Silver Clipboard

Ubiquitous Capture Tip: Keep Your Notebook Cheap and Messy

Everyone loves Moleskine notebooks. The rounded pages that don’t fray, the faux-leather cover and strap that let you feel secretly pretentious. A new moleskine smells like a fresh library. For office supply lovers, they are perfection.

Don’t use them.

If you keep a Moleskine to jot down notes and ideas, your pen will never touch paper. The pages, (especially the first page) are just too clean and perfect. Using such a fine, quality notebook makes you feel that only fine, quality ideas can fill it — not what you really need, like ‘buy milk’.

The lesson: Don’t use nice notebooks for ubiquitous capture.

Your pocket notebook should be a little, 50-cent junker that you can easily rip pages out of. Don’t keep it neat. To make ubiquitous capture work, you need as little resistance to writing down your thoughts as possible. Otherwise you will not capture them all. By keeping the notebook messy, but accessible, you take advantage of productive mess. Keeping it neat will make you hesitate scribbling a thought across an entire page as you walk to work.

The messiness makes it easy to record that half-baked thought or reminder. Just don’t forget to process your junk note book to zero during your weekly review.

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Header photograph by Paul Worthington

How Ubiquitous Capture is Vital for Creative Work

Scheduling creativity is a fool’s task. You can’t sit at a computer and decide ‘now is the time I will be creative’. However you can force yourself to work on existing projects.

Ideas appear when the neurons firing in your brain make a new connection. Creativity is random. The good news is you don’t have to do anything to make it happen. The bad news is that you can’t force it to happen.

In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King describes the creative process as it happened to him while working as a handyman at his old high school.

One day [Harry, a coworker] and I were supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls’ shower. I looked around the locker room… There were no urinals, of course, and there were two extra metal boxes on the tile walls.. I asked what was in them. “Pussy plugs,” Harry said. “For them certain days of the month.”

I also noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boys’ locker room, had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached. You could actually shower in privacy.

…I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains, or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn’t know what it is, and the others girls — grossed out, horrified, amused — start pelting her with sanitary napkins… The girl begins to scream. All that blood! She thinks she’s dying, that the other girls are making fun of her even while she’s bleeding to death. She reacts, fights back, but how?

I’d read an article in Life magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena… There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first— Pow! Two unrelated ideas, adolescence cruelty and telekinesis, came together and I had an idea.

That idea eventually grew in to his first novel, Carrie and started his prolific career. But Stephen King wasn’t trying to come up with an idea for a book. It just happened because creativity is random.

The fleeting, random nature of thoughts is what makes ubiquitous capture is so important. When an idea pops into your head, no matter how important or trivial, or how good or poor, write it down immediately. You should keep a pad of paper on you at all times to capture ideas.

Even though creativity is beyond your control, if you practice ubiquitous capture you will always have a stock of ideas to draw from when you sit down to work. Once you get into the habit of capture, you will discover that it is a self-feeding process. The more you capture your ideas, the more aware you become of your own thoughts and the more you have to capture. Get a notepad and get to work.

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Photograph by Chris Metcalf

Instant, Ubiquitous Capture

A notepad in your back pocket will change your life.

If you get an idea, write it down now. Not five minutes from now, but right now. This is called ubiquitous capture: having some device on you at all times, to record your thoughts.

Many people who are creative depend on ubiquitous capture for a living. For example, the writer of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David, uses this method to gather ideas for his show from moments in his life. He keeps a notepad in his pocket for writing down funny ideas that occur to him or situations that happen to him. Jonathan Coulton, the king of geeky music, uses the voice record function of his mobile phone to instantly capture song ideas

Instant is the key word because you cannot trust yourself for a moment to keep that idea in your head. If you think ‘I’ll just finish what I’m doing then I’ll write that thought down’ it will be gone in twenty seconds.

Once you get in the habit of having the notebook on yourself all the time, you’ll develop lots of uses for it and wonder how you ever got by before. One of my favorite uses of ubiquitous capture is for book recommendations. Often people mention in conversation some good book they’ve recently read, but when I get to the library, it’s nearly impossible to remember what the book is when looking for something new to read. But not with ubiquitous capture. Now I jot the title down in my notebook and later transfer it to my books-to-read list.

As a side effect of using ubiquitous capture, others assume you are a more serious person. When people mention something and you immediately write it down, it sends a message that you respect the other person’s opinion or that you can be trusted to get the job done.

Get a notepad and change your life.

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Original header photograph by michale.