Transcription
hello everyone, my name is Chad lman. Welcome back to landman EDC. Today we are going to be talking about morning pages. What is that, and why has it changed my life? I am not joking; doing journaling and morning pages and using these tools in my life has changed almost everything about how I think. I finally got back to doing it, and I'm going to tell you all about it and what inspired me to do it. Let's talk about it. [Music]
My name is Chad lemon, and I talk about knives, tools, and EDC items on the channel here. And if you find value from what I'm doing, please consider subscribing and liking the video. I don't have a membership program, but I would let you buy me a coffee. You can check those links below to send a onetime gift my way. Every dollar gets reinvested back into the channel. Thanks for being here. Now back to the video.
All right, so about once a year you're going to get these videos. You're going to get a "my favorite writing uh EDC," my favorite EDC items for analog note-taking, my favorite whatever. But I actually have a reasoning behind it this time, uh, because I want to talk about a pocket Journal that I have gotten from Lochby that I've talked about several other times in a couple of different videos. And that, along with the idea of this morning pages, has really changed my perspective, and so I just wanted to share that with you a little bit today.
So Marcus O'Brien, wonderful guy, been able to talk to him a little bit on uh Discord and our EDC collab group, he had put out a really cool video about morning pages. And I've always been a good analog note-taker. You can see here, I've got field notes that I have more or less kept up with for the past 10 to 12 years, um, and we'll talk about those in my process with those here in just a moment. But really have always been a pretty good note-taker, but I haven't really journaled. And I saw from a couple of other EDC creators, Marine X being one of them, um, and especially Marcus O'Brien who talked about his morning pages routine, and I thought, "Wow, I used to do that same thing. I used to journal, and it used to empty my mind. It used to be able to uh really exercise my brain, kind of the first thing in the morning," and um, I just stopped doing it. Had kids, got busy, uh, got a really hectic job and stopped doing it. Well, now that things have settled down just a little bit for me in both the professional and nonprofessional space, I got back to doing morning pages.
Now I will confess, I don't do it as Marcus would say, "do it to just get up, get you a cup of coffee, do it the first thing in the morning." I can't do that. I've got to get kids to school and all those different things, but I have made it a habit over the last few months from seeing his video to get back in the habit of doing morning pages when I first thing when I get to the office. So I get to the office relatively early in the morning. I am a full-time Minister, by the way. I work for a church. I am an education Minister, and that means that I don't preach every Sunday, but I manage all of the classes at the church that we go to, uh, a church of about 500 here in Middle Tennessee. It is a wonderful work; it is a calling of the Lord, and it is just absolutely fantastic, and I'm blessed to be able to have a part in that. However, because of the just the relative stresses of the job, it's been a really good idea for me to have morning pages. Well, it's turned into this kind of thing where I just kind of empty my thoughts on the paper, and there is just, I just don't understand what it is; there is just something about emptying your thoughts with pen and paper or pencil and paper first thing in the morning and being able to clear your mind, being able to do what you want to do. What I do, uh, writing classes and doing a lot of different thinking and Ministry really requires a lot of concentration, and so being able to do that is really effective.
And what I have found here, and I want to go ahead and talk about the gear here, I've talked enough about the idea behind morning pages, but what I have done here is take a notebook, just a simple field notes notebook, and we'll talk about how I use those here in just a moment. And I have put that in the Lochby pocket Journal. Now this is a really nice wax canvas uh Journal that's got some pockets on the outside; it's got some uh kadora on the inside; it's got YKK zippers; it's got a really nice zipper here, and you've seen this in other videos; you've seen it in the Data Crew uh snack time sling video; you've seen it in a couple of the other ones. This has become a part of my daily carry, almost an essential; in fact, I would say it's an absolutely essential part. It goes with me in every bag that I have; it goes with me if I'm not carrying a bag; if I'm just going home and leaving my computer at the office, it goes with me and stays with me because this is where I do my journaling and my um my morning pages. And so having this and being able to just write one or two pages in my field notes every single morning has been very, very nice.
