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If your day-to-day looks like one epic side quest, I bet you have at least one notebook you were “really going to use this time” sitting on a shelf somewhere staring you down.
You bought it because the cover screamed at you to take it home. You may have even opened it a time or two and written on a few pages.
But now it lives in your stack of good intentions. Because you’re a champ at starting things.
You collect projects, hobbies, and ideas like cool rocks. You’re less thrilled, however, about committing to any one thing.
Welcome to the side quest crowd!
This isn’t a post on how to become a minimalist bullet journal junkie with a fancy pen and a perfect color-coding system that never changes.
Because you need ideas on using a notebook in a way that works with a neurospicy brain and a life of creative detours.
So here are three side-quest-friendly ways to use a notebook that won’t require you to grow a new personality, stick to a color code, or follow a productivity system you’ll abandon in a week.
1 | Use your notebook as a brain landfill, not a museum
A lot of us treat the first page of a new notebook like a museum exhibit. Whatever goes on it must be important, worthy, and perfectly visually pleasing.
Which is a great way to ensure nothing ever ends up there.
But you know what? Your notebook doesn’t need the museum treatment. It can exist simply as a place where your thoughts go so they aren’t jammed up in your noggin.
Set a timer for 10 minutes. Open your notebook to any page that isn’t the first one and spew whatever’s on your mind. Don’t stop until that bitch-ass voice in your head is out of things to say.
You can totally go from “I should clean out the fridge” to “frog with a cowboy hat” in the span of three lines. No one is going to check that your notebook is “on topic” or “in order.”
If it lives in your head, it belongs in the brain landfill. Your only job is to empty the dump truck.
2 | Turn your notebook into a side quest parking lot
As someone living with an AuDHD brain, traditional productivity advice never works for me.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to follow popular frameworks like GTD or PARA with the best of intentions, only to have it blow up in my face two weeks later.
Why? Because I’m a world-class information hoarder with a serious case of fear of missing out. I want to learn all the things at all times, and my brain throws a hissy fit if I dare to suggest that perhaps something should be skipped for now.
But you know what has worked for me? A Later List.
What’s a Later List? Think of it as a parking lot.
Grab a few pages in the back of a notebook and set them aside as a Later List. Any time you sit down to work on something and your brain throws a new idea or thought at you, plunk it in your parking lot.
You’re not saying no to anything in the moment, so there’s no FOMO. You won’t lose the thing because it’s stored safely in the Later List.
And if it starts feeling like “another list of things I’ll never get to,” set up a recurring Later List Review task in your favorite to-do app.
Mine pops up every Sunday and asks me questions like:
- Do I still care about this?
- Does this appeal to me now, or was it just an “anything but doing the dishes” idea?
- Are there any actions I want to take on this in the next week?
The point of your Later List isn’t to ensure you act on every idea that comes to you. It’s to give your brain proof that it’s okay not to chase everything in the moment.
3 | Keep a proof-of-progress log (your own little smile file)
If you’ve been creatively discouraged, your brain probably keeps a running list of everything you haven’t finished yet that it flogs you with constantly.
- Didn’t finish that Skillshare course
- Never posted that drawing
- Didn’t stick with that challenge
- Haven’t opened Procreate all week
Your brain is great at the “beating you up” part but pretty darn shitty with the whole “remembering all that great stuff you DID do” thing.
Your notebook can help with that. Every time you do anything remotely supportive of yourself, write it down. And if someone says something nice about you? That can go in, too.
On the days your brain insists you “never follow through” or “no one cares what you make,” you’ve got proof it’s full of shit.
You can flip back through your smile file when you feel like crap and let Past You remind Present You that you’ve done more than your brain is giving you credit for.
If you’ve made it this far down the page, consider busting out one of your notebooks and gave one of these ideas a try. (Even if your brain is doing a mental eye roll right now.)
You don’t have to promise yourself that you’ll write in it every day or become The Kind of Person Who Journals.
Just let your notebook meet you wherever you are today, not where you felt pressured to be yesterday.
And later, when your brain wants to get testy and insist that you never follow through on anything, you’ll be ready with receipts: pages upon pages of evidence to the contrary.
Still here? You must be drawn differently.
This is the part where I’m supposed to remind you there’s a newsletter, but let’s skip the pitch.
If you’re someone who’s still trying to figure out how to be a creative human after years of being told to be a productive one, Neurospicy Creative Collective might be your kind of space.
