I have tried every note-taking app worth trying. Each one promised to become a second brain, and each one slowly turned into a junk drawer. The notebook on my desk makes no such promise. It just waits.
Friction is the feature
Writing by hand is slow enough that I have to decide what is worth keeping. That small act of choosing does most of the thinking for me. By the time a sentence reaches the page, it has already been edited twice in my head.
The notebook doesn’t remember everything. It remembers what I cared about.
What goes in
Half-finished ideas that need a few days to settle
Lines from books, with the page number
A short note on how each day actually felt
Once a month I reread the whole thing. Most of it is noise. A few pages always turn into something larger, and those pages are the reason this blog exists.