Now you'll notice that this pocket Journal fits one; uh, it actually can fit two if you really want to, but it fits one regular field notes size notebook. These are regular 3 1/2 by 5 notebooks, and you can tell right here that they're pretty small; maybe they're way too small for your writing, but I write, I'm, I write very tiny, and uh, so they're perfect for me, and they're pocket-size. I can take them out, put them in my pocket; they're pretty durable; in fact, most of them are this nice thick cardboard and thick cardboard paper here. They usually have really high-quality paper on them too, and so I like graph or dot grid. I'm not a very big lined person, as you can see, um, as you can, you're going to see in the trend of my notebooks, I love dot grid and I love lined uh graph paper here. But you can see some of the different entries that I've got in here, and and some of this I'm not going to show you exactly what those are, but some of that is is sensitive stuff that I have just kind of poured my emotions out on the paper and kind of honestly just gotten it out of my brain to be able to prepare myself for the day. It's almost like having a little bit of a therapist in the form of a notebook, being able to talk to somebody without directly talking to somebody.
So I'll open that up first thing, and again, the features of this, it's got some nice pockets on the inside here. You can fit a short pen inside of this middle pocket right here, or you could fit a paper clip, something else, fastener, anything like that. A full-size pen like this, relatively, and this is actually not necessarily a full-size pen, but it's not going to fit really well in that pocket, and so it's not an afterthought, but you can fit a short pen in there. The Big Eye design and the uh um as well as the Tactile Turn short pens, they're going to work really, really well in here. Also, you could fit, these are business card-size holders, and so I've got a couple of business cards in there, and um, you can check this out right here. I've got a couple of different things: digitalparentingworkshop.com, that's a shameless plug, by the way, um, you should check that out; that's my other YouTube channel, but also a Ministry that I'm very much involved with that the church that I'm working at right now helped to create, so very, very awesome.
So I love this pocket Journal. I love the wax canvas and how it is kind of weathering, and it's sort of like leather, um, but it's also not going to kind of patina exactly, but it's going to get kind of that worn-in look, and it's going to be fantastic. Now I've only had this for a couple of months now, but I have carried it everywhere with me. I usually go pretty slick on the outside here; I don't normally uh put anything in the pockets. You can put a smaller pen in this outside pocket; it is very tight, but that's good because your pen's not going to fall out, which is always a positive. Right here, you can fit a bigger, you can fit documents in the back. I can actually fit a regular iPhone 15 in the back pocket right here, and so they loosen up over time. You've got this double stitching that's going to be uh really nice, and then you've got this very relatively um minimal branding here. This also comes in black, and I am going to be buying gifts for friends uh to have this, to give to friends that uh would like black a little bit more than they like the brown. Never was a brown fan, a fan of brown until I got this. The orange octagon on the inside, you've got, of course, two business card pockets, a tiny pocket here for a short pen, and then a bigger pocket for any documents. Now, now you could do what I can do right here and put the inside, you can put the inside of a notebook, and you can fit easily fit two notebooks in here, so you can zip that up, fit two notebooks in here. That is actually a power pack right there with your pen on the outside; you're ready to go; you're ready to journal; you could even tuck your phone without a case in the back there and not have to worry about anything. But really have enjoyed this journal. Lochby was so kind to send it my way, and when they got in touch, and I just absolutely have adored this journal. That is not the only type of Journal that I use; however, it is the primary one that I'm using. Make sure that you check the links in the description for a special offer code uh in the description to be able to get you one of these pocket journals. Great thing about this is they're relatively um affordable too, so you might think that something like this carries a premium price tag, and you would be wrong. And so you can get 10% off, I believe, on my coupon code, and I'll put that on the screen here and make sure you check the links in the description for the Lochby personal journal or pocket Journal. I always get the personal pocket Journal; I always get that mixed up, but it's the pocket Journal.
