Why I Carry And Use A Pocket Notebook 📒

It's no question that phones can be super powerful devices when used properly to better our lives and productivity, but they can also be its downfall if we rely on them too heavily!

In my experience, this misstep is usually taken when we try to use our phones for capturing thoughts. In Building A Second Brain’s CODE, capturing is all about getting the thought out of our mind as fast as humanly possible so it can be organized, distilled, and expressed later on. At times using a phone to accomplish this can result in a negative effect on our productivity.

💡 Imagine this...

Walking down the street on your way to lunch you have this incredible idea for your new startup project and you just need to jot it down!

You pull out your phone and you see you have a message from your partner asking if you are still on for dinner tonight.

After responding you go to the home screen where you see a notification on your mail client of choice and so you need to attend to that first of course...

It's an important email from your bank!

Once that is tended to, you finally open your task app and only remember what you want to eat tonight and your account balance.

This type of situation has happened to me far too often, and I was sick of it.

📒 The Solution

You may say to use focus modes or disable home screens and certain apps at certain times. Or maybe you disable all notifications!

These methods can help but in the end, our phones are made to greet us with new info every chance they can. Whether that info is good, bad, productive, unnecessary, or just pointless is up in the air and depends on the setup you have made for yourself.

My issue is that our phones are great at delivering info but not great at capturing it.

This is where a pocket notebook comes into play. Simple. Analog. And elegant.

I started carrying one for work. I was gathering so much information all the time I needed a place to put all my ideas and thoughts without the interference the digital world can give.

It quickly became my favorite capture method. The fact it didn't have to be neat or organized made it perfect. I could stuff it in my back pocket without a care in the world. The book itself wasn't special it's the ideas inside and that is why for me it's the best method for capturing my ideas.

My notebook is never trying to get me to think a certain way or push ideas down my throat. Instead, it lets me find connections using my thoughts and stores them for me when I need them.

I recommend if you haven't tried carrying a pocket notebook try it out for a week and see how it goes.

I created a Notion template you can use as a companion to this system. At the end of each day take 5 minutes and transfer everything you wrote inside your pocket notebook to your Notion page. Then get rid of any and all pages you have transferred over.

This way you will consume and capture knowledge more efficiently and it will also feel like every day is a fresh start!

It won't hurt to try it. For every idea, note, list, or bullet you need to jot down reach for your notebook and write it there. I guarantee you will see and appreciate the difference in clarity immediately!