how i use my notebooks

do you keep a journal? have you tried and given up, more than once? do you have a stack of half-filled notebooks somewhere in the house, each one started during a different attempt to be the kind of person who keeps one? have you ever started fresh on a january 1st and stopped by the 12th? do you have a notes app full of fragments you have not gone back to? do you think of yourself as a journaler, or as someone who keeps meaning to be one? have you ever copied a sentence from a book into the margin of something just to keep it from disappearing?

i would love to know—tell me in the comments if any of these sound like you. i have been doing this for almost two decades now, and the answers people give are consistently more interesting than i expect.

if you are curious about how i do it, what follows is the breakdown. i developed a method for it over years, which i now sell as a guide called journaling architecture. the version of it i live with day to day is more particular than what a guide can describe though—it has evolved and grown with me over almost two decades and has more of me in it than anything else i own or any person i know.

my current notebook setup is a traveler’s journal—a piece of leather that wraps around three replaceable inserts held in place by elastic bands. mine is deep burgundy with a brass closure, made by a small studio in indonesia. the cover is less than two months old. the leather has already begun to give where my hand rests against it, and the brass closure has loosened from the daily opening. the object itself has done something i did not predict. it has made me write more—more often, and with closer attention than i used to bring to the page.

a planner does not work for me, because my brain doesn’t function in a span of a day as much as i would like it to. notes apps don’t work for a different reason—i don’t go back to those unless it’s a grocery list i need when i’m in the store, or a phone number i need when i’m outside. and a single notebook with everything in one place would not survive what it was being asked to do, especially for someone like me who craves structure in everything, which i feel like my curation practice on instagram has made plenty clear over the years. the daily journal and the commonplace book are different metabolic processes; they contaminate each other when they share pages. the traveler’s journal gives them separate rooms while keeping everything in the same binder.

so here’s how i’ve structured them.