This pocket notebook is (slowly) replacing my phone

This is my notepad, you know, I've used it thousands of times as a wedge to keep my chair from rocking and it's been abused beyond repair in many other ways. I carry it with me everywhere, in short, it provides me with something incredibly valuable. which at least as far as I know I haven't been able to find anywhere else,

this

all started with a very well meaning Nathaniel Drew who is kind of a

notebook

expert if they exist, it's amazing to me how many people actually do

this

. I was intrigued but very skeptical, you know, like I should be, because not everything you see on the internet is true and I kept running into this with other YouTubers where they were experimenting with taking notes, you know, with pen and paper or writing videos. pen and paper scripts or programming or journaling and stuff like that, so I played around with it a little bit.

I even bought some super badass to the bone tactical

notebook

s that are waterproof and practically indestructible, but for some reason I just couldn't get into it as I kept starting and stopping, like start, stop, start, stop back and forth until I finally got tired of it and just left it, so I decided it must be for a few very select grouped people and it wasn't there. in those select few, but then I started hearing things I just couldn't ignore, for example, I found a best-selling author who wrote down every memory he had as a child in a notebook and when he was an adult he would go back, remember them, and remember them. writes, and he literally has shelves full of notebooks, he's like an incredibly prolific author who now writes his books with pencil and paper and then has someone turn them into even the story.

I found people like C.S Lewis who would intentionally use ink that took longer to dry because it forced him to stop after each sentence and wait and think before writing the next thing? that they seem to be getting back to it or at least trying it and despite all the fancy new apps and software that are coming out, there's just this nagging thought that maybe we're leaving something behind that we shouldn't and I really wanted this to be the case. I love the idea of ​​tactile experience and expressing my thoughts on paper and I like the permanence of it and the feel and sound of it.

Oh, I know. I'm very weird about this, but it's the sounds, it's the feeling. It sounded great, but I just couldn't and that's when life circumstances, aka mechanical issues, led me to this dressing moment. A completely absurd idea was born: What would happen if I bought a small notebook and a pen and treated it like a

phone

? carrying it literally everywhere with me, the rational part of my brand was like, dude, it's the 21st century, come on, but the emotional part of my brain was like, oh, you know, who knows, I mean, what if it happened? something incredible, can you guess what I do?

I decided I instantly fell in love with him, we went everywhere together and I never left home without him. I even took it to some places where I didn't take my

phone

. My phone was very offended, unlike my phone. My notepad never turns off, it's never distracting. me and most of all he has absolutely no agenda if I ignore him, he doesn't even try to get my attention. Okay, this all sounds a little funny, doesn't it, but I'm actually very serious and here's why attention, attention, is one of the rarest and most valued commodities in our world today, if you can By learning how to get someone's attention and keep it, you will instantly have an opportunity that no one else has and all around us there are hundreds of interlopers constantly competing for just a small portion of our attention so that they can fill it with their message or their product or their ideas and The interesting thing is that often the best and most useful technological tools that we have are often the best at capturing our attention, so you're probably wondering like, um, are you like? anti-media or something Austin uh no I mean I'm kind of a YouTuber so that would defeat the purpose but I trust and recognize that companies that spend millions of dollars learning how to get my attention better.

They're probably very good at it, like it's their business. I'll give you an example and tell me if you relate to this or not, but have you ever picked up your phone to do something specific like you already know? send a message or take a note or search for something and in about three seconds you had no idea, like you'd completely forgotten why you picked up your phone in the first place and if that's ever happened to you, then that's a prime example of you. . stepping in to use a tool to further his own agenda, but instead had to be hijacked by something that seemed a little more appealing at the time, completely derailing what he was originally trying to do, at least for the moment, but if it's So.

I know that trying to avoid a problem or not face something that you should be facing and you just wanted a quick distraction, it's great for that, but what it's not good for is organic thinking and here we come to the most important thing that this little pad offers me. of notes. that I haven't been able to find anywhere else, one of the first things I noticed when I started carrying this with me is that it gave me a place to just pour out organic thoughts with zero like getting that zero potential to ever distract myself. or for external ideas to mix with mine and through organic thinking I specifically define it as something that belongs only to you and that you do not want other ideas to mix with and speaking from past experiences this could be any thing, from you know, making a shopping list that I'm sure my friend Zach remembers, um, you know, trying to process emotions and figure out why I'm mad at a friend or another aspect of this is letting go of creative ideas, because a creative idea can arise. very quickly and it can just pop into your head and if there's any kind of distraction you can lose that at least I can and I just can't count how many times I've picked up my phone to write down a creative idea that I had and completely lost it because something told me. attention or something distracted me before I could figure it all out and that's actually really frustrating, honestly, and there's one more aspect of this that I think is really important and worth mentioning which is have you ever forgotten to carry your phone somewhere with you for a couple of hours, not that you had it with you but on silent, but you literally didn't even have it with you if you're like me?

There's something different about being physically removed from something that can distract you like your phone versus just having it with you, but in silence it's like your brain suddenly realizes that there is literally no possible way for me to be distracted or drawn to it. . direction and it seems to redirect your attention to other things like your environment, another way of thinking about it, at least for me, it prevents me from sleeping with one eye open, so to speak, you know, where are you, that analogy of sleeping and always you're like you're always aware that in case something comes up, you have to be alert because that's what it feels like sometimes, and when you completely eliminate it, it literally disappears and all of a sudden the energy refocuses and that's something. which again, using this actually works really well as it eliminates any of those distractions and really allows your brain to refocus that energy and this is huge because this can literally make the difference between solving or jeopardizing a creative solution or idea.

Okay, so I've been walking around with this notepad and this pen in my

pocket

for several months. Now I sometimes go a week without even using it. It doesn't matter, sometimes the table is unbalanced in a restaurant, so I put it under the table. leg to keep it from wobbling, seriously, I couldn't care less, now I don't use this for everything, obviously there are some things for which it is wildly impractical to use a notepad and now my phone or laptop works much better and so it's not even a question in that sense, but when something comes up that makes me stop and go, oh, that's important, nine times out of ten I will do it, at least during the discovery phase of an idea, I will often choose a literally wherever it is.

It is impossible for any other agenda other than mine to be present, where nothing will mix with my idea. This will cost you a dollar, so feel free to try it for a few weeks and see if it works for you. What I love to do is whenever I'm in a group and then everyone's on their phones and they're all bored and stuff, instead of taking out my phone, I take out my notebook and start writing, it's amazing, literally no one does it. see it coming