Feb. 4, 2025
I’m an avid collector of small notebooks. So much so that I have a box full of them in my office. I’m not afraid of writing in them, it’s just that I’ve bought so many over the years I can’t get through them quick enough.
The mania began with Field Notes shortly after I got back from South America. That trip made me hyperaware of the need for a notebook that was always with you. Fortunately, when travelling a camera can often take the place of a notebook. It allows you to capture the moment, though not always the exact thought going through your head when you presser the shutter down.
And it can really help to capture thoughts rather than just things or scenes. It is well known that human vision captures a totally different scene to a camera lens and often a scene will look totally different to the memory when you come to look at your photos later. (Great photographers know this and have some innate sense of how to frame a scene as though an observer.) So capturing thoughts - the why of the scene as well as the what - can be more useful than a photograph, or useful in a different way.
Lately though, I don’t seem to be out and about that much. My job is very much deskbound and beholden to a majority in my team who don’t like to come to the office. So I’m stuck at home and sedentary. But there’s still a use for the little notebooks. Growing weary of the array of post-it notes stuck along the bottom of my monitor, I decided to collate the content of them into one of my notebooks.
It’s been a nice way to make sure I actually act on my post-it notes too. All too often I would let them linger, but now with the notebook I can intentionally review them instead of waiting for the light glue to wear off so much that it becomes impossible to stick it back up. In that scenario, I’d often decide that I didn’t need to keep the information and screw it up for the cat to play with. (Martok loves a slightly sticky post-it paper ball, something about the stickiness makes it a better bit of prey.)
Of course, now the problem I have is what to do with all these blocks of Post-it notes!