Why Every Woman Needs a Notebook

In today's video I'm sharing why every woman needs a notebook and 15 ways that you can fill them. Hello everyone, Jennifer L. Scott here and welcome to the Daily Connoisseur. So I am the author of the Madame Chic series and Connoisseur Kids and I am a big fan of journaling and notebooking. And in today's video I'm going to share why I believe every woman, and man really, but women primarily watch my channel, why every woman needs a notebook. So when I talk about notebook in today's video it could really be anything from a paper planner to a cloth-bound journal to an inexpensive lined notebook that you get at the drugstore. It really doesn't matter what you write on, the key thing is that you write. When I was a child I would journal almost every day. I have volumes of journals from my childhood all the way up to my early adulthood. Then something happened and I stopped journaling. I stopped writing things down. I think the computer really entered the scene and the mobile phone so I just moved away from it. But recently I've come back and I forget how incredibly enriching it is to keep a journal, to write a to-do list down on paper, or to write any creative thoughts that I have down. Now it's not just my opinion stating this. I have an article here from Psychology Today that gives four reasons why writing things down on paper still reigns supreme. So let me give you a little summary of what it says. It says, jotting things down on paper is faster. Handwritten notes tend to be more accurate and have personalized flair. Handwriting in a notebook triggers more robust brain activity and writing by hand is associated with stronger neural encoding and memory retrieval. What we write through our hand is tied to our brains and what we remember and what we store. This is really powerful stuff. So I might have a bit of an addiction with notebooks. I have so many notebooks of all different varieties. I am never caught without one. I always have at the bare minimum a little paper notebook with me because I'm constantly thinking of ideas for books, for poems, for the blog, YouTube, everything, recipe ideas. I am constantly writing things down and if I don't have a notebook with me I feel completely unprepared. So you don't have to go as far as I do with having literally dozens of notebooks, but pick one or two and I'm going to give you a list now of 15 ways that you can fill them and maybe just experiment. See where it takes you this month. So let's start with the first one and I'm just consulting my notes here, which is the paper planner. This is where your life is stored. Now I've mentioned in the past that I use both paper and digital planner when planning my days. I use them in conjunction with each other. I use my paper planner more as a to-do list and my digital planner more for appointments so that I don't miss them. So paper planners are really good for your daily schedule. Idea number two is to have a dreams and goals notebook. Now you can combine this with a regular journal if you don't feel like you could fill an entire journal with your dreams and goals. Usually there's a few major ones that you have, but have you ever considered writing them down? And I'm not even talking about a planner here, like just listing them. I'm talking about a journal. So you sit down and you write what your dreams are, what your goals are, what it would be like to fulfill them, your plans on achieving them, and little steps on the way. So that's a really powerful journal to have. And I know that most successful people write down their dreams and goals. I've been writing mine down for a while now and I can tell you that it keeps me focused and I'm able to achieve my goals quicker when I do this. Third idea to fill your notebooks is with a gratitude journal. Now a lot of people have gratitude journals that are just dedicated to that and I had one of those as well and I filled it up. So I journal every morning. Lately my journaling has really taken on a new shape. I used to just write down what I was grateful for. This is when I was easing into journaling, but now I like to combine it with things I've learned, things that are actually happening in my life, events. I usually talk about the previous day because I do it in the morning. And then some days when I don't know what to write, I do the gratitude journal. That happens a lot and that's good because I was finding I was writing the same things every day and I was trying to find little things that I was grateful for too. So it's good to start that way, but it might morph for you. But writing down what you're grateful for really keeps things in perspective. The fourth idea is of course a good old-fashioned diary. Just write down what you did each day, even if it's just a few sentences. So one of the viewers recommended Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere and Elfoxton journals when we were studying Wordsworth in the Sheik assignment. She was his sister. Her journals, each entry was pretty short and it just talked about the most mundane things of the day, like we went on a walk after dinner or we had chicken for dinner or we saw the little child down the a candy. You know, little tiny things like that where she might have thought, why am I writing this down? But for us, so many years later, it is so interesting to see how they lived back then. So you might consider that maybe your ancestors might read your journal and know what your life was like. Everyday life, small things that we take for granted. Or you could just chronicle what happened. You might wonder what the point is in that, but honestly I go back to my childhood journals where I used to do that. I just wrote what I did every day and it's so interesting for me to remember that. Another thing to note, when I was living in Paris with Madame Sheik and her family, I kept a journal that I wrote in every day. That was so helpful for me when I wrote my books about it almost a decade later because I had such vivid memories of my everyday life there and my observations. So never take the daily journal for granted. The fifth idea is actually an idea journal or notebook. And I have a lot of these. And so if I have an idea for a YouTube video, or I have an idea for a book or a poem or something, I typically will jot it down in these journals. I will do everything like with YouTube videos from the concept to maybe an opening line to what I would like to title it to how I want the thumbnail to be. I will write this down in a journal. As soon as the thought comes into your mind, stop everything if you can and write it down. This is really important because a lot of people, especially busy moms, will have an idea and then they think, I'll get to that later. And then a few hours later, you can't remember what the idea was. So that's why I always keep a journal near me. Something pops into my mind, I immediately write it down. Another thing is for creative people, if you have a job where you need to come up with content, all I have to do if I'm lacking inspiration is to pull open my idea journal and I look and I have so many ideas of what I can do. The sixth idea is to have a poetry journal. So if you like to write poetry like I do, this is a wonderful thing to have. You can combine this, of course, with other journals as well, idea journals. But if you have an idea for a poem, maybe a concept, or maybe you have a few lines that you thought of in your head, again, write them down immediately and just see where your poetry takes you. I write my poetry on my computer as well, but I have a lot of notebooks where I write them down. And I wrote a poem this