text-based goes into Obsidian.
One area where a physical notebook shines is for diagrams, graphs, or anything else that is not basic text. To be honest, I still find myself looking for a piece of paper every now and then. And in a group setting, I think a whiteboard is very hard to beat. With that said, I’ve found Excalidraw to be a very nice tool. It makes digital sketching easy and has a nice “hand drawn” look to it. And as a bonus, it can be integrated into Obsidian.
My preferred notebook is an A5 dotted notebook from Swedish company Whitelines. Instead of having a white paper with darker lines, Whitelines pages are very light gray, with white lines. That makes them easy on the eye, and easily scannable or photographed because the lines “disappear”. They are available in lined, squared, and dotted versions. My favorite is the dotted one. It is the perfect combination of everything. You can use the dots as lines when you need to, can use them as squares if you want to draw a graph, or just ignore them if you want to draw on free hand.
This is an example of the squared version, not the dotted, but I think the picture does a good job of capturing the look of the notebooks.↩︎