Couple of other things that I have used, and we'll go over the pens and the different things, and oh, by the way, I did want to mention Lochby does send you a small field notes notebook with field notes size rather notebook with the Lochby personal journal or pocket journal. And what you've got here and what you've got here, they send you a dot grid, and uh, it's just your regular 3x5 size, and you can find 3x5 notebooks pretty much anywhere; uh, it's kind of a morph into a pretty standard size these days. So staying on covers uh very briefly, I've just got a couple here to show you. I have used these in the past; I'm not actively using them right now, but these are your Bellroy field notes covers, and these are not as a um these are not as economical as something like the Lochby would be in the wax canvas. These are a vegetarian kind of leather, vegan leather, not vegetarian; you're going to, okay, just roast me in the comments for that one. Okay, just go ahead, uh, this is a vegan leather. This one right here in the gray, I got probably over 10 years ago; this one probably about 5 years ago. This one has just patined so nicely, and I don't tend to use it that much, but it's got a lot of the same organization as the other one does. So I'll put a field notes in here and let you see when I when I put these field notes in, I put the date right here. I usually use one every quarter or so, every about 8 to 12 weeks or so. So you take the back cover here, and you can just slide that in right here to this Bellroy uh cover, and again, this is all leather. You've got spots here for uh business cards, and you can slide those in; they're fairly minimal; you also can put something in this big part right here, close that up, and it's got this really nice magnetic closure right here, really, really nice, and um absolutely phenomenal. I've got black and I've got gray; they've got a couple of other covers. They used to be big partners with field notes, and I think that contract uh expired somewhat uh because they stopped putting the field notes branding on it. Yeah, so it had Bellroy field notes branding on it. This was the actual field notes; it comes with two field notes notebooks uh with the pack package, and I believe these are $80; they might actually be $100 right now, so not very economical, but this is something like heirloom quality; you're going to be able to pass these down to your kids if you wanted to; they're going to probably last that long, um, and again, I have taken these almost everywhere until I got the personal journal from Lochby. I got, took these almost everywhere, and they are phenomenal pieces, and they usually, they really only fit one notebook; you can fit two inside of there, but the magnetic closure does not work if you do that as well. The Bellroy pocket Journal here, the magnetic leather pocket Journal, those are really fantastic. Another local company to Tennessee here, and I'm going to turn it over to the back here. This is a full-grain leather journal, number 27 pocket journal from uh Lytleville, Tennessee. This is from Colonel Littleton. Now if you've never heard of this brand, uh, I wouldn't be surprised because they're relatively local brand here to Southern Middle Tennessee, right down the road in Lytleville, Tennessee, and this is just a wonderful little pocket notebook. It's got two um it's just a really, because if I take this notebook out here, if I take this notebook out, and Field Notes has, by the way, I'm going to talk about Field Notes in a minute, they have so many phenomenal designs for covers, that's just, it's just amazing, but this is really just a leather flap with sewn leather flaps on the on the outside right there. And so you can see uh that it's just a nice, you got a nice kind of uh hide inside of this, and then you just go ahead and put those inside the flaps, and I've got this particular notebook, this is one of those notebooks that I I keep; I have tons of different notebooks that I keep for things, but it's just a nice little slim package there. This one doesn't really go a whole lot of places with me, but it's already nice and patina; it's just um it's just wonderful. Colonel Littleton.
Now let's talk about Field Notes notebooks. Now you can see here that I keep uh a number of these, and I put stickers on them, and I put, you know, different things on them. I actually did not mean to use these in uh the same order. I love these little um notebooks, these limited edition ones, these Green Green Mind green; they've got so many different designs; it is insane. And so I love, you look at that Kaiser sticker right there. I love using these, and I love putting the dates of when they were used. This was fall of 2023; here's summer 2023. And what do I write down in these? Well, I just write down a little bit of everything. I keep my sermon notes; uh, I do drawings and doodles; I keep important notes for different things, um, here like here's some sermon notes from uh August 13th, so a year ago almost, August 13th, the Beatitudes number two from Matthew Chapter 5. And so just a nice uh way to keep notes there of different important things, and I just love these little Field Notes size notebooks. Now Field Notes come in a number of different sizes; you do not have to use Field Notes notebooks; you can use your own. I've seen a lot of people that have used their own. These are a tad overpriced; you get three little notebooks um for about $15 now, and that's a little bit overpriced, but sometimes you can catch them for $10 and $12, and then they're just right, and they've got these premium designs with premium paper on the inside, all sorts of different stuff. I just keep these notebooks, and I love them. My my coolest thing about this is that I have a flatbed scanner, and so I'll take these and I'll put them on flat like this; I'll put them flat on a scanner and scan these in to where I've got a digital copy of these as well. So I just think this is really something cool that, you know, if I was to if I was to kick the can tomorrow, somebody could go back and look through through my notes and just get a pretty good idea of what I was doing almost day-to-day on these certain things and figure out what I was thinking, especially when I'm doing my morning pages; it's just powerful. I think analog is powerful; I think analog is catching on even more these days; I think that you're seeing more of tapes and CDs and people using even iPods for their personal music collections, and so I think analog is is not dead. Analog is not dead.
