on keeping a notebook
Whatever you pay attention to is being fermented by your brain…Every tweet you read, every newspaper you glance at, every show you watch, every email you skim, it’s all feeding your subconscious things to process. And whatever it’s fed, it will ferment into ideas and reactions. So if you want to come up with better ideas, you must get extremely str... See more
Nat Eliason • The Art of Fermenting Great Ideas
The person who creates better information flows gets better thoughts
Connections can’t be made by siloing everything off. That is why I’m an advocate for having your ideas live in the same app as your meetings/todos/journals/etc.
Build a world. Make your projects and work a vessel for self-expression. Make your software match your vibe. Make reading your book feel like it feels to talk with you. Customize, make it bespoke, put yourself into it instead of doing what you feel you should. This has all kinds of benefits (reducing burn out for instance) but especially helps with... See more
Be an idea expander
I keep a daily diary for many reasons, but the main one is that it helps me pay attention to my life. By sitting down every morning and writing about my life, I pay attention to it, and over time, I have a record of what I’ve paid attention to.
Austin Kleon • Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad (Austin Kleon)
The true value of unbaked scrawls and sketches and whatnot is as a window to an artist’s process. Process is an ugly-sounding word—pedestrian jargon for the inherently wondrous act of creation—but it describes a method by which a thing evolves, which has always had a hold on me.
Adam Moss • The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing
A method by which a thing evolves (what if that ‘thing’ is us - or why I keep field notes for my life.
Too often, we think of notebooks as a way-station: a necessary stop en-route to the perfected, polished work of art. But what if the notebook is the work of art? What if the process of taking notes is the point?
What if the process of taking notes is the point?