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
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Even better is using scrap paper for this. You know, the blank side of the 100+ pages someone printed a report on before they checked that the name of your company was spelled correctly in the page header. I cut the pages in half and scrawl everything I think for later review/copy/filing/whatever.
The moleskine is for actual writing, and is also ubiquitous for me.
All too true. I turned mine into a autograph book and jot down my ideas on a plain note pad that I got for free from a trade show.
I admit, I had trouble with writing my first few notes in my moleskine. but now I have 5. I use them when working onsite, I use one for calendars. all the things that make then great to look at also make them great to use!
This is unfortunately too true. I convinced my wife that a moleskine would be the very best thing for us to spend our limited money on. But it’s just so pretty I can barely bring myself to use it.