Notebooks are the one thing in my life I have unembarrassedly experimented with for a long time. I have bought, used, and quietly retired notebooks in roughly every category — the bullet journal, the dot grid, the lined, the unlined, the leather-bound, the pocket-sized, the absurdly expensive Italian one I felt too precious to actually write in, the cheap office-supply pad I wrote my best year of journaling in. After roughly a decade of this, I have settled on three notebooks I keep reordering. None of them are surprising. None of them are particularly fancy. All of them earned their place by being, in slightly different ways, the right kind of unfussy.
This isn't a roundup post. It's just three things I trust, and a little bit about why I trust them. If you're already happy with your notebook, you can stop reading; the right notebook is the one you'll actually open. But if you're, like I was for years, in a long cycle of buying nicer and nicer notebooks and journaling in them less and less, maybe one of these will land.
1. The Muji B5, plain
This is the one currently on my desk. It has been the one on my desk for most of the last four years. It is unlined — I prefer unlined for thinking, lined for to-do lists — and it is, by any reasonable measure, the most boring notebook in this list. There is no leather. No embossed logo. The paper is thin enough that some pens bleed through, and the cover is a kind of soft cardboard that gets a little rumpled within a week.
It is exactly because it is so boring that it has been my main notebook for years. The Muji B5 has no aesthetic ambition. It does not ask to be displayed. It does not make me feel I should be writing important things in it. I can scribble badly in it. I can tear pages out. I can spill tea on a corner and not feel I've damaged anything precious. The notebook is, structurally, an invitation to use it. The very nice notebooks are, structurally, an invitation to perform writing in them.
The price is also part of why it works. They cost a few dollars each. I keep two unopened ones in a drawer at all times, so when one fills up I just open another. There is no anxiety about what to use the next notebook for. It is the same notebook. It is just a fresh one.
2. A small pocket Field Notes-style memo book
I am not religious about which brand. The original Field Notes are good. There are perfectly nice off-brand equivalents, and I have used both. What matters is that the notebook is small enough — about three and a half by five and a half inches — that it lives in a back pocket without thinking about it, and slim enough that the pages don't bend when it does.
This notebook does a different job from the Muji. The Muji is for thinking, drafting, journaling — the slow work that wants a flat surface and a window. The pocket notebook is for capture. Phone numbers, addresses, sentence fragments overheard at a café, names of plants I want to look up later, a question I had at three in the afternoon that I want to come back to that evening, a grocery list, a friend's recipe. None of this stays in the pocket book; most of it gets transferred into the Muji or into actual life within a few days. But the capture moment — pulling the small notebook out of a back pocket, writing a line, putting it back — is one of the small physical pleasures of my week.
I prefer plain or graph paper. I do not prefer dotted, although I know that's the trend. I have not been able to articulate why. It's possible the dots are good and I have a quiet aesthetic prejudice. I will not insist on it.
I have, over the years, gone through perhaps fifteen of these. They never feel finished, exactly; they just fill up. I keep the used ones in a small wooden box. Every two or three years I flip through one of the older ones and find sentences I'd completely forgotten — overheard fragments, half-jokes, a description of a tree I was trying to remember. The pocket notebook is, in some quiet way, my best record of what I was actually paying attention to.
3. A simple bound notebook for the year-long projects
The third notebook is the only one that's slightly nicer, and it's nicer because it has to last. Once or twice a year I start a project notebook — a translation I'm working on, a novel I'm planning, an essay I'm researching across many months — and for those, I want a notebook that's going to physically survive being opened and closed for a year, dragged in and out of bags, sometimes spilled on, occasionally written in upside down on a train.
The current version is a Leuchtturm A5 hardcover. Before that it was a Midori. Before that, briefly, a Moleskine. The Leuchtturm is the one I keep coming back to because the binding holds up, the paper is thick enough not to bleed with the pen I use, and the construction feels like a notebook that expects to be used hard. The Midoris are beautiful but I have torn the spine on two of them. The Moleskines, in my experience, have not aged well, but I know other people swear by them.
The key thing about the project notebook is that I number the pages. This is, again, not a system; it is just so I can refer back. If I make a list of source materials on page 14, I can write "see p. 14" on page 71 when I want to come back to it. This is the smallest possible nod toward organization, and it is enough.
What I have stopped buying
The expensive notebooks, almost without exception. Not because they are bad — they are usually beautiful — but because I treat them with the wrong kind of reverence. The leather Italian notebooks I bought in my early thirties are, mostly, half-full of self-conscious, performance-quality writing that doesn't sound like me. I write better, more honestly, and more often in cheap notebooks. The ratio of nice paper to honest writing is, in my case, inverse.
I have also stopped buying notebooks I don't have a use for. Walking past a stationery store and buying a notebook because it's pretty is a tax I used to pay routinely. Now, when I see a notebook I like, I ask: is one of my current notebooks running out? If yes, I buy it. If no, I leave it on the shelf. There are very nice notebooks on shelves all over the world. They will still be there when I need one.
What none of them are
None of these are productivity tools. None of them are part of a system. I have tried bullet journals, tried the various templated planners, tried the layered indexing approaches, and they all collapse for me within about three weeks. The notebooks I actually use are not organized. They are chronological. The Muji has a date in the corner of each page, sometimes, and that is the entirety of the structure.
If you are someone for whom systems work, the systems are great. I am not that person. I have tried very hard to be that person. The notebooks above are what I use because I have given up trying to be that person, and they are the ones that survived in the absence of any system at all.
That's the list. A boring B5 from a Japanese homewares chain. A small pocket book of indifferent provenance. A reasonably durable bound notebook for the long projects. Three notebooks, two pens, no rules, ten years of trying everything else. If your current notebook is working, ignore everything I've said. If it isn't, the answer might be plainer than you've been letting it be.