Affiliate links may be included for your convenience. View our privacy and affiliates policy for details.
If you didn’t see my post yesterday about this month of creativity boosts, check it out!
I love my notebooks. I use them pretty much all the time, for pretty much everything. When I’m writing morning pages or just journaling it’s all mixed in with book reviews, to do lists and blog drafts (yep, I wrote this in my notebook, too).
There are always doodles (from me and the girl). Sometimes there might be a poem, or a recipe or a reading list.
These books are an archive of my life that I’ve kept on and off for years. I used to pull pages out of my notebooks when they were just lists or drafts of knitting patterns, but now I like to keep nearly all of it. It’s fun to go back and have a full record of what was going on in my life at any given time. And if anyone ever writes a biography of me, they’ll be all set. 
I have all sorts of notebooks: freebies from conferences, a Moleskine, reporters notebooks pilfered for long-ago jobs, cute little books I bought years ago, a gift that never made it to its recipient.
But mostly I use plain old, one-subject, spiral-bound, college-ruled notebooks of the sort that are two or four for a dollar at back-to-school time.
Natalie Goldberg says in Writing Down the Bones that she could fill such a notebook in a month. I’m not there yet, and I don’t expect you to be, either, especially if you’re not already used to writing regularly.
What’s the Notebook for?
I don’t expect everyone reading this is going to take up journaling or composing blog posts longhand. But even if you’re “not a writer” a notebook is a great tool. 
I hope you’ll grab a notebook from around the house (if you don’t have one you can even buy them at the grocery store) and try to get in the habit of keeping it with you and using it, not only if you’re playing along with these posts, but on into the future.
Do you use notebooks? I’d love to hear about your favorites and how you use them.
Related articles
