The Catalogue Notebook: A Quiet Tool for Creativity, Memory, and Leadership
A catalogue notebook is neither diary nor to-do list. It is a personal archive of ideas, reflections, and plans — a quiet studio for thinking beyond meetings and frameworks.
Editor’s Note: This essay explores the catalogue notebook as a thinking artefact: a quiet tool for noticing, remembering, and shaping ideas over time. It sits within the Cultivated canon on creativity, learning, and attention.
The Catalogue Notebook
My weekends and evenings often disappear down rabbit holes of old notebooks — sketches from Leonardo, field notes from Darwin, fragments from Franklin.
Across centuries, these books share a common quality: they are neither plans nor diaries, but something in between.
A place where thinking is allowed to be unfinished.
It reminded me of my own catalogue notebook
— a running record of ideas, intentions, and reflections.
Not a productivity system.
Not a journal.
A personal archive of attention.
Living Outside the Calendar
Much of modern work lives inside calendars.
Meetings, deadlines, time blocks.
There is little space for noticing, wandering, or reflection.
A catalogue notebook is an antidote.
It creates a parallel space
— outside schedules and deliverables
— where thought can stretch.
It holds what might matter later, what felt important in the moment, and what might become something more.
What a Catalogue Notebook Holds
A catalogue notebook is not structured. It accumulates.
- Future — sketches of ambitions, half-formed strategies, experiments not yet run
- Past — reflections, decisions, moments that deserve remembering
- Ideas — quotes, observations, fragments, drawings, questions
It is a working memory, externalised.
Why It Works
Writing clarifies.
Noticing creates ideas.
Recording creates memory.
When thoughts sit next to each other on paper
— plans beside reflections, quotes beside sketches
— patterns emerge.
Ideas combine. Perspective deepens. What felt urgent becomes contextual. What felt trivial becomes connected.
The notebook becomes a slow conversation with yourself.
Leaders as Creatives
We tend to reserve creativity for artists, designers, filmmakers.
But leadership is creative work. Strategy is creative. Culture is creative.
A catalogue notebook becomes a quiet studio for that work
— a place to think beyond meetings, beyond frameworks, beyond immediate outputs.
A Personal Archive
Over time, these notebooks become something else:
a record of how you thought, what you noticed, what you believed mattered.
They are maps of attention. A reservoir of what you noticed.
Not productivity tools.
Not systems.
Archives of a mind at work.
This piece forms part of Cultivated’s wider body of work on how ideas become valuable, and how better work is built.
To explore further:
→ Library — a curated collection of long-form essays
→ Ideas — developing thoughts and shorter writing
→ Learn — practical guides and tools from across the work
→ Work with us — thoughtful partnership for teams and organisations
