The Five Daily Notebooks That Keep My Life Together
Excessive? Maybe. Effective? Definitely.
I’ve loved notebooks since I can remember. The stationery section was always my favourite and could spend hours testing pens, looking at paper, and, oh, those beautiful notebooks. The best part about notebooks, however, is getting to write in them. Over the years I’ve had a lot of different systems, but I always come back to a version of the same one.
These are the five notebooks I use every day and that have changed my life:
- The to-do list book
- The food diary
- The ideas book
- The Proper Ideas book
- The messy daily planner
The to-do list book
To-do lists are the OG of productivity tools and they’re severely underrated.
I like to use a pad or a notebook that I don’t care particularly much about and then go to town.
Some days I write just the main things, and other days I write absolutely everything under the sun. It makes me feel good. Morning coffee? Tick. Made bed? Tick. Remembered to breathe? Tick tick tick.
To be honest, I don’t actually tick off the things I’ve done. Instead, I highlight the lines once I’ve completed them for an even better visual reminder of how awesome I am. This notebook makes me feel like I’m doing a fantastic job at life, whether it’s an ‘aim high’ or ‘aim low’ day.
The food diary
This one is pretty boring. I write down everything that I’ve eaten and drunk during the day, right down to the ingredients if I’ve made it myself. I started this habit many years ago, and at the time it was unhealthy. I used it to control what I was consuming and would obsess over trying to get it to be smaller and cleaner and better every day. Learning how to use this as a positive tool was admittedly quite difficult for me, but eventually, I got there.
Now it’s a healthier habit, and it’s about tracking the foods that are working well for me and those that aren’t. I make a note of how I feel, how I sleep and how much creativity or energy I have that day and I look for patterns.
Sometimes this notebook is my friend, other times like right now when it’s screaming that white wine ruins my sleep, I don’t like it so much. But it has my best interests at heart. Tracking what I eat might be a bit boring, but it’s definitely helped me make a lot of positive health choices in the past.
The ideas book
This is a dumping ground for all of the things that I think of during the day. It’s also where I note down things from dreams, or ideas for recipes that I want to try.
Essentially I talk to myself in this book. It is what it is.
Of all the notebooks that I have this is the messiest. It’s probably unintelligible to outside parties, occasionally written in a weird form of Spanglish and has no discernible organisation to it. And that’s entirely the point.
I have a busy brain. I’m constantly thinking about multiple things at once and it can be a killer for focus. But I don’t want to miss out on any of the creative or practical thoughts I’m having, even if I can’t concentrate on them fully at the time. Dumping everything in the ideas book reassures me that I’ll get to it and that I’m not losing anything, whilst freeing me up to keep working on what’s most important in that moment.
The Proper Ideas book
The most formal of my notebooks. This is purely for work purposes and becomes a sort of ‘final draft’ of relevant things that have been dumped in the ideas book.
As a child (ok, and now) I was a bit of a perfectionist. I liked to make sure there were no errors or scribbles on my homework. I would obsess over the first page of a notebook or school jotter to make sure that it was as beautiful as it could be. This tendency lives on in the Proper Ideas book.
The proper ideas book is usually hardcover, and I’m particular about the colour of pen that I use in it. Sometimes rulers are involved. It’s a whole thing.
This book works as my official plans and ideas book: once something is in the proper ideas book, I’m going to work to make it happen.
The messy daily planner
I use time blocking to sort out what I’ll do in any given day. I plan what I need to get done and then allocate certain slots of time to each task depending on how complex it’s going to be. I also block in lunch and coffees, exercise, cleaning and any general tasks. My main time blocking happens on my computer, either on a spreadsheet or directly on the calendar. But while I’m sitting down to do the tasks, I need more information to keep me on track.
I use my ‘messy daily planner’ to plan the micro-steps that need to happen in each block, and to brainstorm different aspects of them as I go along. Sometimes it gets highlighted, sometimes it gets annotated… It’s more organised than an ideas dump but it’s not designed to be revisited, so it’s not going to win a beauty contest any time soon. Getting my thought process out of my head helps me see it more clearly and allows me to truly make progress on each task.
Notebooks might just be the great love of my life (sorry, boyfriend), but there are some situations where I’ll go digital-first. During client calls and coaching sessions for example, it’s faster and more accurate for me to type out notes and reflections as we go.
Those kinds of situations aside, I’ve always found it more enjoyable to write thoughts out by hand, and then transfer any ‘good’ thoughts to digital format later.
It’s my adult version of writing a draft in pencil before daring to use a pen.
There are huge advantages to digital record keeping, and I do transfer a lot of things across. But I like to do it mindfully, and make sure that the things that get transferred are the ones that matter the most. Using paper before digital allows me to ‘declutter’ my thoughts before they make it to their final format.
Five notebooks might seem excessive, but they all have their own purpose and space and without them I don’t think I’d get half as much done.
Try adding just one or two to your routine and see how it works for you.
