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I think her experiment with the notebooks is misleading. This is a well known issue among stationery enthusiasts, that you are afraid to begin using a nice note

by wrp 4y ago

I think her experiment with the notebooks is misleading. This is a well known issue among stationery enthusiasts, that you are afraid to begin using a nice notebook because it means committing it to a specific use. People buy Moleskines or the like and are afraid to start using then. I got around that problem by switching to spiral notebooks, so I could tear out used pages and start a new task "fresh".

throwanem 4y ago
I've never understood this frame of mind. The notebook is a tool that's meant to be used. Part of learning to use a tool well is using it poorly, in order to learn what not to do. At least with a notebook you don't have to learn by missing the nail and not missing your thumb. Also quite seriously: Moleskines are garbage. Poor bindings, shit paper, absurdly overpriced - I honestly don't know how they sleep at night. A Mnemosyne N195A is $9 or $10 from a reputable seller, and much better made with quality paper. Or, for the same money as a ripoff Moleskine, you can get an A5 Rhodia Webnotebook and have something so beautiful and palpably well made that it's at least understandable not wanting to sully it with use. (But if you do get one, write in it anyway, dammit! The only way you misuse a notebook is to let it sit gathering dust.)
- pavlov 4y ago
  At least for people with a designer/artist mindset, it's the fear of the blank canvas. People have an idealized end state in their mind: buying the notebook they imagine what its pages could look like a year from now, filled with insightful notes and breezy sketches. By committing something to paper on the first page, they're breaking that mental image. The notebook of their dreams won't exist and something mediocre is inevitably creeping in its place.
  - throwanem 4y ago
    I suppose that makes sense, with the nature of the idealization as the problem. It is a reasonable problem to have, for anyone who hasn't yet realized that 99.9% of the stuff you see from "bullet journal" Instagram was created for "bullet journal" Instagram as purely performative #vanlife on paper, and almost no one who actually keeps notes or diaries for their own sake actually does anything remotely similar.

by wrp 4y ago

throwanem 4y ago

I've never understood this frame of mind. The notebook is a tool that's meant to be used. Part of learning to use a tool well is using it poorly, in order to learn what not to do. At least with a notebook you don't have to learn by missing the nail and not missing your thumb. Also quite seriously: Moleskines are garbage. Poor bindings, shit paper, absurdly overpriced - I honestly don't know how they sleep at night. A Mnemosyne N195A is $9 or $10 from a reputable seller, and much better made with quality paper. Or, for the same money as a ripoff Moleskine, you can get an A5 Rhodia Webnotebook and have something so beautiful and palpably well made that it's at least understandable not wanting to sully it with use. (But if you do get one, write in it anyway, dammit! The only way you misuse a notebook is to let it sit gathering dust.)

pavlov 4y ago
At least for people with a designer/artist mindset, it's the fear of the blank canvas. People have an idealized end state in their mind: buying the notebook they imagine what its pages could look like a year from now, filled with insightful notes and breezy sketches. By committing something to paper on the first page, they're breaking that mental image. The notebook of their dreams won't exist and something mediocre is inevitably creeping in its place.
- throwanem 4y ago
  I suppose that makes sense, with the nature of the idealization as the problem. It is a reasonable problem to have, for anyone who hasn't yet realized that 99.9% of the stuff you see from "bullet journal" Instagram was created for "bullet journal" Instagram as purely performative #vanlife on paper, and almost no one who actually keeps notes or diaries for their own sake actually does anything remotely similar.