I continue to collect/stockpile notebooks, especially Field Notes, and this was my Chinese New Year gift to myself last year, a total of 33 notebooks.

I was an early convert from analog to digital note-taking, and as early as 1984 I was keeping all of my notes on one application or another on my hard drive. But a series of catastrophic crashes and minor incidents of data loss or file misplacement has convinced me to return to analog form to augment my digital archiving, or at least a hybrid of analog with digital archiving.

What I did not expect when I started my first tentative steps back to the handwritten world in 2006 was all of the other cognitive benefits that come with just writing stuff down.

Notebooks are now a key part of all of my workflows, whether for writing, Scouting, travel, reading, or any of my projects that require more than a simple list.

I’ll be sharing some of the ways I use notebooks in the coming weeks. Some are proven, some more experimental, but each reminds me how underrated and versatile these simple tools can be.