A Year of Three Pages Every Morning

Last August I bought a pack of cheap notebooks and made myself a promise. Three pages, by hand, every morning, before the phone and before the kettle. No rules about what went on them.

It has been a year. There are eleven notebooks on the shelf above my desk, and I have just read the first one from cover to cover.

What the pages look like

Mostly dull, to be honest. Weather. What I'd dreamed. A list of things I'd forgotten to buy. Complaints about the neighbour's bins. A recipe I never made. Page after page of ordinary mornings, in handwriting that gets worse as it gets earlier.

I thought this would bother me. It doesn't. The dullness is the point. There is no audience in a notebook, so nothing needs to be impressive, and after a few weeks I stopped trying to be.

What I skipped

I missed forty-one days. I counted. A week in November when I was away and left the notebook at home. Ten days in March when I could not seem to find the time, which is a polite way of saying I could not find the will. A scatter of Sundays.

Each time, I picked it up again. That was the only rule I really kept: begin again, and do not make a speech about it.

The small surprises

I did not expect the pages to get quicker. In the first month, three pages took an hour. Now they take twenty-five minutes, and I don't think it's because I write less. I think I stopped editing as I went.

I did not expect to start noticing. A word that kept returning (grey, mostly). A pattern in what I was avoiding. The way the same small worry showed up in October, in February, and again in July, and each time was a little lighter on the page.

I did not expect to like my own handwriting. I don't, exactly, but I recognise it.

What I use

For anyone curious:

• A5 notebooks, plain or lightly ruled

• A pen that doesn't skip

• A chair by the east window

• A cup of something warm, set where I can't knock it over

• A rule that I do not read yesterday's pages until the week is out

That last one matters. If I read back too soon, I start to judge, and the next morning I write for a reader. Waiting a week keeps the pages honest.

What has changed

Nothing dramatic. I do not wake up transformed. But the mornings have a shape now, and I like standing in it. The day begins with a quiet half hour that is mine, and everything after that happens on top of it.

I have started the twelfth notebook. The cover is blue this time. I picked it because it was the only one left in the shop, which seems like a good way to choose.

If you've been meaning to start something like this, I'd say: begin with the cheapest notebook you can find. Write the date. See what comes.