On notebooks.

For quite some time now, I have made myself accustomed to the means of bullet journaling in keeping all of my reading notes, personal data and random blurb of thoughts. As a consequence, being that the journaling method demanded it, I have also acquired this not-so obsessive need for 'dotted notebooks' as a means to keeping the said journal.

I have grown to like this style of notebooks, to be honest, and while I am not going to elaborate, as is often the case with me, on why using a dotted journal is significantly better than the traditional lined or ruled ones. I aim on this blog post, however, to look at the issue of cost when using such notebooks and how I am currently dealing with it.

While living a quite frugal life is, arguably, better than sinking into unnecessary expensive desires, as I have done so for the past few years. One such desire of mine have recently drained money out of my sparsely filled pockets more than I thought it would.

Buying journal notebooks have been, in my most recent memory, the most expensive desire that I have indulged in. For the uninitiated, journal notebooks, as opposed to cheap, flimsy student notebooks have, for some reason, been elevated to a premium in the place that I live. In such that, purchasing such journal notebooks would often set me back two or three times more than the cost of a regular flimsy notebook for the same amount of paper.

While some might argue that it is the quality that I am paying for and that I should just accept that journals are priced more than the flimsy notebooks, then, frankly, I would kindly reply that it is neither the "cost" nor the "cost of quality" per se that I am concerned about. But rather, it is the unreasonable cost of such journal notebooks as compared to the flimsy ones that I complain about.

In the fear of digressing further from the point of this post, let me discuss what I did in answering this unreasonable cost of journal notebooks: I made my own. It turns out that making your own notebooks with some paper with printed graph, or dotted, patterns, a hard cover and some thread would significantly reduce the cost of journal notebooks by almost 70%. Suppose that the "premium" journal notebook that I have been buying for a few months costed around 100, creating my own notebook only roughly cost me 30-40.

While, of course, it will be less convenient, and more labor-intensive, for me as my notebooks would now have to be made before I would be able to use them, it is not a grave problem and, personally, the cost reduced in doing this is valued significantly higher than the benefit of having ease of access to journal notebooks.

I guess the whole point in this post is that don't buy "premium" journal notebooks. Make your own.