Transcription
I got asked about my pocket journal at my men's bible group the other morning. He said, "I really need something like that." I responded, "Yeah, I love this; it's just me trying to get over my phone addiction." And he said, "Yeah, I like that idea. I just would probably always forget my notebook." And then I showed them why I never forget it.
So the amazing thing with smartphones today and all the apps that come with them: we have apps like Evernote to capture and collect information. Notion does basically everything under the sun. All those things should make it easier to create to-do lists, to track our productivity, to stay focused. But I started to question myself: Do they actually make me more productive and help me stay focused?
A few months ago, at the end of last year, I was just reviewing a bunch of old journals and notebooks, cleaning out my cla—a little bit—getting ready for the next baby to come along very soon. Just needed to clean up things, get a little bit organized. So I'm sitting in the chair back there, reviewing all these old journals, these notebooks, and they're like 10 years old, some of them; some of them are a little bit older. And it just seemed like I had more clear ideas, that I was more focused, that I was more productive. But I was trying to figure out, like, who was this guy that had these great thoughts? I feel like I hadn't really, really grown or matured a lot over the last 10 years because this guy seemed smarter than this guy, and that was a little disappointing, a little frust—it's frustrating, a little—it tasted a little better to think that I—also was thinking like, how did this guy have the time? How did he have the time to sit down and write all this stuff out? And so it just really got me thinking about the process of of notebooks versus digital, going analog versus digital.
So then I had a decision point: I'm going to start using journals and paper and being more analog again. A lot of this comes down to information overload. I found a study that was from 2011, so quite a while ago. It's from Dr. Martin Hilbert, I believe, from the University of California. The study reveals that we read the equivalent to 174 newspapers a day. That was 2011, so what are we doing now? Maybe we're maxed out completely, and this is why anxiety is up and depression is up. This was the peak of our consumption ability; we just can't jam anymore into our tiny brains.
I'm going a little bit further with the data: teens spend 8.5 hours a day on screens, and Americans are scrolling the equivalent to 35 feet—that's a foot mark right there—305 feet on Facebook alone. That's equivalent to the Statue of Liberty. So can you imagine being on your phone, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll? Like, what are these muscles? What are these muscles going to look like in the future if we just keep scrolling 305 feet a day on Facebook?
So why use a pocket notebook? Real problems with digital—this is just for me, and these are my four main problems. Number one: the infinite versus finite. Even if you're productive, the visible backlog looms inside these to-do lists. You can put a ton of stuff in there, and even if you get a a bunch of stuff off, you check it, swipe it, whatever it is, there's still more stuff sitting there. It just never really goes away because there is an infinite amount of space for us to to put tasks into, to-dos and projects and ideas. There's always more. So we have this perpetual inadequacy that we feel because we're not catching up to everything that we think we need to do because there is so much space, an infinite amount of space. For example, inside this notebook right here, it's finite. I can only put so many words on this page; that is finite.
Number two is the distractions. I think of my phone as a gateway to doom. So my intent is, I want to capture a thought; I want to take a note. But then I go into my phone, and I get derailed by the notifications or the things that are in there, like, "Oh, that looks interesting." Even just in the morning, I will come down; I want to put on some chill hop on YouTube, and then I see a great thumbnail, great TI—I go, "Well, that looks interesting; let me watch this." All of a sudden, I'm watching YouTube for the next hour instead of working. So on my phone, I'm doom-scrolling for 30 minutes just because of that idea that I wanted to go put into my notes app. And then the big problem, I think, is that I completely forgot; then I forgot why I was even there in the first place. So it's a waste of time; didn't even get to capture the idea.
The third thing is the fragmentation. With all these different to-do apps in different places where we could be storing things, or maybe it's just screenshots, things are scattered; they're all over the place unless you have one capture system, one collection bin for all your stuff, which we probably don't because one app does this really well, and another app does this really well. So we're scattered, which means there's more opportunities back for number two, back to distractions.
And then four, this is my biggest one: a lack of touch. There was a study done; you can go read this online. The advantage of handwriting over typing—if you just Google that study, you'll find this this um scientific report. And what it basically led to is better m—memorization, learning progress, and I thought this is super interesting—a more positive attitude; you're just happier doing stuff when you're writing stuff down versus typing. There's a German word—let me see if I can pronounce this on my first attempt—fingerspitzgefühl. I'm pretty happy with that: fingerspitzgefühl, which means fingertip feeling, and I translate that—my own translation to that—is I want to be able to touch things. It feels more real to me when I'm touching; I have a better relationship with it, which equates back to the better memorization, learning progress, and a more positive mood, which is my biggest reason for wanting to use it. It just gives me mental clarity that I'm using a pocket notebook.
Biggest reasons are: it slows me down, I consume less, and I can only hold and have one thought at a time because I am going slower and focused. So if your question is, "Well, doesn't it slow you down?" Or, "It doesn't take too long to to write all this stuff out," yes, that's exactly why I'm doing it. It helps me consume less. Instead of consuming uh 174 newspapers in a day, I get to slow down; I don't have a hundred racing thoughts in my mind; I am more focused simply because I'm using a pen and paper, the tactile feel.
