Why Ideas Need Ink, Not Screens

And the Importance of Little Black Notebook

One of the most frequent questions I get from early-career researchers, students, and other readers is: How do we come up with ideas for our projects? My answer often feels too simple to be satisfying: we don't find ideas, we collect them. The best ideas rarely arrive fully formed. Instead, they flicker into view, half-formed, nagging, a question without a clear home. The key is learning to spot them, to hold on to them, and then, eventually, to decide which ones deserve our attention.

Good projects, the ones that sustain us through the long haul of research, revision, and rejection, tend to emerge at the intersection of inspiration and irritation: something that sparks curiosity and something that doesn’t quite add up. The spark could be a puzzling result in someone else’s work, a half-thought during our morning walk, or a detail in the news that seems off-kilter. But the irritant matters too, it gives our idea traction. For me, it's often when I think, Wait, that can't be the whole story... That’s when I know it might be something’s worth chasing.

1. The Little Black Book

I still remember a moment, many years ago now, that shaped how I think about ideas. I was at a large political science conference. The kind where the coffee is bad, but the conversations are great. During a break, I caught up with my grad school buddy, friend, and co-author, Seth Jolly, and pulled out a little black notebook. It was well-worn, the pages crowded with scribbles, arrows, half-finished thoughts.

“Any time something catches my attention, something weird, off, interesting, I write it here,” I told him. Seth joked that he wanted to “steal my notebook.” We laughed and started a conversation about how to harness ideas and the different ways we try to capture them. Since then, Seth and I try to meet up at every professional conference we both attend, always making time to swap family updates and talk shop. That notebook helped spark more than a few collaborations.

Since grad school, I’ve always kept a modest black (or dark blue, darker colours exude professionalism in my mind) notebook that lives in the side pocket of my bag. It’s full of incomplete sentences, graphs that don’t exist yet, quotes from novels, papers, news articles or academic talks, questions I don’t know how to answer (I also hoard old ones that have no blank pages left, just in case!). I do this because I think while some ideas may strike instantly, more often than not, ideas come when we’ve trained ourselves to be ready for them. My notebook has become my lightning rod.

2. On Why “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard”

Crucially, it’s handwritten. I know that sounds analog, but nostalgia is not the reason for it. There’s something different about writing with a pen on paper, something cognitive, something more profound. Research has shown that taking notes by hand improves comprehension, recall, and critical thinking. Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014), in their now well-cited study “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking,” found that students who took notes by hand performed better on conceptual questions than those who typed, because they processed the information more deeply rather than transcribing it verbatim. Pen and paper slows us down just enough to think.

3. The Historical Power of the Notebook

The idea of a notebook is hardly new, of course. Francis Bacon, an English philosopher, statesman, author, and pioneer of the scientific method (who lived in 16th and early 17th centuries), introduced the concept of “the laboratory notebook”. For Bacon, the act of recording observations and reflections in a notebook wasn’t just a matter of preserving data; it was a crucial intellectual practice that helped shape the scientific mind. Bacon saw the laboratory notebook as a tool for organizing and refining thoughts, a way to transform raw, fragmented ideas into structured knowledge. His view was that writing things down allowed us to better understand and make sense of the world by giving us the mental space to reflect, build upon, and refine our observations. The notebook, in his vision, wasn’t simply a place for rote transcription but a dynamic environment where ideas could evolve and grow, just as we see in the process I’ve described here. Bacon believed that when we write down our ideas, no matter how half-formed, we begin to create the intellectual scaffolding that will support deeper insights and breakthroughs. It’s a process of composting ideas: allowing them to sit, decompose, and eventually sprout into something new and more meaningful.

4. Skill Power: Idea Discipline as a Research Superpower

But this post isn’t just about the magic of notebooks. It’s about something far harder: deciding what to work on, and more crucially what not to. Once we start collecting ideas, a new problem emerges: we will likely have too many. Every researcher, every writer I know has a “graveyard” of half-baked ideas, Word (or Latex) docs with titles and little content, folders named things like “project maybe???” Knowing which ideas to pursue, and more crucially, which to leave behind, is an under-appreciated skill in writing.

It is part of what I dubbed “skill power”: a kind of quiet strength that’s built not through flashes of brilliance, but through the muscle of discernment. It’s not about generating the most ideas, but about learning to notice which ones have roots. Skill power means we resist the temptation to chase every shiny object and instead focus on what we can nurture, on what has true meaning to us.

5. Sifting through Ideas: A Rough Guide

Here’s a rough guide I use when sifting through ideas that might work for you as well:

1. Does it bother us enough? The best projects are ones we can’t let go of. Even when they’re frustrating, even when the data is messy or the reviewers unkind, they tug at us. If an idea doesn’t keep resurfacing, if we forget about it for months, it probably wasn’t urgent enough.

2. Is it ours to tell? Some ideas are interesting but better suited to someone else’s expertise or perspective. Others feel personal, rooted in our own curiosities, skills, and intellectual commitments. I try to work on ideas that I feel responsible for.

3. Will it teach us something new? This might sound obvious, but I’ve found it helpful to ask: Will working on this project make me a better scholar? Will I learn a new method, grapple with a new literature, see something from a different angle?

4. Can I imagine spending the next two years with this idea? Because, frankly, we will! Between the research, writing, peer review, and (if we’re lucky) publication, projects take time, lots of time. Choose ones that will still feel interesting a year from now, even when we’re sick of the dataset or knee-deep in reviewer comments.

Sometimes, a project emerges fully formed from a single entry in the notebook, in my experience this is extremely rare, however. More often than not, it’s a combination of small sparks: a line from a policy report, a frustrating gap in the literature, an unexpected electoral result. The notebook isn’t a blueprint, it’s more like compost heap. Ideas go in half-formed, and over time, they break down and mix, until something new and more fertile grows.

6. Preparing for Inspiration

I’ve also learned that timing matters. Not every good idea is a now idea. Some are too ambitious, some need a co-author with the right expertise, some require data that isn’t available yet. That’s okay. Write them down anyway. The act of keeping a notebook, of recording ideas without judgment, builds trust in our own thinking. It reminds us that inspiration is not something we wait for. It’s something we prepare for. It is part of our skill power.

So if we’re struggling to figure out what to work on, maybe we shouldn’t aim for a great idea, but start with a habit. We can carry a notebook. We can scribble freely. Follow what bugs us. And when something keeps tugging at us, something small but insistent, and we pay attention, it might just be the start of our next big idea.

7. Let’s Stay in Touch

If this resonated with you, or sparked an idea of your own, I’d love to hear about it. You can reply, comment, or share your own methods for capturing inspiration. And if you haven’t already, consider subscribing to stay up to date on future posts about research, writing, and the work behind deep work. I truly appreciate your feedback, thank you!