I always carry a small Moleskine notebook, the pocket-sized hardcover with grid paper, for notes, thoughts, and whatever else comes to mind during the day. Each page is numbered, and I continue the numbering as I move from one notebook to the next. This allows quick reference to past ideas, thoughts, or notes I may have in an older notebook, or even a few pages back. It is the primary way I get thoughts to paper, and is the "entry point" to all my writing and thinking.

Notebooks do not crash, do not freeze, and need only you and a pen. My notebooks often remind me of this passage from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance":

> “For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don’t know and have to give up.”

> Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance