Tooth and Ink

I am staring at a fat, open-spine binding with a white cross on the cover. A gift from Pia Wallén at her gleaming, oh-so-Swedish studio in Stockholm. My wife and kids and I visited in 2017. She gave us a tour of her beautiful space and handed me this notebook—a limited run she had made with a book binder in Sweden. The cover felt heavy and the paper had enough tooth to catch ink without letting it bleed through. It took me a year to fill every page. That notebook was glorious.

My handwriting is a mess. I write in all caps, lower case, and cursive depending on my mood. I use various pens (never pencils) of various colors. But after twenty years of building things, I have learned that spelling out one letter at a time is the only way to slow my brain down. Typing is faster. Voice dictation is faster. Almost anything is faster than scratching words onto paper. But efficiency is a trap that kills the music before you find the melody.

There is a flow to how work moves through us. Receiving. Analyzing. Deciding. Implementing. Most people skip the middle steps. They get an email and immediately respond. They receive a Slack and react. The pressure to move fast pushes us from input straight to output without stopping to think.

Writing by hand breaks that cycle. My morning habit has been the same since I can remember. I scan my inbox and write down each topic on a physical list. I make decisions right there on the page. If an email is a waste of time, I write a simple no. If a meeting is at two, I write Tuesday 2pm. Then my day is set. The rest is just the doing. Ten minutes of planning forces a pause between receiving and reacting.

There is data tucked into this. Multiple studies have found that people who wrote down their goals were forty-two percent more likely to achieve them. And doodlers remember twenty-nine percent more from a phone call than those who just sit and listen. I do not know if the math always settles perfectly, but I know that when I draw cubes and pyramids in the margins of a Zoom call, I stay engaged with the conversation way more than if I were trying to clean my inbox at the same time.

I have used just about every notebook from every maker. Leuchtturm, Moleskine, Rhodia, Midori. Each one has a personality and traits that I admire. I prefer dots over grids and grids over plain and plain over lines. I do not like lines. The dots though, I like. There's something special to me about connecting the dots to build little three-dimensional shapes, square check boxes, perfectly gridded letters.

I also enjoy the quiet reward when you reach the last page. You hold this object filled with everything you thought and did over the past weeks or months. You will probably never read it again. But you can hold the weight of everything you have done in one hand and the thinness of what is left in the other. That feeling is hard to replicate digitally. There is nothing satisfying about being fifty percent through a notes app. Whatever that would mean.

The second round of prototypes for our own Canard notebook arrived at the studio today. We are eager to get our hands and pens on them for extensive testing.