I’m filling up my Field Notes notebooks quickly, so I’ve been on the lookout for my next set. I figured I would go cheaper this time, since Field Notes (it’s a brand) are quite pricey. I found some generic A6 size notebooks on Amazon that looked nice and have about 10 times the number of pages as the Field Notes.

I’ve been scribbling in one the last couple of days, and I realize that I don’t care for them as much. They’re too thick. They’re not as easy to write on, nor do they feel as nice to write on as the Field Notes.

I’m one page away from filling up my first little field notes notebook. I wrote about a month ago about my attempt at using field notes as an supplementary note taking method. I’ve talked since then in a video about how this has become a little bit of an obsession and how it has kind of changed the way I do things.

Lists

The first thing that has changed is that I’ve moved a lot of my “to do” list items out of my digital task manager and into my notebook. The repetitive stuff that I do every day ends up in the digital world, but anything that is more unique or even a little more important, ends up on a list in the field notes. I love the physical nature of actually crossing something off the list. I’ve always liked clicking the button in Todoist or TickTick, but doing it with my favorite pen is so much better.

A few months ago, I talked about my note-taking problem. In that post, I talked about my new solution: QuillPad and Obsidian connected via Nextcloud. A few days after that, I talked about how much I was loving Obsidian and the setup in general. That was June.

Now, I wrote in that first blog post about how I have trouble sticking with a note taking solution. I like trying new things and I’m very picky when it comes to how this all works. I want it to work exactly like I want it to work, and if something doesn’t… well that shiz has to go.

I’ve talked about my note taking “issues” in the past. I’m pretty happy with my current digital setup. I use obsidian on the desktop and I use QuillPad on my Android phone with Nextcloud in the middle. I will admit that things there are messier than they were a few months ago. I’m going to have to work on simplifying that again, but I think it still works well.

But I need to add something quicker. I don’t know what it is, but my memory isn’t great. I can remember things, but I often forget to do things that I need to do. Not really planned things, but things that come up throughout the day, usually when I’m away from my computer and my phone. There might be an entire blog post on how my digital life has ruined my ability to remember things, but that’s for another day.