It’s been said over and over that all good things must come to an end. Where some ends are because something is broken or changed, it can be simply because something has come to its natural conclusion. That latter case is what I am doing with a writing journal, as I have recorded thoughts on its last blank page.

In the past I have talked about how I write out most all of my blog posts. Call me old-fashioned, but it works for me. Of course sometimes I just put fingers to the keyboard (all 2 of them) For those I have written (read: printed) most were captured in a journal.

This particular journal is a college-ruled composition notebook I bought at Target on September 5, 2012, and I only remember that as it was a Target-brand notebook, and the day I bought it I wrote my first post in it, Remember Team Morale During Work Stress. Since then it has captured many blog posts, brainstorming for blog topics, scratch paper for other uses – such as my kids stats from their last doctor’s appointment – as well as a doodle pad for said kids. Where many things were written from front to back, others started from the back to front, and the last post I wrote in there, My Takeaways From The Book 52 Motivational Quotations For Salespeople By Tom Cruz, was about two-thirds of the way through it. That being said, it was a very organized collection.

What To Do?

So what do I do with a journal that has traveled just about as much as I have over the last several years? Do I simply recycle it, shred it, or save it? I am not about to start saving notebooks, especially as I am trying, with moderate success, to declutter my life. But as I simply can’t discard it altogether, I cut the spine from it and fed it into my Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, saved it as a PDF document, and have archived it with my other personal documents. That way, if 100 years from now someone wants to know how The Hot Iron was created, they can look at a PDF file rather than yellowing pages in a dusty box. That is if that dusty box wasn’t long tossed out by my future grandchildren first.

This post you are now reading was written out in another journal I bought at a Walgreens last summer and wrote my first post on the book Scrum, as that day I did not have my other journal with me and I needed something to capture my writing, It too has had some other uses, some I hope to share in the future.

What do you use to capture your creativity? Please share in the comments of this post… and let me know if you typed it straight from your mind or after transcribing it from paper.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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