My Logbook Format

I keep a black, dot-gridded, A5-sized Leuchtturm notebook wherever I go, and I’m seen frequently writing in it. On average, I write about 1.5 to 3 pages per day, and have for enough time that I am on my 12th of these, this time the special “411” edition that has, well, 411 pages.

People ask me how I made the book useful, since many tried to keep a notebook in paper and bounced off of it, where it was either too clunky or simply didn’t carry its weight. This post will be me detailing what I do with the notebook to make it so useful to me, and useful enough that I have filled thousands of pages with hand-writing. The short answer is that less structure is better, and the core of it all really is in where you put your thoughts and thinking.

I call them logbooks because they feel like logs to me, chronological outlines of days and events. You could call them journals, but that has a connotation of emotional processing, and while that also happens, I see the logbooks as more of a tool to get work done.

The rule of thumb at the heart of it all is, whenever you’d grab a piece of paper or a text file to note something down, append it to the logbook instead. This makes sure the book is used for practical reasons, this makes sure it stays with you, this makes sure you can actually use it for historical looking up of useful things you need to reference again.

The actual format is exceedingly simple. Every day, in the morning, I open the notebook, I write a header with today’s weekday and today’s date, and then outline how I slept, and how I feel, maybe occasionally how I dreamt. This is, in all honesty, not really done for any purpose other than to write, occasionally to go back and find patterns, but the act of handwriting feels good and wakes me up. This is the only thing that has been consistent over all 12 books, and everything else changes, here or there.

These days, I then add a daily list of tasks and chores I want to accomplish, usually by re-writing the ones I didn’t do yesterday, and filling it out with things I can think of, or have other reminders of, or things I am prompted to do by email or text messages. I do this over digital lists, because crossing something out with a pen is much more satisfying than clicking a button, and the rewriting enables a check of ‘do I still want/need to do this’. You also viscerally notice when you’ve rewritten something many days in a row.

Things that require action of multiple days that would get lost in the strict format here get dedicated pages, where the subject is a big headline, and the page itself is noted in the index Leuchtturm notebooks come with. If it’s not the first page for the project, I then also add a reference to the page of the first project page, and a forward reference to the old page. Project pages can be anything from concrete multi-step projects in the GTD sense, to loose collections of ideas I want to refer to when prompted by The Fates¹, to small drawings of furniture I want to build.

I also started keeping monthly overview pages, where each day gets a line with notable events (or none at all). Usually these are “interaction with other people” or “things I did”, but they all tend to fit in one line and just allow me to index a month quickly without needing to flip through a lot of pages.

The flexibility of a plain page of paper is the advantage here. The only criterion that matters is “is this going to make the logbook more useful to me in specific?”, and going by that. I found I kept losing things, so project pages became a thing, and I nicked the format from GTD projects. The main thing is that it needs to be useful, it needs to pull its weight, and so my use is geared towards that.

In between things that have some amount of structure is a great amount of free-form prose that is just detailing things like how the day is going, how people are feeling, what happened to them, sometimes what’s happening in the world, processing my own emotions, thinking about ideas of things to do in the future, or what I want to achieve at some point.

It’s an incredibly useful tool, and hopefully, this post gives at least one of you enough of a starting point to making your own version of this. The act of handwriting and filling pages of paper, of filling notebooks and seeing time pass in a very physical sense is very meaningful and grounding to me, in a life where I spend a lot of time interacting with computers for work or joy. It’s a written record I am proud of being consistent in, that allows me to relive moments and events, and makes the past more tangible without being nostalgia. It makes life feel… denser, for lack of a better term, and I think I will keep doing this until I no longer can.

You can see examples of the log book in some previous posts, like the one on my reading/processing/synthesis process, or the Fates post.