The 500-Year-Old Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci.
And why you should keep a notebook too.
There is a wonderful story in Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci’s biography about when he was writing Steve Jobs’ biography. Steve told Walter that he had all these documents, notes and emails from the 1990s that he would retrieve and share.
Several weeks passed, yet there was no sign of these documents, so Walter wrote to Steve asking him if he had found them. Steve replied he had found them, but he and his best engineers at Apple had been unable to retrieve them from the discs.
As Walter writes,
“Paper turns out to be a superb information-storage technology, still readable after five hundred years, which our own tweets likely won’t be.”
I have a stack of CD ROMs with hundreds of photos I took in the early 2000s, yet I no longer have a CD ROM drive to view them. However, I still have a photo album of printed photos from the 1980s and 90s that I brought with me when I came to Korea in 2002.
Digital technology is fantastic; it has allowed us to take copious amounts of notes, save thousands of articles (which, it turns out, most of us never read) and has revolutionised how we do our work today with email, Microsoft Teams and Slack. It’s given us more flexibility about where we can work and democratised information so that more of us can access more information than ever.
Yet, just because we can, does that mean we should?
At the start of this year, I returned to handwriting my journals. After five years of writing my journal in Day One, I had never returned to re-read my old entries. Whenever I was on my phone or iPad, I would more likely open Facebook or Instagram than Day One. Yet, I have my old handwritten journals on my bookshelf, and I regularly pick one of them out and read through entries from 2017 or 2018 as I wait for a client to come onto a call.
The whole point of collecting our ideas, thoughts and dreams is so we can go back and read them. Yet, how often do you do that with your digital notes?
One of the great things about collecting your thoughts and ideas on paper is the randomness of those thoughts and ideas. There’s no logical sequence to the way your thoughts come out. You may one day write a page about going on holiday to Jamaica, and the next page could be this week’s shopping list. Yet, several years later, when you come across those notes, they will make you smile. You’ll remember when you wrote those pages and be amazed at your dietary choices.
Moreover, that randomness will give you incredible connections when you go through your notebook. You may have collected some thoughts on the Japanese tea ceremony on one page, and later, you have a few thoughts on slowing down and being intentional. As you read through those notes, even if they are far apart, your brain may connect the art of the tea ceremony and the idea of slowing down and being intentional. No digital note technology would make that distinction. One is about making tea; the other is about slowing down.
Another change I made this year was to do my initial planning on paper. I found that how my digital notes forced me to format my text, write lists and follow the template of the notes app restricted my thinking. It felt like I was editing, not thinking. There was no flow; it was just lists and more lists. Then, as my note grew, I had to navigate the screen by scrolling or resizing it.
On a single sheet of A4 paper, I can write in big or small letters, from the bottom to the left or right side or add additional notes in the margins. There’s complete freedom. It doesn’t matter if I make a spelling error or use incorrect grammar. I can easily switch pens, write in different colours, and use a highlighter or circle a vital sentence or phrase. It’s simple, and I don’t need to search through menus of features to make things stand out or change colours.
Now, when I plan the week, a project or a YouTube video, I pull out my planning book (A Rhodia A4 lined pad with ring binding), pick up a pen, and just let my thoughts flow from my head down my arm through the pen and onto the paper. I have no anxieties about battery levels or internet connection — just good old-fashioned pen and paper. I can turn off my computer and phone and immerse myself in whatever I am planning with no distractions or pop-up notifications. It’s pure joy.
Once I’ve finished planning, I can scan the paper note into my digital notes, give it a title and pull out any next actions. The note is now available on any of my devices and is searchable.
However, as Steve Jobs discovered, I am aware that these digitally scanned notes will likely not survive the format changes over the next five or ten years, so I keep my planning books. Filling a single planning book takes me around eight to nine months. This means it will take around ten years to fill twelve books. That’s not a lot of space on my bookshelf.
The internet is full of stories of people finding their grandmother’s recipe book or their great-grandfather’s notebook, and they are marvels. They are handwritten, with movie theatre tickets from the 1950s or an old magazine recipe glued in there. They are beautiful; they are art.
Digital technology will never give us that. It’s cold, formulaic and dull. Marcus Aurelius, the second-century Roman Emperor, wrote a journal we still have. He did not intend for his journal to be published, but we are forever grateful he wrote it. The lessons in Stoicism we have from those writings help millions of people today.
You may not think you have anything to share with the future world; neither did Leonardo Da Vinci or Marcus Aurelius, yet they did, and you may too. But the future world will only benefit from your ideas and thoughts if they are in a format that will survive the constant advancement in technology, and the only format that will do that is good old-fashioned pen and paper.
Don’t throw away your ideas. Keep them, cherish them and hand them down to your kids and grandkids. They will have memories of you long after you are gone.
Thank you for reading my stories! 😊
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