Marks of mayhem

How to cure the “shiny new tool” syndrome

My trusty Plotter A5, a mainstay of my work

Dear reader, I have a secret, dormant condition: I have an obsessive fascination with notebooks. Hardcovers, softbounds, ring binders… I’ve got stacks of them on my desk and stacks more stowed away in the shadows of my cabinets. Some are filled with ruminations, work schedules, and to-do lists, but others are patiently waiting to be cracked open and marked with mayhem.

I was listening to the Staying Up podcast on my train ride home when co-host

Taryn Arnold

mentioned her pocket notebook, and my ears perked up for more details. It has become instinctual, the strong curiosity to know what type of paper and pen are each writer’s weapon of choice.

The podcast had a video format, so my little racoon hands scrambled to find a visual on the notebook. Is it a Moleskine, a Leuchtturm1917? Is it a hard or a soft cover? Is it a plain, dot grid, or ruled notebook? What pen does she pair it with?

Cammie and Taryn Arnold Scott from Staying Up

Writing this, I’m high-key judging my own curiosity. Like… it’s paper. It has literally nothing on it.

There is a romantic aspect to note-taking that I can't shake off. That someone thinks their thoughts are valuable enough to jot down on paper (or screen). That they take time to be creative and connect new ideas together. That they're made for more than executing (work) but also creative expression. Everything emerges from a blank page.

Viewing someone's notes is like witnessing a magnum opus in its infancy. A sketch before the final painting is done. In Tick, Tick… Boom!, composer Jonathan Larson’s sporadic notes become ribs that form the spines of the final track Louder Than Words. Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift stashed homeless couplets in Apple Notes before the resulting songs hit Spotify’s Top 50.

Notes are relatable, because all our ideas are also conceived this way.

Left: Tick, Tick… Boom! / Right: Taylor Swift in Miss Americana

The symptoms: hacking PKM

When I discovered the world of digital personal knowledge management, I encountered a plethora of note-taking tools, from the digital realm (Roam, Notion, Obsidian, Evernote) to the analog lands (bullet journals). There's even an internet tribe called Building a Second Brain (led by the formidable Tiago Forte) that hinges upon building a note-taking system so efficient that it frees up your brain to do the important thing: thinking.

I started the analog way because I already had an existing notebook that served as my daily to-do list. I spent three months transforming it into my bullet journal, meticulously creating thematic spreads such as monthly habit and mood trackers. After feeling comfortable with my notebook, I proceeded to then invest a year or so building up my Notion and Roam pages, connecting them to Readwise as the automatic feed plucks highlights from my Kindle app, podcast snips, and newsletter clippings into one centralized digital home.

I was clearly spending my time on the wrong thing: organizing my notes. After the three analog months, I ditched my fancy habit trackers and bought a dated diary. I also stopped brandishing my digital note systems. The digital pages ended up just sitting there anyway, idly collecting information from the automatic feeds. 

I was trying to acquire the tool as a shortcut, to hack my way into being productive, becoming a more efficient organizer, a more creative thinker. But the type of software or tool I have does not matter if I don’t generate any sort of output.

Tech journalist

Casey Newton

griped with the same problem, having fed his notes into Roam multiple times a week. He then waited for the insights to come. And waited. And waited. His conclusion: “it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking.”

But this year, I discovered how to get over the “shiny new tool” syndrome and instead use the tool as intended: as a tool.

I harnessed the full power of my note-taking system once I started writing.

The antidote: creating

Creating, as it turns out, is the ultimate way to “utilize” a tool. When I set a weekly publishing goal for Substack with Write of Passage (open for enrollment), I began to find ideas everywhere and frantically dropped them into my notebooks and my apps. After all, a database full of ideas is useless if nothing came out of it. It's like having a Ferrari parked in a fancy, humidity-controlled garage.

Now, I jot down keywords or short thoughts in my daily Roam pages, and transfer them to a Notion page once I have a rough enough outline. If I need references, I will pull them up from Roam using the search function (that’s how I quickly found the Casey Newton reference in the above section).

A weekly publishing goal meant I had limited time to mess around with organizing my notes or making them pretty. If anything, it pushed me onto the highway of creation, forcing me to streamline my process as much as possible.

The antidote is temporary

I wish I could say that my new creating driving force has forever squandered the curiosity in exploring new tools. But when I encountered the notebook from the podcast, I fell down the same familiar, endless hallway.

This past week, I have frantically browsed the internet for the perfect notebook. It has to be pocket-sized, like Taryn’s, but also with a soft cover so I can shove a pen in the middle of the elastic. It’s as if I don’t have an existing pocket notebook, abandoned in my flat somewhere after using the first two pages and deciding that notebook wasn’t for me.

Turns out the antidote of creating is not a permanent cure. But that’s okay.

We enter the note-taking world because of our intentions: to become productive, a better thinker, a more efficient organizer. Sometimes we just need to reroute onto the highway and realize that the shiny new tools on the street-side billboards are just distractions waiting for us to notice them.

There’s no harm in taking the exit lane here and there to give a new note-taking tool a spin. This morning, I dusted off my abandoned pocket-sized Traveler’s notebook and decided to commit to it, Taryn-style, for a month. I plopped it in my backpack. If it works, great. And if it doesn’t, I’ve got a steady and reliable note-taking system to fall back confidently on.

---

Because nobody asked, here’s what I use for note-taking:

Thanks to friends who are probably as obsessed with note-taking as I am:

Lavinia Iosub

,

The Conversation Starter

,

The Show Must Go On

, and Evan Lim.

---

Update log:

• ✍🏼 I’m joining Write of Passage’s 11th cohort as an editor! See a good lot of you there.

• ⏸️ Considering to take a temporary break from YouTube, especially during the duration of Write of Passage.

• 🏋️‍♀️ Brought a friend to Bodypump. I have an open invitation to my friends: if anyone wants to try strength training for the first time, I promise to go with them so they don’t have to be intimidated to do it alone.

• 📖

  Casey Newton
  ’s reflection on three years of
  Platformer
  . Excellent piece on the economics of running a Substack (or in Casey's case, a group-run Substack), multi-platform products, and the importance of collecting email addresses.

• 🎸🤡 Watched the Glitter + Doom musical, the closing film at the Hong Kong Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. Features a love that is “good and young” and wonderful songs from Indigo Girls.

• 📹 On the YouTube channel: Making overcast sketches more vibrant.