Newsletter - Some of my notebooks

📍 Location: Bay Area, CA

Well, it’s 2025. I feel like we might as well call it 1925, depending on your outlook in present day events. I skipped January due to feeling extremely stressed out that I couldn’t concentrate on writing. I had two ideas for newsletters ready to go, but the feeling of general malaise and outrage quickly quelled any creative spark. Which is a shame because I think those of the times in which I love to engage the creative side. Take care everyone in these trying times, and maybe next time we talk about how to cope together.

Notebooks

My wife, brother-in-law, and I visited The Gilded Page, a bookstore in Tarpon Springs, Florida. I found a lovely yellow notebook with very nice binding. I decided this was going to be my ideas journal. It’s not necessarily a commonplace book more than it’s a place for mulling and musing about with ideas. I keep a very extensive personal knowledge manager digitally, which I can talk about in the future, so I leave the physical books to something I want to slow down about and think through.

The first step with any notebook that I’ve found is to personalize it. I’ve been thinking about this idea from Van Neistat’s camera rituals where he engraves his new cameras, gives them a name, and builds a mount into it. Recently, the idea clicked when I saw examples of Austin Kleon’s notebooks.

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Looking at my notebook, I dedicated the first page to writing down the purpose of the notebook. I love manifestos, and I put it in the style of one so it felt more personal. The next thing I did was make a table of contents on the next page, so I can index and easily find any page. Then I started numbering the next few pages before breaking it in. I think this ritual helps me solidify this is mine, and not a sacred object. I have many unused notebooks at home (and my wife has more) because we are scared about ruining them. Which is crazy because we own them and can do whatever we want to them. That’s why I wanted to break them in where it can be approachable and not a sacred item to build dust on the bookshelf.

Beyond the idea notebook are my pocket notebooks and my diary. The pocket notebook is my scratch paper. I loved scratch paper as a kid. The process of writing something down helps me remember. I think it has to do with the act because I devoted a chunk of my life to learning fingering for playing the piano. This can be tasks, diagramming, doodling, and a broad stroke of other items.

The other notebook is my diary. I choose to use a Leuchtturm 1917 pocket-sized blank-page notebook because it doesn’t smear as much as Moleskines and has a nice hardback cover. I have been using diaries consistently since 2010 (although I took a break during COVID-19). In more recent times, the journal has become more personal for inner thoughts, and the ideas notebook acts more as a stand-in for the commonplace notebook. Prior to my ideas notebook and journal were one in the same. I loved to keep it all together. And now I love having these things separate because there’s a little bit of joy having different personalized notebooks for different purposes. Even if there are mistakes inside of them.

What’s been in my information diet?

I’ve returned to a regular cadence with books in January. I finished reading The Editor a biography of Judith Jones, Meditations for Mortals, and the Productivity Field Guide. I started reading The Serviceberry and An Immense World, because I need something more uplifting in life than the direction US politics have taken us down. All of the books I’ve read I recommend, and hoping to get more fiction in later this year.

For the newsletter archive, check out Newsletter Series. For this specific series, check out the Newsletter: Season Four .

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