Isaac Newton kept two notebooks as a student, and neither of them is about physics. One is a pocket-book he bought blank for eightpence, whose first three pages are a coded list of every sin he could remember committing. The other is a list of things he did not know, written under headings he invented himself. Both survive. Both have been transcribed in full and put online for free. And between them they show a nineteen-year-old using a notebook for …
Category: Journal Keeping Tips
Most of us assume a journal is a place for sentences. But go and look at the notebooks of people who actually changed how the world thinks, and the pages are full of pictures. Not paintings. Not finished art. Quick boxes, arrows, stick figures, charts, half-finished diagrams. Drawing was not a separate hobby. It was how they thought. Across the journals of successful people I keep returning to, the same pattern shows up. The figures we now treat as singular …
I went looking for the field notebooks of a seventh-century monk and found a library catalogue entry that quietly says somebody else wrote the book. Here is Stanford’s statement of responsibility for The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions, the famous account of Xuanzang’s journey through Central Asia and India: translated by the Tripitaka-Master Xuanzang under Imperial Order ; composed by Śramaṇa Bianji Composed by Bianji. Not by Xuanzang. And here is the publisher of the English translation …
The first entry is dated 30 March 1796. Carl Friedrich Gauss was nineteen. In Latin, it reads: Principia quibus innititur sectio circuli, ac divisibilitatis eiusdem geometrica in septemdecim partes Roughly, and this is a plain gloss rather than a scholarly translation: the principles on which the division of the circle rests, and its geometrical divisibility into seventeen parts. What he had done was prove that a regular seventeen-sided polygon can be constructed with nothing but a compass and a straightedge …
There is an entry in Stanford’s archival catalogue that reads: Dymaxion Chronofile, Vol. 252 [5 of 6], 1964 Jan It covers 2 to 14 January 1964. Thirteen days. It is the fifth of six parts of a single volume, and that volume is the two hundred and fifty-second. It sits in Box 126, Folder 1, and it holds correspondence with Adlai Stevenson, a copy of the January 1964 NCAR Quarterly, and material relating to the TIME magazine cover story that …
Every journal prompt on this site was written by somebody else. That is the normal arrangement: a stranger supplies the question, you supply the answer, and the question is the part you are not expected to produce. Derek Sivers has kept a daily diary for over twenty years, and his entire method is the opposite. He writes his own question, answers it, and then sets about attacking the answer. The Only Living Subject in This Series Almost everyone profiled on …
The grid is nine boxes by nine boxes. Your goal goes in the centre. The eight boxes around it are the conditions that have to be true for the goal to happen. Then each of those eight becomes the centre of its own nine-box square, and you fill in eight concrete actions for each. One goal, eight conditions, sixty-four actions. Shohei Ohtani filled one of these in as a high-school student in Japan. His centre box was to become the …
The Lewis and Clark expedition was ordered to keep journals in duplicate. Two officers, several copies, redundancy designed in from the start by the president who sent them. What survives is not what was designed. Meriwether Lewis missed over four hundred days of entries. Where both captains did write, they were often copying each other rather than writing independently. The record of the expedition exists mainly because William Clark, the worse speller of the two, wrote something down nearly every …
When I started reading about famous notebooks, I expected the survival stories to be the dull part. Of course the Mona Lisa‘s sketchbooks survived. Of course we still have Bruce Lee’s training journals. They are in archives. They have institutional grants. They have laminated tabs. Then I started reading the footnotes. It turns out that more than one of the most-quoted notebooks in history made it to us through near-disasters: a fire that burned 6,000 pages, a drawer in a …
A sleep journal is a short daily log of how you slept: what time you went to bed, roughly how long it took you to fall asleep, how often you woke, when you finally got up, and how you would rate the night out of five. You fill it in once, in the morning, and you keep it for about two weeks. It is the only journal on this site whose main purpose is to be read by somebody else. …