A guy at the library showed me his 40 year old fishing log and I haven't bought a notebook since
I was sitting at a table in the downtown library here in Tulsa last Saturday working on my own journal when an older guy next to me noticed I was writing down stuff about my garden. He pulled out this worn green notebook that turned out to be his fishing log going back to 1983. Every catch had the date, the lake, the water temp, what lure he used, and a couple lines about the weather. He said the log taught him more than any book because he could see his own patterns. I asked how many notebooks he'd filled and he said 11, one about every 3 or 4 years. I went home and dug out an old spiral notebook from a junk drawer instead of ordering another fancy one online. What do you all track by hand that a phone app would technically do better?
My handwriting looks like a chicken fought a pen and lost, so a fishing log from me would be a code nobody could crack, including future me. Still, there's something about paper that apps can't touch, like the guy said, you can flip back and see your own dumb mistakes staring at you. I track my workouts in a cheap notebook because scrolling a phone at the gym just turns into me checking texts for 20 minutes. Same with my tomato plants, I write down when I watered and what the leaves looked like, and every app I tried wanted my email and a subscription for stuff a 99 cent notebook does fine. The phone is faster and has reminders and graphs and all that, but it never once taught me anything about myself the way flipping through old pages does. Half the value is just slowing down long enough to actually notice what you're doing.