I’ve always been someone that has been a bit of a perfectionist and over thought my own processes for achieving goals. It’s made it hard to ship blog posts regularly, land my side projects and generally complete tasks. For me, one part of creating things involves having a place to dump ideas down quickly that isn’t digital - there’s something about taking the effort to note things down by hand and create a more mindful moment, allowing me to take a pause and really process what I’m thinking about.

However, I’d buy a brand new notebook and I’d painstakingly fuss over what I was going to use that notebook for, what structure I’d choose to write in it with, and if I made a mistake while writing in it, I’d be incredibly frustrated that now that page/part was “ruined”. The very process of just writing notes would suddenly throw up roadblocks in front of just delivering the creative ideas I’d just had.

It came from a place of wanting to do great work, but ultimately it crushed my creativity, halted my momentum and kept me focused on things that didn’t drive the goals I was aiming for.

Recently, while telling him about my new notebook purhcase, my friend Jordan Terry introduced me to the term “Commonplace book”, and as soon as I read more about it, I knew that’s exactly how I needed to treat my notebooks going forwards. They just need to be a stream of consciousness, interesting ideas, quotes, lists, and random thoughts. It didn’t matter if there was a mistake, if what was on one page was unrelated to the next, or if another page was a shopping list. It feels strange, almost like I needed validation that there’s a concept of an unstructured notebook, but I’ll take what I can get.

So, why am I writing this in a blog? Well, after a recent conversation with Ben Phillips, who’s re-embracing blogging and building again, he said that he was “going to write for me” and just “see if anyone reads it”.

That statement, plus the discovery of this concept, it just made me want to get something out there and stop worrying about it so much going forwards, so here we are, hopefully I’ll get more than nine blog posts out there over the next ten years.

And yes - I did buy a new notebook and pen because nothing beats that feeling of starting a new notebook.