Here's some Zebra clip pens. Let's go over some pens that I like to use. The Zebra clip pens are really nice; you can get them on jetpens.com; I'll put a link to that in the description. But the ones that I use the most are the Uniball Signo Ultra Micro 207's. I have several boxes of these, and I just absolutely love them. To a tee, they will be my number one pickup choice for what I buy. You can get a box of them for probably 12 bucks, so probably about a buck a piece on these; uh, they're not the cheapest p, p, they're not your regular just big pens, but they're going to be really nice, and these are the Ultra Micros, and so these are 0.35s I believe, and they give you a really fine line. I like to use anything from 0.35 to 0.5; no more than 0.5; 0.7 is a little bit too much for me, especially being in the smaller notebooks. But I've got some of these Zebra Clips right here, and these are F's, and so I like using different colors sometimes, not all the time; most of the time it's just just black or blue. But here I've got some red, purple, gray, and also a kind of really nice blue color, and these are relatively cheap as well; they're made in Japan. All the good stuff is made in Japan; it is really good; all the good writing and stationary stuff is made in Japan.
Getting a little bit more expensive is these Prismacolor Premier authorized Prismacolors, and these are archival-type pens. These are going to be 0.5, not 05, but 0.5; they're incredibly fine tips, and I don't, again, don't use colors an incredible, incredible amount, but when I do, I like to use some archival stuff. Now when I'm marking in my Bible, and I like to mark in my Bible, when I'm marking in a Bible, I like to use some type of archival ink, and so that involves using one of these pigment liners or using something like a Micron 0.1, and I'll put that link in the description. These are got varied tips of incredible variety of sizes and colors. Highly recommend the Prismacolor Microns; they are incredible for archival ink. They what, what archival ink means is that it's not going to yellow over time, or at least that's that's what they tell you. And so I've had Bibles that I've used Prismacolor Micron ink in for a very long time, 20 plus years ago, and the ballpoint ink that I've been using from other things uh and all the sorts of stuff, even some of the ink that has been used from my Ultra Micros has yellowed over time, and it's kind of smeared; it's kind of moved on; it's kind of faded. This archival ink is almost guaranteed not to do that. And so if you're writing in a Bible with sheepskin pages that are very, very thin like this, and I know this is just one of my smaller Bibles, I'm not really writing in this one, but if you got a big Bible with very thin pages or something like that or a textbook that you're taking um notes in that you really want to keep those notes around because you're going to be a doctor.
And you're going to be referencing that like in 20 years. Make sure that you're using—get you some of these Pigma Micron or some of these uh archival ink ones. And I'm going to link a lot of those below, but highly recommend these uh they're not too expensive. You can get a set of probably 20 of them for about 25 bucks, 25 or 30 bucks. And so I'll put those links below. Those are some of my favorite pens.
And then you get a little bit more expensive uh this is the refine uh pen. I believe this is the EP1; they've got several different ones. If you want a cheaper bolt action pen and you don't want to break the bank, I've got one in my desk at work. And this is just a—I love the belt clip, or excuse me, the pocket clip here. I love the tiny minimalist um bolt action here, and it writes in a really fantastic way with Schmidt refills on these. So these will not break the bank; you're looking at anywhere between 40 and 60 bucks for one of these. If you look at the Tactile Turn pens, where they get up there to the $100 mark, $150, $200 mark, and it's uh they get pretty expensive up there. Nothing against nice pens—I own and love plenty of them. And I do want to throw out—I did just say that I'm not talking about expensive pens—but this defeats the whole purpose: the bolt action pens from Big Idea Design. They're titanium; some of them are titanium. You can get them in uh zirconium, you can get them in brass, and you can get these relatively for an inexpensive price. I think these are $150. And again, if you want a pen that is going to last you for the rest of your life, if you want to buy once and cry once, this is what you do. Um, if you just want to use disposable pens, like the Ultra Fine Micron that are a dollar or two a piece, then so be it; use these. Uh, I have found that I use a little bit of a mixture of both because I write so much and because I take so many notes in so many different places. I found that I take different notes. So I'll link all this stuff below, just so that you know.
