A new notebook day

Oct 21st, 2026

by Juha-Matti Santala

This was published in categories: indie-web-carnival , notes

Marisabel is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival on a theme of Pages.

It’s no secret I love notebooks. Whenever I start a new job, one of the best parts is going to the book shop and picking up a new notebook to accompany me. As the luck happened to line up, this month I filled up my previous pocket notebook and get to start a new one.

In the Field Notes fan subreddit FieldNuts, people have built a beautiful ritual out of it, called In/Out . With Field Notes, there’s the fun of picking a new cover — I’m a bit more boring because I’ve used the exact same pocket notebook with a black cover for multiple iterations but the joy of moving from one to another is still the same. I also use notebooks with more pages than they do so I get to experience In/Out days more rarely.

Two Moleskine pocket notebooks: one used with a Firefox sticker on the cover, other still in plastic wrap.

For me, a pocket notebook has a special place in all my notebooks: it lives a tough life. It comes with me everywhere, it spends a lot of time in various pockets exposed to the elements and it lands on many surfaces from pub tables to mossy forests. As it fills up, not only do the pages collect words of lived life, it physically wears out.

A new, pristine notebook is stiff and well-formed but over the months of its service, its spine loosens up, the back pocket fills up with index cards, stickers and fun mementos and shapes the rest of the notebook.

I have my practical ritual with this transition: I copy the rolling index of the old notebook into my digital notes’ Mega Index note so I can find my notes later from the archived pocket notebooks. I then take a new notebook from storage and set it up with my meta rules, start the first rolling index and move my extra trinkets from the old notebook’s back pocket to the new.

Page from my notebook titled Meta Notes with five rules: 1. Add a page number to the outside bottom corner of each
new page. 2. Add a date to the inside bottom corner on the first page of each note. 3. Add the starting page of each note
to the index. 4. Once the index is full, create new index on the next blank page. 5. Once the notebook is full, copy each
index into the Main Index note.

Finally, the old one goes into the Box. I mostly travel light but I have a huge box of old calendars and notebooks that keeps filling up and I love it. If I ever settle in and find a place to live for a longer time, I’ll take out all my notebooks from the box and put them into bookshelves to form my own small library of thoughts and experiences.

A new notebook is exciting because you never know what adventures await in the empty pages. It’s like turning a new page in life.

If something above resonated with you, let's start a discussion about it! Email me at juhis@hamatti.org and share your thoughts . This year, I want to have more deeper discussions with people from around the world and I'd love if you'd be part of that.