you don’t need a notebook system

What’s up with our obsessive desire to make life feel rigid?

We take soft things and fence them within parameters, schedules, regimes. Mornings become a “morning routine,” daily habits get tracked on a chart, reading wishlists become a “syllabus”.

I’m talking to a certain kind of person here. Put your hand up if you are a:

• former high school over-achiever

• stationery addict

• eldest daughter with a Muji pen collection

• retired bullet journal devotee

Hi. I am one of you.

Something I’ve noticed lately is an uptick in conversations around “notebook systems,” or “ecosystems” which promise ways of organising thoughts, ideas, to do lists, collages, reading notes, morning pages, into a series of different notebooks. Perhaps there’s even conversation between notebooks, where passages or items get copied out and logged in different places.

I get the appeal. One notebook for this, one notebook for that. I too am a woman who believes that a notebook with just the right page density and spine flexibility might change my life’s trajectory.

But every time I sit down to watch a youtube video or read an essay about someone’s “notebook system”, I never end up using it. I just bask in the idea of a perfectly organised life.

[Homer Simpson voice] Mmmmmm… idea of a perfectly organised life.

So let me offer an alternative:

Let it be messy.

My favourite art teacher, Lynda Barry, asks her cartooning students to use a composition notebook on a daily basis. She tells them to put anything and everything in there. Her list of “greenlit” categories for composition books include the following:

• Diary entries

• Drawings

• Dreams

• Doodles

• Shopping lists

• To do lists

• Daily comics

• Spirals, shapes

• Fears and anxieties

• Quotes

• Class notes

And it goes on and on.

Sometimes I wish I could separate my life into categories. But so often, things run into each other:

• you write down a name whilst on a phone conversation and then start doodling a picture

• you go shopping for groceries and think up a poem in the aisles

• you meet a friend for coffee and end up talking about your job hunt

Life isn’t always easy to separate and catalog. So why do we insist on it?

I have a notebook which I tried to wrestle into a category. First it was a bullet journal. Then it was a manifestation journal. Then it was a daily diary.

Then I stopped asking it to be something specific, and just let it be.

It’s ok to not have a system for your, uh, stationery. Your life will be just as good if you write your to do list on diner napkins. You can fill up a blank page however you want. You can stick in bus tickets and write in ugly to do lists or phone call doodles. You can make a mind map on one page and then write a poem for your dog on the other.

Consider this your permission slip to loosen your grip on the things which make life fun.