Over the course of my professional career I have become quite dependent on the notebook. I have tried and used a number of digital means, (some I still do), but I have always come back to the paper page and have long stopped fighting it. My biggest fear was always “What if I lose it?!” But it hasn’t happened yet so we are going full YOLO.

As with anything, it takes a long time to get comfortable with a workflow. If you count when I started doing the convention, (which I do), it took a few years of bouncing around different things before I settled on what works best for me. I think it was 2017 when I really started using a notebook. It is my daily work buddy, and I trust it to remember everything I don’t. As soon as something pops in my head I write it down and then forget about it. My notebook then becomes a giant to do list of various groupings, and a way to flesh things out when I need an overview or need to explore how to lay things out.

I recently finished my second notebook (of course I save them!), and I am already blazing through my new one. I am definitely about 6 pages in, which is a lot for a new notebook. For reference, there were months maybe I would use one or two pages. The amount of projects I have going on currently is surely to blame, but as I was just looking at the book as a whole I mused about what my life might look like whenever that book is filled, probably within 2 years.

Will I have the arcade open with the team I am working with? Will the convention be back and thriving? Will I be facing a lot of failure? What new things will pop up that I surely do not expect that will be happening around me?

While the notebook is an important and essential tool for me, it is also a journey. It is also a time capsule, as I can look back on my walk through life, and see it all unfolding when I already know the outcome. I believe in digital work aids, and I swear by some of them, but for me the old pen and paper reigns supreme and it will take a lot to usurp the king.