A Mess of Notes

Page 249 of the 250-page Leuchtturm 1917 A5 notebook, which I think of as the hub of my paper-based life, beckons. There’s a fresh spare on the shelf, still shrink wrapped, so I’m calm, but I’m also conscious that I am deluding myself about its centrality.

There are, you see, actually four notebooks in use at any one time. The big Leuchtturm has evolved in puncutated fashion from a pure Bullet journal to something a lot less identifiable. For a while it was a Six Slots kind of thing. Now it is a monthly planner and daily tracker for no more than three or four things a day. Sometimes there’s a pencilled list of simpler one-task projects on a Monday which might get added to through the week and then cleaned up and carried forward if necessary. The Leuchtturm, however, is not alone.

There is also the 14×9 cm 48-page pocket notebook that I do indeed put in my pocket and carry about with me. Those notes generally find their way into lists and reminders I keep digitally, and even into things I write. At the end of each book I go through to see if there is anything I haven’t already salvaged. That done, it goes onto a shelf, though I’ve no idea why as I almost never look at old pocket notebooks. ¹

Then there’s the one I am in some respects most proud of, which consists of used A4 pages printed on one side only, cut in half, folded into two signatures of eight folios and then bound with a couple of very nifty clips I discovered at the Aladdin’s cave that is Shepherds in London. I can’t tell you what they’re called because I don’t know and couldn’t find them in the catalogue. Perhaps they’re no longer available. In any case, two of these clips and a bunch of waste paper create a little notebook that is perfect for jotting down stuff that I need in the next few minutes or hours. When a page is full, and even when it isn’t, I tear it off and chuck it.

The tricky element in all this is the spiral bound notebook that sits to the left of my keyboard. Currently a Clairefontaine wide-ruled, it started life as a Mnemosyne ditto, which is too expensive to justify just because it has microperforated pages. That’s the notebook in which I write anything that’s more than ephemeral but less than something to plan. It’s a problem because, really, why don’t I just use the Leuchtturm?

Because the Leuchtturm is hardbound and, while it lies admirably flat, it takes up twice the room of a spiral bound book. It just isn’t as convenient.

So here I am, stuck with two notebooks of the same size for different uses. The solution would probably be to get a spiral bound notebook with the squared or dot-squared ruling I like for planning. I’ve never come across such a thing, I suspect because squares and dot-squares are serious and spiral binding is frivolous. Another solution would be to extend the left side of my desk slightly so that the Leuchtturm would have room to lie flat open.

It’s a mess, but it’s my mess and it will probably continue, unless you have a better idea.