Doodles, drawings and to-do lists: Why we love notebooks | Canada Voices

When you reach a certain level of notebook obsessiveness, browsing reviews on blogs and Instagram and TikTok, you eventually discover the Hobonichi Techo.

A bound notebook small enough to fit in your pocket and featuring Tomoe River paper, it is set up as a planner, with each page marking one day of the year. Some people use it to organize their lives, others as a diary or a canvas for their art. People love it for its excellent quality and its versatility.

My Hobonichi for 2025 now sits atop my desk next to at least half a dozen other notebooks: the large format one with the beautiful forest-green cover and creamy blank paper that I keep as a hybrid diary-sketchbook, the marbled composition book I record my running and swimming in, the pocket-sized Moleskine for whatever fleeting thought needs to be written down on the go, the BenOpinion book with the baby-blue cover I bring to interviews and more.

Down in my basement there are boxes of them, full of notes, doodles and drawings, to-do lists and grocery lists, a repository that I hardly revisit but cherish all the same – if my house ever caught fire, I would race to the basement like Usain Bolt to rescue them.

I am not alone in my love for notebooks. Go to any bookstore and you’ll see them. Indigo has an entire wing for more than 30 brands of notebooks small and large, bound in brown leather or with bright pastel covers. There’s a notebook for every type of personality. Online, there’s an endless stream of social-media posts assessing the merits of each kind and touting their uses.

The question is, why? We have phones, tablets and laptops and so, so many apps, a vast digital world to record and organize our thoughts and lives. So why do notebooks persist? And not just persist – why do we hold them so dear?

As Roland Allen makes abundantly clear in his new book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, one reason for the notebook’s continued success has been its remarkable functionality.

As he chronicles the notebook’s roots in ancient Rome – the pugillare, or “handheld” tablet, was the Moleskine of its time – Allen takes readers through every significant iteration up to modern day.

There is the invention of the sketchbook in 13th-century Italy, the personal notebook known as a zibaldone a century later, writers’ notebooks and patient diaries on through to the modern phenomenon of bullet journaling.

Along the way there are fascinating stories of Isaac Newton using his giant notebook to work out the mathematical theories that would make him famous and tales of how Charles Darwin used notebooks to develop the ideas that would form his theory of evolution.

Allen, who lives in Brighton, England, and works in book publishing, guides readers to an unavoidable conclusion: There is nothing you can’t do with a notebook.

“There’s just a very functional truth to it, and that’s why it’s endured,” says David Sax, author of The Future is Analog: How to Create a More Human World. The notebook works because “human beings are physical creatures,” he says, who interact with the world with our eyes, ears and hands. “We have evolved to sort of process information primarily through the physical world.”

Nathaniel Barr, a professor of creativity and creative thinking at Sheridan College, west of Toronto, says the way we physically engage with a notebook compared with typing on a laptop or using another device has been shown to change the way we think.

Notebook users do better on memory tests and are better able to process information compared with those who type. Other studies have shown that doodling improves a person’s ability to follow along with information being presented – a class lecture, perhaps – and improves their recall of those facts.

There’s also the wonderful, analog nature of a notebook. You just open it up and get going – jotting down a task or spending a few minutes drawing.

The freedom to do whatever you want with it is another appeal of the notebook, especially since so much of our digital lives are channelled into narrow specialties – there’s an app for everything. “Everything’s got its own stream. Everything’s got its own bucket,” says Barr. “But with a notebook, the only boundaries are the page.”

All of this may be true, but none of it fully explains why we are so attached to them.

Sax pointed to the answer during our conversation, saying how intimate notebooks are compared with digital devices, and how much more expressive they are of our identity.

“There’s nothing unique, there’s no personality to a file or document in a computer, and there’s no personality to a device,” he said.

At the end of his book, Allen writes about the extended-mind thesis, put forward by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 1998. Essentially, it goes like this: If I were to use a notebook to work out some thought, then that notebook is an extension of my mind.

It “helps to explain the strange strength of the bonds that we form with our notebooks and diaries if we understand them to be extensions of our minds, parts of our belief and cognitive systems that happen to reside outside our skulls but are otherwise integral to the business of thinking and living,” Allen writes of the theory.

I would take this argument a step further – okay, maybe a giant step – and say that we cherish notebooks not just because they are the receptacles of our thoughts and belief systems but are extensions of our very selves.

“Our notebooks give us away,” Joan Didion wrote.

Your choice of pen, your handwriting, your every doodle or squiggle, the way you make lists or draw arrows from one item to another, your most personal thoughts and even what you need to pick up at the grocery store are all a record of you as a person the way nothing else will be.

Our phones contain much of our lives. Show me yours and I will know many facts about you, but not all that much of your personality.

Show me your notebook and I will show you who you are.