There are three (note)books I (try to) carry with me and write in daily:
1) SPIRAL NOTEBOOK
For Journaling
For daily journaling, brain-dumping, and morning pages I rely on good old-fashioned spiral-bound school-purposed notebooks. I love their big size. I love how easily-accessible they are in supermarkets and drugstores. I love their familiarity. I love how they open and lay flat and the cover and used-up-pages can be turned all the way over and behind the fresh pages forming one solid tablet with a firm hard surface. I love that the spiral notebook does not put on airs or pretend to be sophisticated or fancy or better than what everybody else is writing on. I love that they are utilitarian: designed with purpose. I love the colors of the college-ruled lines: the blues running in an orderly fashion horizontally … the single long red zip down the left margin. I love the simple bold solid-colored covers and cardboard-backs.
My favorite spiral notebook is the 11 x 8.875 inch Top Flight WIRED Notebook with 20 lb paper. It is PERFECT with my fountain pens and inks (unlike Mead Five Star notebooks which have paper that sometimes resists my ink and/or pens like it’s coated with something inhospitable). Looking at Amazon reviews, my positive experience writing on the WIRED paper with fountain pens is confirmed by other folks. I started picking these up at Safeway and our locally-owned small-town drugstore years ago and now they’re all I want to use.
Unfortunately, the Top Flight WIRED notebooks are not consistently stocked; I’m not sure how much of it is a pandemic-related supply chain issue and how much is limitations from distributors (when I asked about them at our local indie office & art supply store, the woman said she WISHED she could get Top Flight products but that whoever they order wholesale from doesn’t offer them anymore). I tried ordering them from an Amazon seller, but had the same bad experience other negative reviews reported: you can’t pick your cover colors and worse: the seller does not send the same kind and/or quantity ordered/promised/depicted in their listings (I ordered a three-pack, but they only sent two). The good news is you can buy directly from Top Flight Paper’s website: TopFlightBuy.com … and they offer free shipping over $50.
Now that Top Flight WIRED paper has set my standard so high, I’m done experimenting with other spiral notebooks; I don’t want to waste money trying more notebooks that are bound (haha) to be disappointingly substandard relative to the WIRED notebooks, so it is worth putting in an order for a six-month pile of my beautiful old standbys directly from Top Flight Paper.
When it’s only practical to carry ONE notebook/tablet/chunk of bound blank paper, this — my spiral-bound journal/notebook — is the ONE I bring with me to write everything in.
My three different daily notebooks with three of my most-used pens
2) STENO BOOK
For Wants & Gratitude
I love bi-column stenographer’s notepads. They’re compact, great for all kinds of lists, and appeal to my old-fashioned noir aesthetics populated with snoopy reporters, physicists held hostage, sleep-deprived private eyes, and highly-capable underestimated omniscient secretaries and paralegals wearing 100% nylon stockings and garter belts (or beautifully-tailored thirteen-button wool sailor pants). Writing in a steno book allows me to enter into a solitary role play without anybody knowing. Note to self: learn shorthand.
What I use my steno pads for on a daily basis: well-being practices like gratitude lists and lists of wants. In one column I list what I’m grateful for (clean running water, the days getting longer, the way my wife just laughed so hard at my joke, how my Parker Sonnet fountain pen writes so damn smooth and pretty filled with Diamine Majestic Blue ink). In the other I list what I want (a good night’s sleep, an underground vault filled with guns and gold bars, to dream of flying over a winding river in a rainforest tonight, a $5,000 gift certificate to a fountain pen retailer, a black-cherry-disco colored Corvette for my wife to drive around and be gorgeous in).
It is easy to fill up a 6×9 inch piece of paper with positive things I want to savor, focus on and move towards.
These pages I fill with gratitude and wants are easy, fun, motivational … and huge escape hatches and coping tools. When I’m stressed, anxious, resentful, or overwhelmed, it always helps to give myself even just five minutes focusing on one or both of these columns — what I want, and what I’m grateful for — to replace visions of fear and discomfort with positive feelings, filling my whole field of vision with a whole bunch of things I want (instead of my mind being overrun with all of the things I *don’t* want) and an inventory of beautiful amazing things I already have that are only the tip of my life’s abundant iceberg.
