For years, I’ve kept a notebook near me at almost all times. I feel I should clarify that it’s not the same notebook, though it’s always of the same design: A cheap composition book with a black-and-white marbled cover, the kind you can always find in the school supplies section of your nearest grocery store. I treat these notebooks, not just as traditional prose journals, but as scrapbooks and dream diaries, a home for shopping lists and extraordinarily dumb thoughts — and many terrible drawings.

I borrowed the practice from cartoonist and teacher Lynda Barry, who assigns the act of keeping a notebook to her students. Everything and anything can and should go into the notebook. Part of the assignment is structured: Barry provides a template for a daily diary entry meant to help her students see and remember the world around them. But the rest is unstructured by design, open to whatever you see, think, plan, hope or remember. The notebook functions as a kind of mental composting bin — a place where you can put bits and scraps of your daily experiences and, with a little effort and daily tending, transform them into a nutrient-rich foundation for your mental garden.

As Barry puts it in her excellent book Syllabus: “I think of the comp book as a place for the back of the mind to come forward.”

I’ve always had this fantasy of being the kind of ultra-disciplined creative person who has the mental and physical capacity of a minor god. I’m talking about the kind of sicko so devoted to the refinement of their craft that they wake up at 4 am every morning just to write or draw or sculpt or whatever. You read about these people in the newspaper sometimes, I’m sure they really do exist. But as a habitually undisciplined creative person, my notebooks are the closest thing I have to achieving this dream. I have filled, on average, a notebook every two to three months since June 2019. It’s objectively the longest project I’ve ever sustained.

Yet the notebooks are hardly “perfect” as a record of my life for the past six years. I’ve had days where I just didn’t write anything or draw anything, and I don’t know why. At other times, I’ve been too tired or too sick or too lethargic to put genuine effort into documenting my day. When this happens, I usually fret and get mad at myself and then recall this passage from Virginia Woolf’s diary: “What a disgraceful lapse! Nothing added to my disquisition, & life allowed to waste like a tap left running. Eleven days unrecorded.”

(I’ve never read Woolf’s diaries all the way through. I only know the quote because Alison Bechdel used it in one of her books. All my important knowledge comes from cartoonists.)

But as I was working on this blog post, I started to wonder whether my notebooks are better as a fragmentary, imperfect record. What does “perfect” or “imperfect” mean when applied to an idiosyncratic, inherently personal project that no one else will ever see? The terms start to lose their meaning.

I’ve been asked before whether I “use” any of my old journals, and it’s not a question that I really know how to answer. In one sense, I do “use” them in the way the questioner means: That is, I do occasionally return to them and mine the contents for creative projects. I’ve captured ideas, questions and doodles in my notebooks that I’ve later turned into something bigger. They do help me remember things that I would have certainly forgotten otherwise.

But I also believe the notebooks are, in many ways, completely useless. They are not bullet journals or planners; they don’t help me be more productive or efficient. In fact, they are often barriers to my productivity and efficiency. Even after years of practice, writing things by hand still slows me down; clipping out physical newspaper articles and taping them onto a page takes a surprising amount of time and effort; and finding anything specific in a years-long collection of jumbled, un-indexed thoughts is itself a Herculean labor.

We live in a world that demands we justify our time as useful. That you will be productive in some measurable way — that you’ll work to make money, probably for someone else — is the default assumption. ("Learn to code!!!" screams the tech bro at the hapless humanities major.) There is no room for someone who does nothing whatsoever.

I can’t say that my notebooks are some blow against capitalism. By definition, they cannot accomplish anything so grand. But they are, for me, a reminder that not every scrap of time needs to be well-spent. It’s perfectly okay to waste a minute or an hour or an afternoon drawing silly squiggles in a notebook that no one will ever see. The inefficiency and unproductivity is the point.