Artifacts are important. There is a certain joy that comes with putting pen to paper and making ideas physical rather than committing them to soulless, easily-deleted pixels. My memory is linked to both the physical act of my hand creating and the visual placement on the page, neither of which are accommodated with a Google Doc.
I have been keeping notes and to-do lists, rather poorly, for the past 30 years on legal notepads. They don’t travel well, look shoddy rather quickly, and lack the search-ability of a digital document. After years of looking, I have found an elegant solution: the magnificent Leuchtturm 1917 hard cover master slim A4 notebook. Gorgeous heavy weight-lined paper, and the pages are numbered for making an index. Yes, it’s large, and I feel a bit like Ben Franklin carrying it into a meeting where everyone else is pecking away behind laptop screens, but it lends things a bit of gravitas, a permanent archive of thought and world-changing to-dos. It is one of those simple pleasures that improve my life immeasurably. Check out Leuchtturm, and let me know if there is perhaps an even better notebook out there that you prefer.
