On keeping a notebook

Are you someone who looks back at your notebooks? And if so, what do you find when you look?

I have an obsession with notebooks, but when I get to the end of one I tend to reach for the next, momentarily savouring its fresh white pages before, like the one that preceded it, covering it in scrawl. The last one is relegated to a pile on my desk, neglected, ready to collect dust, and I tend not to look in it again for a long while, unless something bugs me that I think I wrote down somewhere and I then go in search of this one quote, or this one observation, and invariably don’t find it.

I know people who are less chaotic (there are lots of people who are less chaotic than me), and they either write straight into computer files and date them - or they laboriously type up what they have written in their notebook that week. I did attempt to do this in my Ten important things series - which I still intend to pick up again, because it was really helpful in helping me remember. That’s the point of making notes, isn’t it? To remember? Not to make the notes and then forget you made them.

Sheila Heti wrote a whole book from her diary entries, Alphabet Diaries, but was only able to do this because all her diary entries were already filed on her computer.