Is the notebook dead?

Notebooks. I’ve got quite a lot of them. There are over 60 in the picture, and there’s a bunch more in the attic...

I’ve always been a prolific note taker, which is embarrassing to a point, because my handwriting is absolutely awful. I write in capitals, can’t stay between the lines and constantly scribble all over the page...

I write because I want to remember. Not so much to go back to the notes (although they helped) but to imprint the conversation on my brain. I was also very good at daily to do lists... and actually took great pride in looking back, crossing things off and then adding the outstanding to the days new list. It was pretty cathartic when you worry about the volume of stuff you have to get through.

And then transcripts arrived on online calls, and that’s the majority of meetings, and the need to scribble subsided.

The came voice through the LLM’s and now through apps like Granola and Wispr Flow and suddenly everyone is talking to all their online tools. I’m guilty. I actually love dictating to Claude and this blog started as 3 mins of my dictation.

The volume of data from all these sources is a bit bonkers. If those recordings have amazing context to process against, then the output can be really transformational for businesses.

One of the skills I’ve created in Claude takes my Granola transcripts and compares them to my Second Brain, which is a personal context file that sits on my desktop. It assigns the notes to the right Project and then on a daily basis looks ahead 7 days and blocks out a suitable amount of time in my calendar for the follow-up actions. It’s been working about a week and I’ve managed to keep to it about 60% of the time...

So, are notebooks dead?

I hope not. I still carry one in my bag for those impromptu meetings and actually after writing this I might go back to writing a daily to do list. It’ll have to sit next to all my other to-do lists though...

As for these... they are going in the recycling. I had thought about sending them to a scanning centre and then uploading it to Claude, but I was worried I might break it.

My Claude Coaching start’s on 19th November, I’ll be sharing best practice about Claude, and how to get the most out of it for you and your teams.

Here’s the link to book: danbrookman.co.uk/claude