Now you may not think that this is an analog writing tool, but you would be wrong, because if I'm ever writing in public, if I'm in a coffee shop, if I am in a noisy place and I cannot focus on what I need to write—focus on what I need to take notes on—this is going to help me out a lot. These are the Nothing earbuds, and you've heard me talk about these quite a bit as well, but I love these earbuds. I'm telling you right now, I was looking—it took them years to come up with a suitable Airpods Pro replacement, and these are less than half the cost at $99. They're readily available on Amazon; the link will be below. And their noise—qu—noise cancelling and their audio quality is just as good as Airpods. And I know what audio quality sounds like. And so this is um this is a very, very good product. Nothing is coming out with a lot of great stuff. I kind of want to try their CMF phone uh that it's been all the rage here; it's a $200 Android phone. Really want to try that out, actually. And so these are phenomenal; they'll pair with anything. They'll pair with an iPhone, they'll pair with a Nintendo Switch. Um, but I use them to listen to music, and I am going to link down below my favorite playlist for working. And so I've got a lot of instrumental playlists that have no lyrics in them. Some of them have a few lyrics like every now and then, but mostly instrumental, mostly kind of this binaural beats kind of stuff. And so I want you to check that out. This is a phenomenal way that you can write and get kind of clear out the world so that you can focus on your writing.
The last thing I want to talk about is the thing that I talked about, I believe, in the last video, and I have alluded to these before. This is the Evergoods Civic Access Pouch, the Cap 5 Ler. Now you've heard of me talk about the Cap 2L, Cap 2 Ler, the organizer that I really love, but this one is a tiny organizer, and it is a perfect pencil pouch. So if you're one of the types of people who likes to have a couple of pens around, you can put those in there and have those in there. You can have other essentials in there as well. I've got a couple of cables here in the mesh pocket, and then you've got a solid pocket on the other side. I've got a couple of tech accessories, and you saw me go over this in the last video, so I won't do it, but I've got a couple of USB drives and whatnot. But you can actually fit a fair—fair amount of writing implements in this bag. You close it up; it's just got this one little thing. I've got the brown and black on the outside with AquaGuard zippers, so anything that you put in here is going to be protected from water. You've got a nice, awesome hanging hook right there, and it's just a—it's a wonderful little pouch. And you know, I can't get over pouches; I cannot stop buying pouches; it is a problem. But this Civic Access Pouch 0.5 is phenomenal, and it's a phenomenal pencil case or artist case if you're carrying around a bunch of pencils. Now I do not carry this much of pencils around; in fact, I usually only carry maybe three pens around with me if I have a chance. Most of the time it's just that one pen, but when I do want to carry a bunch around, when I'm going on a trip maybe, and I know that I'm going to be taking notes on that trip, maybe a work trip to a workshop, I can put a couple of pens in here. This is phenomenal. This has got that brown interior that I talked about, and it kind of opens up like this for a nice little desk caddy.
So all that being said, that is my note taking, and that is how I take notes here today. I want to thank you so much for tuning in, as always. I appreciate your subscriptions; I appreciate all of your comments, your positive comments. I appreciate everything uh that you say on the channel. If you have any questions about any of the gear that I'm using, or you would like to talk to me about something, let me know. And most importantly, if you want to talk to me or find out more about Jesus, I know that I leave all this at the end of the video; maybe you click off as soon as you hear anything religious, but if you want to know more about him, if you want to know what has changed my life the most, even more than morning pages, then I want to tell you about him. So if you want to do that, get in touch below; I would love to speak to you about it. I want you to go out and have a great rest of your week and a blessed day, and uh God bless you and everything you're doing. Thanks so much.