not long ago i wrote about my journalling system, if it can be called that. it’s still pretty much the same setup, but i’ve been heavily inclined to return to my simple two-three notebook system that i had for an age before i decided that the answer lay in keeping a separate journal for everything.
what i used to have were daily notebooks, very much the ‘dear diary’, with a side of did that, went there. and i had a tetradochka – directly translated to little notebook, think cuadernito if you speak spanish. that shit housed everything. it was a work scratchpad, it was random thoughts i had whilst parking my car, it had notes on business, projects, reviews of restaurant dishes, doodles, drawings, sketches, todo lists, commonplace, vocab, uni assignments, meeting minutes, etc., etc., etc. the sole reason tetradochkas existed outside of the ‘dear diary’ was because i didn’t want to lug my actual diary around – which used to be way more personal than it is now, oddly enough – only to forget it at an investment banker’s office. it’s not to say that tetradochkas weren’t personal, but they were so messy and full of to-do lists that it would be hard to discern the soulful side of it all.
i don’t abandon notebooks, so i’ll be finishing every single one that i have going on right now, but i think i will softly begin combining everything into two or three notebooks again. so far the only thing i know i’ll keep separate is my recipe notebook. not that i’m such a prolific cook that it is warranted, but i just want to have these notes in one book that i can quickly take to the kitchen if necessary.
another candidate for staying unchanged is my panning notebook – again, for the sole convenience of always keeping it on my vanity.
everything else is fair game.
book journalling is a big question in my head, because i know part of me wants to keep a separate record of all the books i read. but the journalling part of it seems to happen mostly in my main big book of everything anyway.
that’s the main reason for it, i think. it all mingles and colludes anyway. keeping a separate book for everything breaks my flow, if there is any.
the first notebook to be absorbed by my Big Neurodivergent Book of Everything is going to be my morning pages. i know there exists a theory that morning pages need to be separate from everything, but if it’s noise that’s the defining factor behind this theory, then, well, the noise is not going anywhere. the noise is here to stay, no matter how many morning pages i do. so i’ll just merge it into my main book, and see where that takes me.
i’m not sure what the second book will be, but i have an inkling that the last one is going to be my book journal. the reason for that is purely material – i bought a separate templated ‘reader’s journal’ type notebook some two years ago, and i’ve yet to get to it. once i do, i might keep a separate log, with a page of monthly stats between all the book entries, while everything else – notes, quotes, commonplace – will get reabsorbed by either the daily or the tetradochki.