So how do I use my pocket notebook? I have two main collect notebooks: I have my pocket notebook, this one, and then I have my desk notebook. This always sits on my desk right here; never leaves. This thing goes with me everywhere, and it's also the reason why I never forget it, going back to the opening question: it is my wallet. So I have my ID, my cards, uh my business cards are in here somewhere—yep, here's my business cards—and have my cash. So I'm not going to walk out the door without this since it is my wallet. That's the biggest thing, the biggest reason why I don't—I never forget this thing. And a big switch that I did was I was always carrying my phone in my right pocket, and I've now moved my phone over to my left pocket. My pocket notebook sits in my right pocket now. Because of my addiction to my phone, I just had a really bad habit of reaching for that phone, and I think a lot of it was just boredom or instinct or habit, which I think equals up—that equates to addiction—one of the biggest reasons I had to—I had to make this switch.
So what is in the pocket notebook? How do I use the pocket notebook? It—there's ideas, quotes, four main categories: ideas, quotes, I have outlines, frameworks, models—things that I draw out, sketch, a little bit sloppy drawings—um, I put books and page numbers of things I want to go back and remember or reread something I liked. And then I do that along the idea of podcasts, videos, or I'll write down the title and the time so it's easy for me to go back and search. And of course, uh tasks and reminders. So let me see if I can find—um, here—here's an example for some content ideas: "Do you live somewhere that doesn't feel like home?" I was listening to a podcast, Tom Green on Joe Rogan; it's the one-hour and 40-minute mark where Tom Green's talking about living in LA for 15 years and it never felt like home. Well, being in real estate, I like that idea; I want to see if I can do something with that idea. So um, put that down as to go back and review. I like this cold email subject line that Jesse Etler came up with; saw that in a real—so just wrote it down—um, just some stuff about models here on a fstar offer. These are notes for my—my bible group, uh my men's bible group—how I want to start when I'm taking notes while I'm reading things like that. So just complete—kind of—this is from a meeting that I had with uh Baller Media, Corey Jebson, uh um, on—I like the framing that he did. This won't make sense to you, but it makes sense for me. So there's really no rhyme or reason; rarely do I have dates put down because this is not a diary; it's not a journal; it is a place for me to collect information. For some more of my notes, going a little bit deeper on that, more models—none of that matters to you, but it all makes sense to me, and that's the only thing that matters. This again on notebooks—this is a smaller notebook—let me see if I can pull this out. This was the notebook that I was originally using, um kind of can tell—collect all—so it's a little bit smaller than this one. Let me measure this one for you: about three by four and a half. This is four by six, and then this notebook is a five and a half by three and a half notebook. So kind of that typical uh Field Notes, Moleskine, that type of size. And this is the notebook that actually came with this wallet; I just already started working on all this stuff.
So once I've collected all the ideas in my pocket notebook or my desk notebook, then I move them to my primaries, which is e—e—either—either a calendar or to-do list. The next place that it goes to is my factory notebook, which is—this is my factory journal, and this is more about flushing out the ideas once I have them collected in here. So this is more big idea, not specific, then getting detail-oriented: What does this idea really mean? Does this idea matter to me at all? What should I do with this idea? And then from there, if it's not one of my ideas or it's one of my best ideas, then it goes into a big commonplace journal. And a a question that I did get recently about this is, "Aren't you afraid of losing your ideas that it's in these notebooks all over the random places?" So am I afraid of losing ideas because they're just in these books? Wouldn't it be easier to search and tag them digitally? Well, instead of scrolling, I'm now flipping. I—and the time that is regained from not scrolling, I can focus on finding my ideas that are not lost. So when I'm sitting in line to pick up my daughter for pickup, I'm—instead of pulling out my phone and scrolling—I pull out my pocketbook, and I'm flipping through the pages, just reminding myself of what's in there. It—while I'm waiting for my daughter to finish up her softball practice, instead of pulling out my phone and scrolling, I now pull out my pocketbook, and I get to flip through it.
The second thing that I would say is, if you are going to use a pocket notebook, have a plan. And here's uh a few—I—few ways that you could do the plan. You want to have a plan on where you're going to move things to, and you want to have a plan on when you're going to move these things. So first, where—let's say you don't want to give up digital completely; there might be a time and place for digital. I kind of get that; I a little bit understand that—but I want you to be more organized and less random. So think of what you're doing inside these notebooks as a filtering process. You don't want to just throw junk in there and get it lost and scattered. So you're filtering it through your notebooks ahead of time and then moving it into your digital world, wherever that is: Evernote, Google Docs, uh Notion, or you could move it into another analog journal, like what I do. It's like my plan. And then a third option of what I do with some things is ChatGPT has this uh—I don't know what it is—a version, a a whatever—but it's called ChatGPT Vision, and you upload an image; you just take your phone, take a—if I take a picture of this, it will turn my handwritten notes into text. So that is also a quick way instead of having to sit down and type it up, moving it back up into digital.
The second thing I would say is, then when—have a time and place that you do this. When will you do it? Will you do it daily at the end of the night? Will you do it weekly, Saturday morning while you're having some coffee? What is the when and where? And uh the place of when you do it, not just the place of where you move it to.
So if your question is, "What kind of notebooks? What's the best thing to use?" I really don't have an opinion on that. I look for cheap little throwaway things because they are throwaway; these are just collect ideas, transfer them over, check these things out. So I really don't have any specific notebooks that I like. I do, of course, love this wallet; I'll leave a link for this down in the description if you want to check this out. But I'd love to hear what kind of notebooks do you use? What is your recommendation on that? Or do you—do you prefer digital, and what are your favorite apps or why? If you went analog and then you went back to digital, what is your preferred digital app and why do you prefer digital over analog?