Analog Distills

Bill McKibben's homage to analog over digital, Pause! We Can Go Back!, makes an assertion about how everyone's using Moleskin notebooks these days rather than their on-line organizers, and that the miracle of them is that they "concentrate, rather than dissipate."

I'm sorta glad that people are using "Moleskin" as a buzzword, the way people will generically ask for "a Coke" even when they know the restaurant serves Pepsi. There are other brands of notebook out there; I'm very partisan to Leuchtterm; the paper is far better and the pages are numbered (numbered, people), meaning it's trivially easy to create your own index. I'm also a huge fan of Clairefontaine, which pretty much has the finest paper in the world, but they don't make the A5 format notebooks everyone's using.

But it's not entirely true that my notebook concentrates. It also dissipates: it makes it clear what is and is not a priority, because you have to review, you have to carry forward, what it is that you're going to do on any given day. You can't get away with just concentrating; you have to be willing to let the past dissipate a little, too. Notebooks neither concentrate nor dissipate: they do both. They distill.