Two columns like a fun two-lane road I can drive: one lane filled with all the beautiful sights and good things as I pass by and move through life, the other filled with my destination and all the good things I want to notice and enjoy along the way going forward.
3) PLANNER
For Projects, To-Do’s & Scheduling
Planners are COOL. I’ve admired them since I was a kid in office stores, but my life and work has never lent itself to standardized pre-filled calendars, planners and appointment books made for mainstream 9-5 types. But … I definitely need a manageable way to plan ahead, organize my tasks and time, and enjoy the satisfaction of checking off work I’ve completed and seeing how much I do accomplish in a day (while maintaining records/documentation of ideas and things I still want to do).
I’ve tried to-do-list apps, gamified to-do-lists, the usual calendars and schedules that come with google and outlook, bullet-journaling and project management software; they are helpful and I still use some of them, but they just don’t offer the benefits of putting pen/pencil/highlighter to an organized familiar paper with some preset structure: the immediacy/speed, the kinesthetic flow & forward-movement, the tangible hard copy you can look at without electricity or waiting for an update or pop-up interruptions. The way some decisions are made for you by a thoughtful designer so you don’t have to do ALL of the admin.
I’ve had some success with the undated print-your-own Dragontree Dreambook and Planner, some of The Printable CEO’s productivity tools, and with my own customized 24-hour planning pages. I love being able to customize dates and times according to my own sleep-and-wake schedule, start of a year, etc. I love being able to print things on my own paper in standard sizes that can be organized in regular 3-ring binders, and just use/keep what works for me instead of being stuck with a stack of pages I’ll never use (contacts?!? LOL) and pre-filled beginnings (January 1st!), missing and unusable hours (start at 6 am but don’t plan on getting anything done between 6 pm and midnight!), and pre-populated days that at the end of the year don’t care if you were in a coma for three months: you’re still stuck looking at a whole bunch of wasted potential represented in empty page after empty page where apparently you just FAILED and every fucking day you failed has an irrevocable date on it. All stacked up like tombstones for RSVPS to events you wanted to attend but just couldn’t drag your ass out of bed to put your stamp on.
Last year I gave into temptation and bought a hard-back planner I saw advertised online: THE FINISHER’S JOURNAL. The main selling point for me at the time: you have 90 days to focus on and FINISH *ONE* achievement goal.
I need that FOCUS to cut through the overwhelm. I need that SIMPLICITY to build my time around. I need that PERMISSION to say NO to allllllll of the piles of things I want to do (and that other people want me to do); this planner is designed to GET ONE BIG THING DONE in thirteen weeks. Yes, there’s plenty of room for other tasks (and a secondary project), but 90 days is a beautiful reasonable chunk of time to keep your eye on ONE big prize. Ninety days is a perfect amount of time: not too far away to get all loosey goosey distracted and procrastinate or have people get mad at you for making yourself unavailable for a whole entire calendar year, but short enough to build and maintain momentum and get something measurable done.
Write and publish a novella. Plant and harvest a crop of watermelon, tomatoes or cabbage. Build a treehouse. Create 3 months worth of content for a new YouTube (or Twitch or OnlyFans TV) channel & launch with videos queued up and ready to roll out on schedule … then with your next Finisher’s Journal do all of the advertising and promotion to grow your subscribers to the point where you qualify to earn revenue.
As a self-employed introvert entrepreneur, I feel like this planner BY DESIGN makes excuses for me that I’ve been afraid to make for myself (“We’re sorry; P. M. Starr will get back to you in 90 days or when this ONE THING they’re allowed to FOCUS ON AND FINISH this season is done, whichever is sooner”), and gives me a reality check and container with boundaries (you’ve had nineteen years to finish these thirty-one projects you’re super attached to but not even one of them is done yet; how about you focus on just ONE?!?); keep it at the top of your list of to-do’s every day, every week, and increase the probability you will actually experience a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction at seeing THIS ONE DREAM realized at the end of this very-reasonable span of time. Then CLOSE THE BLACK BOOK ON IT (and put a big giant elegant gold star on its cover), take a week or a month off to regroup, then START YOUR NEXT 90 DAY BLACK BOOK.
The price of the Finisher’s Journal is on the high side, but makes me feel more invested in using it and reaching my goal. Not a single page wasted, it keeps me focused on what matters most every day.
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