Dot Grid Notebooks are my Paper Brain

It’s a curse of having ADHD – everything inside my brain is in one big heap and there is a giant chute dumping new ideas onto the pile non-stop. 

Picture the garbage dump world of Sakaar in Thor: Ragnarok. Sometimes it’s an overwhelming mess in there.

I’ll admit that having a constant flood of ideas is also a beloved superpower that I wouldn’t ever want to give up. I just wish it looked more like that scene in Pixar’s Monsters Inc. where all the doors are running on hundreds of  tracks and each ends up in nice neat rows where they belong.

That’s one reason I call my sketchbooks my “paper brain.” I’ll have a little 3.5” x 5.5” notebooks with me most of the time. Actually, I usually have two going at a time because I’ll misplace one and start another.

My favorites are Field Notes dot grid. I adore the national park covers. 

With the dot grid pages I can freely draw, take notes in any direction, or make my favorite Celtic knots.

Everything goes into these little gems. Grocery lists. Thumbnail sketches of ideas. Notes from meetings. And especially, ideas. Lots and lots of ideas. 

I tried bullet journaling for about two seconds and it didn’t stick. But the idea to leave a page or two blank at the front of a sketchbook then write in a table of contents as you go (or when you fill the book in my case) works really well. I also write the date the book is done on the outside cover and list the main things inside the book on the back. These

---

It’s been a really long time since I’ve shown you what happens with a lot of the celtic knots I doodle. They get meticulously worked on, cleaned up, and sometimes I actually make them available for you to play with. This batch was turned into mandala kaleidoscopes. It was amazing to slice and dice each circular knot and put it together in different ways.

I’ve got a small inventory of the coloring books in stock. These aren’t coloring pages for the feint of heart. They are meticulous, beautifully meditative little works of art. I’ve been working on clearing out my inventory so it’s listed at a very reasonable price.

You can purchase the coloring book HERE.

(The Amazon link for the sketchbooks is an affiliate link by the way – it doesn’t cost you any more but I get a few pennies if you order.)