A notebook system that finally stuck
People ask what I use, so here is the whole system. It took four years of abandoned apps and half-filled notebooks to arrive at something this boring.
The kit
A pocket notebook with waterproof paper, a 2B mechanical pencil, and a cheap 8×42 binocular. That's it. Pens smear in fog. Phones die, glare, and pull you out of the place. A pencil works upside down in the rain.
Every page starts the same way
At the top: date, place, time in and out, weather, and tide if I'm on the coast. This takes thirty seconds and is the single most useful habit I have. A year later, the header is how I find things, and it's how I notice that the swifts always arrive within a week of the same date.
Below that, a list of what I saw, with counts when I can manage them. Then a few lines of behaviour: what something was doing, not just that it was there. If something holds still long enough, a sketch. Bad sketches are fine. The point is that drawing forces you to look at the thing instead of at the idea of the thing.
Once a week
Sunday evening I type the pages into a plain text file per month. No database, no tags beyond the place name. Search covers everything else. Some of those weekly transcriptions become posts here, lightly cleaned up.
What didn't work
Apps with dropdowns of species names: I started seeing what was in the list instead of what was in front of me. Voice memos: I never listened to them again. Photographing everything: hundreds of files, no memory of the morning.