What to Do with a Grid Notebook
Grid notebooks are slowly replacing horizontal line notebooks in the world of productivity. You may notice that people who are intentional about documenting a journey as well as boosting their productivity are slowly migrating to grid notebooks.
What’s so special about them and what can you do with a grid notebook?
From perfecting your artwork and practicing calligraphy to creating a planner, grid notebooks have so many uses, and using one is an excellent way to be super productive. The style of grid notebooks makes it easier to become more creative, so you can achieve more with such a book.
What are more uses of a grid notebook? How is a grid notebook different from a regular notebook with horizontal lines? We’ve got answers to these questions and more in the rest of this article.
1. Practice Calligraphy or Improve Your Handwriting
If you want to improve your handwriting, you should try using a grid notebook. In a regular notebook, you mostly practice by making sure that your letters, words, and sentences do not fall below or rise above the line. While this is good, a grid notebook offers more.
In a grid notebook, you still have the chance to write so that your words do not rise above or fall below the horizontal dots or lines. An advantage of grid notebooks, however, is that you also have vertical dots or lines to align your letters or words by so that they will be well-arranged.
This means that in a grid notebook, you can arrange your letters, words, and sentences both vertically and horizontally. You can also connect the dots when practicing calligraphy.
2. Sketching Journal
Do you love sketching? You should use a grid notebook. You can sketch diagrams from beautiful places in your traveling journey. You can also try to sketch pests or insects that you found in your garden when you were without a phone.
While you can also sketch in a regular notebook, the lines can interfere with the diagram. In a grid notebook, however, the dots are usually very tiny and can go unnoticeable in your diagrams. You should sketch as many diagrams as you want in your grid notebook so that you can remember your travels.
3. Scale Technical Diagrams or Drawings
If you have ever drawn a technical diagram before, you’ll appreciate a notebook that can help you scale your diagrams without effort. Scaling is helpful to create the perfect diagram that you can easily reproduce. In this context, a grid notebook is the combination of a regular notebook and a meter rule.
With a grid notebook, you can easily draw lines and circles as you only need to pass through the dots (or between two dots). You can also draw a diagram inside another diagram with equal space between both diagrams on every side.
4. Games
Who does not like playing games? Did you know that playing games can make you more productive? Sometimes, all you need to help you think better is to rest or do something not work-related such as playing a game.
If you are in a workplace, it may be difficult to play games with your phone or pc without distracting others, but you can do so with ease in a grid notebook.
You can simply trace the dots in a grid notebook to make beautiful shapes and patterns. You can even play the dots and boxes game. What’s more? You can play tic-tac-toe with someone else on a grid notebook. So long as you are creative, you can come up with more games to play.
5. Daily Journal
It’s time to get a little bit more serious. You can use a grid notebook for everything a regular notebook can do.
One common and productive use of a regular notebook is journaling. How did your day go and what did you learn from today’s mistakes? You can document your life’s journal in a grid notebook.
Just like in a regular notebook, you can write your daily journal in a paragraph format or a bullet point format. It is all up to you to decide the best format to write your daily journal in the grid notebook.
6. A Simple To-Do List
If you want to get more productive, you should start writing down the goals and tasks that you’d like to achieve in a given period. For example, you can make a to-do list of important tasks or repetitive activities that you should do in a week or a day.
You do not need to create a special template or dashboard to make this to-do list, but you can if you wish. Remember that it is easy to draw in a grid notebook, so you can easily make your template in your notebook. Try your best to achieve the tasks and goals on your to-do list.
7. Alastair Planner
While a simple to-do list can be productive and also give details, you can easily convert it into an Alastair planner in your grid notebook. The Alastair planner is a to-do list-like planner that helps you to plan your tasks, behavior, and goals in a specific timeframe.
How can you easily make an Alastair template in your grid notebook? The Alastair planner has a grid-like template in which the days of the week (or weeks of the month) are the columns and the tasks on your to-do list occupy the rows.
In a grid notebook, you do not need to draw any extra lines like in a regular notebook in which you need to draw vertical lines. A grid notebook is already in a grid format, so it can help you to complete your tasks and achieve your goals without much effort in planning.
8. Track Your Progress
Do you want to manually track your progress in a specific journey? Use grid notebooks. Aside from writing your progress as in the journaling format, you can draw your progress in different types of charts in your grid notebook. Remember that drawing is very easy in grid notebooks.
Let’s say that you’d like to make a bar chart to report the number of days you spent on various tasks. All you need to do is to start the chart from the bottom or left part of your notebook, write the days, weeks, or months in a y-axis, and then write the tasks or behavior that you want to track in the x-axis.
For every day (or any timeframe that you choose to use) you complete a task, increase the length of the bar of that task. Leave a specific date black if you failed to do it. This is an easy way to create bar charts just like doing it with computers.
9. Brainstorming
You must have heard of flowcharts before. These charts can help you to make the right decisions because you get to draw the details of every vague idea or dilemma in your mind. Start the flow chart by the most general concept and then divide it until the most specific concepts.
When you want to make a decision that relates to the chart that you created in your grid notebook, you only need to go to the chart and trace it down to the specific concept that matches your current situation.
If you brainstorm regularly, you should get a grid notebook to help you in your thinking process.
10. Practicing Your Design Before Going Digital
Remember that you can easily produce scalable diagrams in your grid notebook. With this awesome feature, you can create designs in your grid notebook before you try them out digitally. If you are a front-end developer or a UI/UX specialist, you must have used a notebook to bring a specific design into life before you try to recreate it with your pc.
It is easier to do this with a grid notebook as it is scalable. You will get a matching design (with similar dimensions) when you recreate a design in your grid notebook. This is an essential tip for graphic designers as well.
11. Make Your Own Planner (Be Creative)
You must have learned by now that you can use a grid notebook for everything a regular notebook can do. You can choose to make a planner that suits your lifestyle. You can create a new template and dashboard that you like.
What’s more? You can make doodles in your grid notebook. Truthfully, the uses of grid notebooks are so many and you’d surely be more productive when you use a grid notebook.
What Is a Grid Notebook?
Imagine a grid but without the lines. That is exactly what a grid notebook is. It is a notebook full of dots that can make grids. The common size of a grid notebook is A5 (5×8.3 inches), but they can come in other sizes.
If you feel that regular notebooks look too scholarly and they remind you of boring essays and other school assignments, you should consider switching to a grid notebook.
Final Thoughts
There are many uses of a grid notebook. It does not matter what you want to use yours for, you will surely become a better version of yourself. What’s stopping you from getting one?
