Tag: self-improvement

How I Use My Notebooks: Work in Progress Notebook – Debts and Lessons

I wrote about my newest notebook, my “Work in Progress” notebook here. It’s basically a notebook that I use for self improvement, dedicated for various exercises in focused meditation, working through gnarly personal issues, and for more intense personal journaling.

Barista sketch because people need pictures in posts or they get bored.

One of the things that I do as an ongoing exercise in this notebook is keep a list of people that I personally know (so no celebrities or influencers) and what I learned from them. The idea came to me as I was reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.

The book starts with a list of people that Marcus is indebted to – from his immediate family, then onwards to friends, teachers and advisers. This inspired me to create a similar list of my own, also starting from my immediate family and expanding onwards from that.

Some people are kind, inspiring, provide a good example and so they were easy to add to the list. Others were more challenging, but I forced myself to confront my relationship to them, and to find the valuable lessons that I learned from them. The point isn’t to be vicious, cynical, or facetious, but rather to take a second look at people and relationships that you have labelled in a certain way. So the terrible boss taught me what I value in myself and in my managers, certain mean people taught me how to recognise hypocrites, and bad teachers taught me to appreciate good ones and to learn on my own.

I highly recommend doing this exercise and returning to it. It will make you appreciate and feel grateful for the people in your life, and you may even be moved to thank a few of them, even though that’s not the point of this. The point is to realise that:

No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent, 

A part of the main.



If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend’s

Or of thine own were.



Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

John Donne

“Triggers” Daily Questions and a Moleskine Pocket Peter Pan Limited Edition review: All Children, Except One, Grow Up.

Ever since I’ve read the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith about six months ago I’ve been searching for ways to track the progress of my Daily Questions (“Did I do my best to…”). I tried using my journal for several months, then used a Google Sheet for two months, and in both cases something was missing. The Google Sheet was great for statistics and tracking, but not as satisfying and meaningful as writing my daily scores down (and I didn’t really find the statistics useful). The journal was much better, but as my goals changed it was time consuming to create a new table each time, and I needed a way to for me to justify my daily scores.

Enter tracking system number three: a Moleskine pocket Peter Pan limited edition notebook and an index card. Let’s start with the notebook:

The Peter Pan Moleskine limited editions showcase some of Moleskine’s best design work in recent years. Both the colourful covers, the drawing and the lettering evoke the spirit of Peter Pan without resorting to Disney-esque tropes. They’re naive without being childish, colourful without being brash, and the quotes on the covers are brilliantly selected.

Inside the covers are more illustrations in the same vein and even the famous “In case of loss” is set in a hand lettering like font. The palate of the entire Peter Pan line is limited (navy, orangey-yellow, green and white) but it never feels that way.

The back cover. Again, extra points for aligning the design so well with the back pocket. It almost seems like they’re flying into it:

This edition comes with stickers that are a lot of fun and well drawn in a naive style:

And the B-Side of the sleeve instructs you on how to build paper planes and also uses quotes from the books or that reference the book:

So that’s the review of the notebook itself. I highly recommend all of the Moleskine Peter Pan notebooks — they rank alongside the Denim and some of the Harry Potter limited edition notebooks as my favourites of recent years. I didn’t buy it specifically to try to use it as a Triggers Daily Questions tracker, but it was languishing in my “to use” pile and a used notebook is better than an unused notebook, so I decided to give it a spin.

The idea of writing down my Daily Questions each time was what made me stop using my journal for this purpose in the first place, so I decided to write them down once on an index card (which I would slip in the notebook’s back pocket), and then number each question, and date the card. Every day I would write down a score for each daily question, and a very short justification for the score. The justification is short to make it easy to write them down (if it’s a hassle I’ll have a hard time sticking with it), and that’s why I chose the pocket notebook (it’s also light and easy to carry around). When I feel like I need to change the questions up, I’ll create a new index card, put an end date on the old index card and archive it in the notebook’s back pocket. Every day will be dated in the notebook, and I use the appropriate index card if I really want to reference that particular day in the future. This may seem a little clunky for reference purposes, but as I learned over time, I don’t really go back to reference my past answers, so that’s not a meaningful setback.

I’ll check in a few months and document how it goes, but judging by my previous experience, this looks like a pretty good setup for now.