On Notebooks and Thinking Better Thoughts

I recently bought a few spiral-bound notebooks from Muji - two for work, and two for personal use. My intention for the personal notebooks was to use them as a destination for inconsequential thoughts, schemes, grocery lists, todo lists, and so on. In digital note-taking software these are often called 'fleeting notes'.

Here are some examples of what I've actually been using the personal notebook for:

• Taking notes on texts I've been reading, specifically The Miracle of Mindfulness, I May Be Wrong, and On the Shortness of Life.
• A mathematical look at how organizations develop over time.
• The link between mindfulness in the sense of accepting reality and strategy: "If you know the enemy and yourself, you need not fear the result of 100 battles."
• The basic ideas for this article!

Why is it that something as simple as recording fleeting thoughts on paper, rather than on a computer, has improved the quality of those thoughts? It's true that I have paid more attention to the content of my thoughts recently, because I've been reading about mindfulness. And it's also true that I've made an effort to reduce distractions, and that a physical notebook inherently has less risk of distraction than anything on a computer. But I think there are more fundamental psychological reasons for the power of my little notebooks.

For most people, our minds are busy and lack structure. They respond to the impressions that we have minute-by-minute and rarely stay focused on a single topic for more than a couple of minutes. Many of these thoughts are trivial: "Hey, I could use an ice cream." I suspect that I have an especially busy and chaotic mind compared to the average, because I've lived with moderate to severe anxiety since I was a kid.

One of the goals and gifts of mindfulness is to learn to observe your thoughts but not take them too seriously. If you have a notebook near you and you are paying attention to your thoughts, then you can be a little selective about what you write down. Unless you're practicing free writing, then the process of writing forces you to curate and structure your thoughts. I think this is especially true with a physical notebook, since very few people can write on paper as quickly as they can think. When reading, the thoughts are coming from a text rather than our own minds, but we are still free to pause and take notes on the most compelling areas.

If our notes seem interesting enough, we might decide to organize them into structured texts. That doesn't necessarily mean long-form writing, but placing the notes into a broader context. When I was studying my master's degree I'd call this composting, because I'd take citations, my own narration, and other such 'trash' - and dump them into a single document, which would progressively become more structured.

The structure can emerge over a period of weeks, months, or even years. The act of organization is what's interesting, and it's what computers excel at. Tags, bookmark lists, filesystems, hyperlinks - all are excellent tools for taking unstructured information and turning it into something more coherent. These allow us to go from our notes to a personal knowledge management system. Some people will go further and adhere to the full Zettelkasten method, or build a private wiki with software like Dokuwiki.

Once we've let our thoughts mature for a while, we'll want to produce something for other people to look at, an artifact. For me this is typically a toot, an article, or some code or technical design. For other people, it could be anything from a strategy memo to a craft project. The production of artifacts is somewhat out of the scope of this article, because they're domain-specific - a YouTube video is not an academic paper, which is not a Lego design.

I think of this like a pipeline: my brain takes in stimuli from the world and produces thoughts from those phenomena. By taking fleeting notes from the more interesting thoughts, I record ideas. Later, I can organize these ideas in my personal knowledge management system¹. Once the process of organizing my thoughts on some subject has reached a decent stage of maturity, I can produce artifacts like articles, code, or technical designs.

For the last year, I've been expanding my use of self-hosting and centralizing documents from various different sources onto services I control. This has great benefits for searchability and organization - I don't need to wonder about where important documents are, because they can only be in one place, which can easily be searched. Therefore, around 6 months ago I decided to stop using paper for personal notes. The main result of this was that I didn't take any personal notes.

Of course, that wasn't my intention. The mistake I made was to try to skip the fleeting notes stage of the process and impose structure before I had raw material. Writing fleeting thoughts into a knowledge management system encourages trying to force structure on them, rather than letting organic structures grow. Another version of this mistake which I've made before is to buy a big, fancy notebook and immediately become terrified of sullying it with substandard thoughts, which is why I now prefer plain spiral-bound notebooks.

Perhaps the biggest mistake of all is the idea that technical solutions can replace the slow and considered human mind. My experience with the notebooks is just one example of how traditional and 'outdated' technologies can often work better than the latest toys.