The 15-Minute Pocket Notebook Routine

The other morning, two tiny pages held a quote from Marcus Aurelius, an old Greek word, two Bible verses, a reminder about teaching my daughter to drive, and a new idea for my commonplace book app.

I’ve been doing a lot of my thinking in a pocket notebook lately, and I want to show you how it works. Here’s one session, start to finish.

Date every page

Every day I put the date at the top of the page. That’s it. That’s the whole system.

Writing in this notebook every day, I’ve started to notice patterns. When one page reminds me of another, I can link back to it by simply writing out its date. No app required. The date does the job.

Start with someone else’s words

I always start with somebody else’s words.

Right now I’m using a little booklet I made called Think on These Things: 20 ideas to sit with to stir your thinking. The ideas are in no particular order, so I just pick one. Each page has a quote, a passage, or a poem, along with four rhythms to walk you through it.

The 4 Rhythms: Linger, keep, relate, reflect

Linger. Read it three times, slowly, and stay with the words. I like to use the word stare. I stare at the words before I do anything else.

Keep. Copy it by hand into your commonplace book. I have terrible handwriting, and my wife teases me about it all the time. Even when I can barely read my own writing, I’m seeing the benefit of putting down words that were written a long time ago.

Relate. What does this instantly remind you of? A quote, a verse, a memory. Write just one thing, right below what you copied.

Reflect. Every idea comes with a few questions. Here were the ones for this session:

• What thoughts have you been soaking in lately?
• If your mind were a piece of cloth, what color would it be right now?
• A habit of thought is like...

That last one gets you thinking in analogies, and every idea in the booklet has one. I think this matters a lot. When you can wrap an idea in an analogy, you understand it better, and you can explain it to other people better.

You don’t have to answer these questions. You can answer one or all three. They’re only there to stir your thinking. Sometimes I answer one directly. Other times a question reminds me of something, or a new idea just pops into my mind.

One drop won’t soak a towel

Here’s what I copied down that morning, from Marcus Aurelius:

Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind. For the soul is dyed by the thoughts.

After I write something down, I keep looking at it. Certain words begin to pop out at me. When they do, I make them stand out on the page. I’ve tried highlighting, underlining, and brackets. On this page, I underlined two words: habitual and dyed.

Then I wrote habitual out again, because I had some thoughts about it.

This came from that question about the cloth. I didn’t answer it. Instead, it sent me here:

One drop of water won’t soak a towel. But leave it under running water for five minutes and every inch will be drenched. It’s not a thought that dyes, but a thought that we return to again and again.

So what should we return to? I wrote: Return to the good, the beautiful, the lovely, the excellent, the pure, and the true. That comes from Philippians 4:8, so I put the reference in parentheses to keep the verse close by.

The soul is baptized by thoughts

Then I turned to dyed.

Marcus wrote in Greek, so I looked up the word he used. It’s bapto, which shares a root with our word baptism.

Which means you could read his line like this: the soul is baptized by thoughts.

As I wrote that down, another thought came: if that’s true, then we need to take every thought captive. That’s 2 Corinthians 10:5, so that reference went on the page too.

I’m sure this has happened to you. You’re writing something by hand, and your mind is doing its own work at the same time. The cool thing about a tiny notebook is that you can catch that connection and write it right next to the thought that sparked it.

That whole session started with one quote and took about 10 to 15 minutes. Not long at all.

Room for whatever else shows up

The page also caught two things that had nothing to do with Marcus Aurelius.

The first was a note to myself. I needed to set aside time to help one of my daughters learn to drive. Whatever gets scheduled is what ends up getting done. I found a line from Tony Robbins that says it better: what’s scheduled is real. So I wrote it down. Schedule driving.

The second came from Substack. Sublime is an app I’m really fond of, and they’ve teamed up with a company called Offprint to print your Sublime curation as a magazine. I thought that was SO cool. I know because I underlined it three times.

Then I wrote that I want to do this with Ember, the commonplace book app I built. I want to print my journal entries, photos, and everything else I’ve saved, and send them to myself as a magazine. Or a hardcover book, in volumes.

I highlighted that note so I’d return to it, and I did. I’ve started working on it. It began as a line on a tiny page, and now it’s a project.

Think on these things

On two small pages, I stayed with one idea for a while, made a plan for my daughter, and started a new project. It doesn’t take much paper to think well.

If you’d like to try this, Think on These Things is the booklet I used here. Volume I has 20 ideas from long ago, each with the four rhythms and its own questions. You print it, make a few cuts, and fold it into a little booklet the same size as a pocket notebook. Mine stays with the notebook in my front pocket all the time. More volumes are coming.

Get Think on These Things, Vol. I here

I think spending time with all 20 of these ideas would radically change your thought life and open your mind in new and creative ways.

One page won’t do that, of course. One drop won’t soak a towel.

But keep coming back.

Want to watch me walk through these pages? Here’s the video.

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