Dr. Cal Newport

So it's like a Kindle, but you can write on it, but you have endless pages on it.

So I've been messing around with that recently.

But I remembered when I was a postdoc, for example, I found it recently.

I went and bought a lab notebook.

Because those are expensive, at least for a postdoc, right?

They're like $70 because a lab notebook has to have archival quality paper.

It's bound.

Yes.

You can't rip it out.

And it's thick paper, acid-free archival paper, big sturdy covers.

But I bought this because I thought, okay, look, I'm going to take it more seriously.

Because I think that's also part of what goes on with the whiteboard is your mind thinks about writing on the big vertical space as a public crystallization of thoughts.

I'm putting this up for people to see, even if there's no one actually there to see it.

And so you take it more seriously.

Yeah.

If I'm writing on a whiteboard in class, I'm not just going to put up nonsense.

Like I'm going to be very careful about what I'm writing because you imagine there's an audience.

This is something for other people to see.

And so you get a little bit of a similar effect if you have a very nice notebook.

You think, look, I don't want to waste pages.