Keeping a notebook is not to record the day-to-day transactions of a boring day or the gossip you heard or an account of things that you don’t want to remember. But for your great ideas, your daily task list, and other plans that come across your mind. I have always been an author, from Poetry to stories, I am not sure if I am the only one but my juices are up and down like that. When I want to write, the ideas flow and when I am not in the mood, no matter how much one can crank me, it just doesn’t happen. Keeping a notebook has been very helpful to me. I keep a notebook not to record what happened I have no interest in keeping journals or diaries, but to record my ideas as they come up.
Some of my business and blogging ideas come in the most unusual circumstances, more like a hunch and I forget about them as quickly as they came up. That’s why I keep my notebook always.
8 Benefits of keeping a notebook
1. It helps you keep a record of your ideas. Sometimes great ideas just come like a passing wind and by the time you try to remember them, they will be gone. A notebook will help you jot down your ideas whilst they are still fresh.
2. It helps you turn your ideas into action and you can accomplish more by getting stuff done
3. Less time will be wasted through procrastinating and distracting yourself
4. You might be able to spread your ideas further, and as you get the things done to spread ideas, like writing a book or blog or giving a talk. Most good ideas come into our minds as fragments, undeveloped, and need some further development. If you don’t write them down, they slip away before you spread them into something useful.
5. Ideas can fade away but writings stay scribed. If you are a writer like me, you will know that ideas come and go but if you write them down, you will be able to keep a record.
6. You can easily recap your plans in case of distractions that may have swayed you
7. It gives you more like a skeletal structure on which to build up. In most cases, rigid plans never work anyway
8. It gives you the ability to track your progress and check areas that need adjustments and improvements.
Disadvantages of not writing things down
1. Procrastination. You put off starting a task because it’s hard or you’re feeling overwhelmed or uncertain about the task.
2. Other people. Other people get in your way. Frustrate you, holding things up with their delays, making things more complicated, complaining, messing things up, being irritating.
3. Distractions & interruptions. You get pulled away by constant distractions and interruptions. Some of those are under your control, others aren’t. Maybe you get started, but then constantly switch to other tasks. So you go to an easier task or your favorite distractions. Switching, switching, switching, leads to a lack of focus and constant busyness. It helps you in managing your tasks.
4. Being tired. You’re tired, hungry, low on energy, frustrated, and lonely. These kinds of difficulties can make it hard to focus and get things done. And by the time you regain your energy, u have completely forgotten.
5. Fear, uncertainty, feeling overwhelmed & self-doubt. Lying at the heart of most of the obstacles above are these mental conditions — fear and uncertainty, which are really the same thing.
In conclusion
The notebook should be like that trusted friend of yours that you always confide in of your great ideas and anything that crosses your mind but is worth keeping a record of. It has no timetable for writing in it, you write whenever you feel you have something to write and it’s okay to even skip some days without writing in it if you have nothing to take note of. It is not a journal that you need to write in every day. But keep it with you always, for you don’t know when next you are going to need it. It’s not every time that a great idea is gonna strike you.
Call me old-school but I prefer keeping a physical notebook. For those who are tech-savvy, there are many electronic versions of notebooks that you can utilize and which save the same purpose.
And as Ernest Hemingway said, “I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”
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