Why I still carry a paper notebook

I own fourteen notebooks that I have filled, and one that I am pretending to fill. They live on a shelf above my desk, spines out, each with a date range on a strip of masking tape. The oldest begins in March 2016. It starts with a grocery list and a phone number I can no longer attach to a person.

People ask whether this is nostalgia. I would like it to be nostalgia, because nostalgia is cheap and sort of pleasant. The truth is less romantic. I carry a paper notebook because it is the only note-taking tool I have used that does not try to improve me.

What it does not do

It does not sync. It does not suggest a tag. It does not notice that I wrote “call dentist” three Tuesdays in a row and offer to make it recurring. If I want to know I have been avoiding the dentist, I have to look at the page and feel it.¹

1 I did go. It was fine. The dentist was unmoved by my three weeks of suffering.

It also does not have a search box, which I used to consider its main flaw. I now think of that as the load-bearing feature. When I cannot search, I have to remember roughly where a thing lives, and remembering roughly where a thing lives turns out to be most of what remembering is. I know the idea about the kitchen shelves is on a right-hand page, in blue ink, near a coffee ring. That is not a retrieval system. It is a map, and I drew it by living there.²

2 The kitchen idea was to take the doors off the upper cabinets. We did. I mention this only so you know the notebook sometimes wins.

The numbers, such as they are

A standard notebook for me holds about 190 pages and lasts roughly seven months. That works out to a little under a page a day, which sounds heroic until you admit that a third of those pages are lists, and another third are me working out whether to buy a different notebook.

I have tried the thin ones. I have tried the ones with dot grids, the ones with numbered pages, the ones with a ribbon and a pocket in the back cover. The pocket gets used once, for a receipt, and then holds that receipt until the book ends. I now buy the plainest ruled book I can find, with a cover that does not mind being sat on.

What I actually write

Mostly this:

• the day’s one or two things that must happen, written the night before
• sentences I overheard and liked, with no context
• half an idea, usually underlined twice, which I will not understand later
• sums, because I check my arithmetic on paper and trust it more

The last one surprised me. Long division by hand is slow, and the slowness is why I get it right. On a phone, I tap in the numbers, accept the answer and move on. On paper, I know the answer by the time the calculator would have told me, because my hand has been in the problem.

The cost

There is a cost, and I should name it so you do not think I am selling something. Paper is heavy in a bag. Paper is not backed up, and a notebook left on a train is a small bereavement. Paper cannot hold a photograph, and paper cannot be shared with a person on the other side of the country at three in the afternoon on a Thursday.

So I keep a second system, a folder of plain text files, for the things that need to travel. I will write about that another time. The point is that the notebook is not a replacement for anything. It is the place where I think before I decide what deserves to be kept anywhere.

Most of what I write down is never needed again. I used to find that depressing. Now it seems like the right ratio. A notebook is a place to be wrong cheaply, and if I only wrote things worth keeping, I would write almost nothing, and I would think almost nothing too.

Starting

If you want to try this, do not buy the good one first. Buy something you would not mind ruining and carry it for a month. Write the date at the top of each day. When you find you have nothing to say, write that.

By the end of the month you will know whether paper is for you. You will also know, and this is the useful part, how much of your day you were willing to leave unrecorded. I did not enjoy that number the first time I saw it. I have come to think it is the more honest one.