I’m Craig Constantine. I’ve spent decades cycling through digital tools for notes, tasks, and thinking: Evernote, OmniFocus, Things, Obsidian, Notion, three separate Zettelkastens. I have opinions about all of them.
A couple of years ago I went back to a bound paper notebook. The specific practices in this book came out of using that notebook daily and noticing what actually helped. Part of it reaches back to the lab notebooks of graduate school in science, where you’re taught strictly: date each entry, number each page, write in ink, never tear anything out. The point is a permanent record of what you actually tried, not just what worked. Especially what didn’t work, because that’s usually where the learning is. That discipline is where this method starts.
What I added — the seven practices — came from improvising my way out of decades of digital tools that had stopped helping. If Cal Newport gave you the philosophy and Ryder Carroll gave you the bullets, this is the specific method that stitches them into a daily practice for people who build things for a living.
The real challenge isn’t having ideas. It’s offloading them, so they don’t have to live in your head. That’s what the seven practices are for, and you can try the whole thing on paper with the free Quick Reference.
The book is 40 pages and an hour to read. Get it on Gumroad ($19) →
If you want the fuller picture — writing, podcasts, and everything else I work on — craigconstantine.com is the place.