For most of my adult life I was convinced I had a good memory. I didn’t bother writing things down because I was sure I’d remember them. I was wrong — not dramatically wrong, not in the way that costs you a job or a relationship, but wrong in the small, everyday way that means you lose ideas before they can become anything.
The notebook fixed that.
Starting Small
I didn’t begin with any system. No bullet journaling, no Zettelkasten, no elaborate colour-coding scheme. I bought a plain A5 notebook and started writing whatever was in my head at the end of each day. Some of it was mundane — a meeting that ran long, a song I liked, something I ate. Some of it surprised me.
The surprising thing about writing things down is that it makes you notice what you actually think, as opposed to what you assume you think. There’s a difference. When a thought stays inside your head it tends to feel more settled, more complete, than it really is. The moment you try to put it into words you see the gaps.
“I write to find out what I think.” — Joan Didion
That quote used to feel like a cliché to me. Now it feels like a precise description of a process.
What I Actually Write
The notebook isn’t a diary in the traditional sense. I don’t recount the events of the day in sequence. I write about whatever I’m turning over in my mind — a book I’m reading, a problem I’m stuck on, something someone said that I can’t stop thinking about.
I also write down things I want to remember: links I plan to follow up on, fragments of conversations, the exact wording of a sentence I read that hit me in a particular way.
There are whole pages I’ll never read again. That’s fine. The act of writing them mattered more than preserving them.
What It’s Changed
Keeping a notebook hasn’t made me more productive in the measurable sense. I don’t close more tasks or ship more things because of it. What it has done is make my thinking less scattered. Ideas that used to evaporate now get captured early, before they fully form. When I return to them later, I have something to work with.
It’s also made me a better reader. Knowing that I might write about something I’m reading makes me read more carefully. I’m more likely to stop and ask what I actually think about an argument, rather than sliding over it.
A Note on Tools
I’ve tried digital equivalents — Obsidian, Notion, Apple Notes — and I always come back to paper. There’s something about the friction of handwriting that slows me down in a useful way. I can’t type a sentence and then immediately delete it before I’ve even finished reading it back.
That said, I do keep a small digital capture inbox for things that arrive on my phone. The rule is simple: anything worth keeping gets transferred to the notebook within a day or two, in my own words. Transcription forces me to re-engage with the idea instead of just archiving it.
If you’ve been meaning to start writing things down and haven’t, the only advice I have is: start uglier than you think you should. The notebook doesn’t care about your handwriting or your structure or whether your entries are worth reading. It just holds what you give it.