Back in December 2008, I wrote a post called Finishing a Notebook. At the time, this still felt rather significant as an accomplishment. My notebook usage before the early 2000s was often very fickle– I’d start one, decide I wanted to try something else, then maybe go back to something I’d tried before, then move on to yet another option… almost all of my notebooks were unfinished. Some were barely even started!

I went through a box of notebooks I used in the 1980s and 1990s and found various examples. Some of the worst culprits were written in for only a few pages at the beginning. Some were started from both front and back and still have a lot of blank pages in between. Some were almost all used, but for some reason, I just had to move on before those last few pages!

I find it very difficult to get rid of old notebooks (except for ones I used only for work notes), so I still have all these unfinished notebooks in my collection. Sometimes I wonder if I should just rip the used pages out and get rid of the rest of the notebook just to save space, but even with notebooks I didn’t like that much, I can’t seem to bring myself to do it.

I suppose my Filofaxes started to help break me of this problem. For a while, I was just moving sheets in and out of a few different Filofax organizers, so there wasn’t this sense of abandoning unfilled pages. I did switch from one Filofax to another but I used them for longer periods, and often continued to use the older ones too. But during that time, I also had a few different journals and sketchbooks where I stuck to my same habits of leaving lots of empty pages before trying something else.

It wasn’t until I started using Moleskine notebooks that I finally got into the habit of using all the pages of a notebook before starting a new one. My first few Moleskines were sketchbooks that I used intermittently, and even those had a couple of unused pages at the end. For at least one of them, I think it was because I was about to set off on a big trip and I wanted a fresh new notebook to bring with me. Also, those first couple of Moleskines felt rather precious, somehow– I liked them so much, I sort of didn’t want to waste them, and I did most of my journaling in other larger notebooks. But then suddenly the Moleskine brand seemed to be very widely available. I vaguely remember browsing a rack of them and seeing that first squared softcover Moleskine, and thinking it would be interesting to try one. That notebook somehow freed me to feel like I could just scribble any old thing in it and fill it completely.

From then on, my journaling and jotting and sketching moved completely into Moleskines and similar Moleskine alternatives, and I’ve filled every notebook I’ve used, pretty much. If I haven’t, it was a rare instance of devoting a notebook to a single purpose which ended before the notebook did. Or else it was a notebook that I still use intermittently and intend to finish. Why did my notebook completion habits suddenly change so much?

One big reason was that I entered a phase where life just got more interesting, and I had more to journal about. I went through changes in jobs and relationships, met new people and traveled more.

Another change was that I wasn’t as worried about privacy as I had been in earlier years. I lived alone and could write all I wanted without fear that someone would read it.

But most of all, I loved the form of the Moleskines– they were the perfect size and I loved the paper. With unlined, squared, and the heavier sketchbook paper available, I could use the same notebook for writing and drawing if I felt like it.

And importantly, the ready availability of Moleskines and other brands in the same format made me enjoy filling them and seeing a growing stack of uniform journals. The more consistently I filled them, the more satisfying it was, and that kept me locked into the habit. There were a few notebooks I didn’t end up enjoying quite as much as others, but by the time they came along, I felt like I had to just write larger, space things out, and use up pages with doodling or loose scribbles just to get the notebook over with faster. I was committed to finishing each notebook rather than abandoning it. And here they are!

I wish I’d been able to establish this habit earlier in life. But I can’t entirely regret all my early unfinished notebooks. Most of them didn’t cost much, and there’s a nice variety to them. If I’d only ever bought one type of notebook and used each one all the way through, I’d have a much smaller and less interesting collection to share with you all now!