summer for a good friend of mine and I did that in the poetry journal. And it's nice actually seeing the evolution of the poem where I cross out lines or this word doesn't really quite go with that one and then the finished product. So I think that that's also something that would be nice to look at in a future date. The seventh idea is a work specific notebook. So if you do work and you need to keep your work ideas separate from personal things, I have this little monogram smites and notebook that my in-laws gave me. And I use this for my chic society vodcast. Whenever I have a topic that I'd like to discuss in the vodcast, I will write it down in this little notebook. So this is very specific toward work. The eighth idea for a notebook is an art notebook. Now, I am not an artist in that sense. I really can't draw or paint or any of that stuff, but my children can. They all love art and they're really talented at it. So they each have abundant sketchbooks, notebooks, and journals. And I encourage them to draw on them and create in them every day. A while back, I was at a dinner party with a woman who was an art teacher to children. And I asked her for her advice. I said, what should we always know when encouraging art in our children? And she said, always keep them supplied. So always give your children the supplies to create art. And so for us, that's sketchbooks and the proper pencils and or pens or markers, whatever they like to use. Another thing that inspired me was when we visited the Victoria and Albert Museum this summer and we saw Beatrix Potter's journals. And she would draw the beginnings of her characters from Peter Rabbit in these journals. And it was so inspiring. You might not be artistic like that, like I am, but your children might be. And that is a really great way to encourage them. The ninth idea is a recipe journal or binder. I have this beautiful one from the Illustrated Life Company. And you can keep recipes in here. Or if you come across a recipe that you see in a magazine or something, you can cut it out. You could paste it in your journal. You could write it down. You can make a note of where you found it. And you could also journal if you want to get a little bit deeper on how the recipe went. Did your family enjoy it? How would you alter it next time? That's another great way to use a notebook. The tenth idea is a family memories specific notebook where you write about your children, what they said, funny things they did, maybe artwork that they gave you. You could paste it in there or memories that you have. That's another thing people like to do. I know a lot of people like to scrapbook, so this could be something similar to that. Okay, the eleventh idea. This is so special. So I have what's called a preserve journal, and I will link it down below. Preserve journal is a journal that's for me. And every time I have a birthday or Mother's Day, my children write in the journal. So rather than giving me cards, which they can also do if they like, I ask them to write an entry in my journal and they say things to me. And you look back over the years and it's so sweet. And I know I'm going to have this journal filled. And when I'm an old lady, I will be able to flip through the journal and see what they wrote to me each year. It is so precious and it's such a good idea. So preserve journals. I'll leave them down below. The twelfth idea is to have a housekeeping notebook. So you could talk about your cleaning zones, your plan. You could journal or notebook. You could notebook about the supplies you need to get, how you're going to alter your cleaning plan, just homemaking inspiration. That's a great idea too. The thirteenth idea is a health and fitness notebook. Now I know a lot of you have those smart watches that keep track of everything for you, but it's a good idea if you are on a health or a fitness journey. You could jot these things down. I just had an idea because if you like a lot of these suggestions, but you don't want 15 different journals like I have, you could have one journal where you write about these things as they come up. So this gives you ideas to write inside your journal. But I think that that's great. You could track various things with your health. Maybe you're on an intermittent fasting journey and you want to journal about that. That could be helpful for you. But tracking your health and fitness is another great idea. The fourteenth idea is a travel journal. So I never would have actually thought of this, but I found a travel journal that belonged to my great-grandmother. And look how amazing this is. Finding this was so special to me. And I got to read about her vacations. I never met my grandmother Cleo, but I always heard wonderful things about her. And everyone always said, Jennifer, you two would have loved each other. So the fact that I have one of her journals now, and I'm able to read about her travels is so special to me. So consider if your family goes on a vacation every year, having a specific journal where you write about it, and then you could go back and reread that in the future. How special is that? The fifteenth idea is a holiday or party planning journal. So this could be if you are the type of person who loves to entertain or you like to make the holidays really special, you love the holiday season, and it might be fun for you to journal about it or keep a notebook about it so that you can keep track of your successes or things that you would like to do next year and all of that. So that is the fifteenth idea. There's so many more ways that you can fill your notebooks, but as I finished this video, I realized I forgot the most important idea that I have and my most cherished journal. So I have what I call a self-improvement journal, and as I read books that help me in my life, where I learn things about myself and bettering myself, I write down all of the important ideas in my journal. In this journal, it's probably almost half filled. This is the most important journal I have because I just take the biggest and best concepts from the books I read and I and so if I'm ever lacking inspiration or just want a recap, I'll flip open a few of these pages and read what I wrote, read about how it applies to my life, what I've learned, and I'll keep journaling. So this is really important. It's my favorite thing to do. If you're the type of person who likes to read books and highlight, write notes in the books, consider starting a journal with the things that you've read and how it has impacted your life. So that's my bonus tip, probably the most important one at number 16. Now I'm going to leave lots of resources for you down below. I have a few friends on YouTube that create notebooks. My friend Kim from Frida Family, she has so many different notebooks that are really affordable. I think that you should definitely check out. I also have some wonderful stationery resources that I'll leave for you down below. My friend Hillary from Old World Home has a Christmas planner coming out. I'm going to leave everything for you down below. Check everything out and hopefully you can find a journal or a notebook that suits you. I hope that you enjoyed today's video. I hope that it gave you ideas on how you can journal and notebook. Please let me know how it goes for you. Come back to this video a month or so later and leave me a comment letting me know how journaling and notebooking has impacted your life because I truly believe that every woman, man, and child should have a notebook. Thank you so much for joining me here today on The Daily Connoisseur. Keep calm and remain classy, and I will see you next time. Goodbye!