Why I still carry a paper notebook
People are sometimes surprised that I write these notes by hand first. My phone is right there, after all, and it has a perfectly good notes app.
But a notebook works in the rain, never needs charging, and doesn't tempt me to check anything else while I'm writing. A pencil works upside down, in the cold, and on damp paper. Those are all conditions I find myself in fairly often.
There's also something about the slowness of handwriting. I can't write as fast as I think, so I end up choosing what matters. The notes are shorter and, I think, better for it.
Most entries are only a line or two: the temperature, the wind, a bird, a plant in flower. Every so often one of them grows into a post here.
The notebooks themselves are nothing special: small, pocket-sized, with a stiff card cover and plain paper, bought three at a time from the stationer in town. I number them on the spine. There are nineteen on the shelf now, going back about eight years, and they are by far the most useful thing I own when I want to remember when something happened. The first swifts, the year the river flooded the path, the morning the barometer dropped like a stone.
A few small habits that have made them more useful:
- Date and place at the top of every entry, always, even if the entry is one line.
- Temperature and wind, roughly, because I have found they explain a surprising amount later.
- Leave the last few pages blank for an index of anything worth finding again.
- A rubber band around the cover, to mark the current page and keep it shut in a pocket.
A notebook is a conversation with a future self who has forgotten everything.
I do sometimes photograph a page and file it on my computer, mostly as a backup. But the paper is the real record. It has mud on it, and water stains, and the occasional pressed leaf, and I like being able to see which days were written standing up in the wind.