New day = new page.

Even if yesterday’s page is mostly empty.

This is going to feel wasteful at first. You’re going to look at all that empty space and think “I should fill this page before starting a new one.”

Don’t.

The empty space doesn’t matter. What matters is that you can find things later, and dating each page is how that works. If Tuesday and Wednesday are on the same page, you’ve broken the one feature that makes the whole system useful.

Think about it: three weeks from now, you’re trying to find something you wrote. Was it Monday? Tuesday? If every day has its own page, you can flip right to it. If you crammed multiple days together to “save paper,” you’re hunting.

The notebook is cheap. Your time spent searching is expensive.

Starting a new page each day isn’t about perfection or following rules. It’s about having a system that actually works when you need to look something up.

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This is part of a series about Hand-Write. Think Better.—a method for using paper to think more clearly. Get the book →