Lichtenbergian Precepts: Waste Books

When he was a young man, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg noticed that merchants didn’t take the time to write down each transaction carefully and neatly as they occurred. Instead, they would scribble them down in little notebooks, often made of scrap paper, and wait until the business day was over before transferring them neatly into their account ledgers.

He said, “[English] Tradesmen have their 'Waste Books' (scrawl-book, composition book I think in German), in which they enter from day to day everything they buy and sell, everything all mixed up without any order to it, from there it is transferred to the day-book, where everything appears in more systematic fashion ... This deserves to be imitated by scholars. First a book where I write down everything as I see it or as my thoughts put it before me, later this can be transcribed into another, where the materials are more distinguished and ordered.”

And so he began while still in college to carry small notebooks with him wherever he went, and he continued the practice until his death.

In his WASTE BOOKS, Lichtenberg wrote down everything, and that’s what Lichtenbergians do as well: every thought that occurs to you, every idea, every shopping list and phone number, every sketch, every schematic, every little thing. Write it down. Make a bullet journal, if you must.

These days I use the extremely handy (and extremely attractive) Field Notes Brand field books. I like their size and their quality, and their special quarterly editions are witty, creative, and lovely. At the moment — because I subscribe to the quarterly editions — I am swamped with WASTE BOOKS. They stand as a silent rebuke to me that I am in fact not writing everything down, because if I were, I should be able to fill up one of these notebooks every month, right?

As it is, I carry a general WASTE BOOK with me (in a leather cover that I made my own self), and for each major project I work on I will start a separate WASTE BOOK. (Choosing which Field Notes notebook to use — cover, edition, blank/lined/graph/dots — is just part of the necessary TASK AVOIDANCE, right?)

You can find your own style: Moleskine notebooks or those other high-end beauties; simple spiral-bound steno pads; make your own WASTE BOOK from scrap paper from the printer. Or you can print your own quickie notebooks here and here. (For instructions on how to fold the latter, see here.)

Waste away!

You can read a whole lot more about WASTE BOOKS and how great minds have used them to create their works in Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy.