The Leader’s Notebook: Plotting the Future, Capturing the Past

My weekends and evenings are often spent down rabbit holes of videos, photos, and articles about old notebooks. I co-host the Stationery Freaks podcast, after all. Browsing notebooks from Picasso, Michelangelo, Darwin, Franklin and others, I noticed a common thread: their books were part doodles, part plans, part reflections.

It reminded me of my own “catalogue notebook”—a series of notebooks where I capture future plans and ideas, while logging the past. I use it in creative work and leadership alike. Here’s why I think it matters.

Living in Our Calendars

Much of our workday is trapped in calendars. Meetings, time blocks, deadlines—there’s little space for noticing, ideating, or reflecting. The closed thinking mode dominates.

A catalogue notebook challenges that. It’s where you capture future plans, log what’s happening right now, and create space for observations and things you've noticed. After all, the art of noticing is the art of leadership.

The Catalogue Notebook

The Catalogue Notebook is not a diary. Nor is it a to-do list. A catalogue notebook captures three things:

• Future: Strategies, tactics, goals, experiments, ambitions,
• Past: Reflections, failures (which are an opportunity to make the business better), successes, decisions, activities that warrant recording
• Ideas: Quotes, doodles, sketches, observations, random thoughts, things you pay attention to, ideas to make the business better

Of course, this same process works in your own personal life too - it's what a lot of creative folk do.

A catalogue notebook is where ideas can come from, as well as a chance to reflect on how to improve our abilities and performance and business.

Why It Works

• Clarity : When we write down our thoughts we give them space to be clarified, noodled over and contemplated. The act of writing requires clarity - so by capturing with pen and paper, and maybe expanding on the thought there and then, we can gain clarity.
• Creativity : Ideas pop from catalogue books. As ideas, thoughts, reflections, quotes, observations and future plans sit side-by-side, it is only a matter of time until you spot a pattern, or you mash ideas together to create something novel and unique. I cover this same concept in the free guide to creating conference talks.
• Perspective: Sometimes the heat of the moment seems all encompassing. We can feel overwhelmed or overloaded or concerned. Writing these thoughts down is a mini form of journaling - and journaling helps with mental clarity.
• Memory: As more information floods your brain and time ticks on by, your catalogue notebooks can serve as solid memories of what you thought, what happened, how you felt and what your plans for the future were.

Getting Started

Grab any notebook that feels good for you. I am a stationery freak so of course I'm going to recommend you find a notebook that feeds your soul, but the reality is, it doesn't matter too much.

I tend to suggest a small A6 notebook or pocket notebook like the Moleskine Cahiers. A good pen or pencil helps.

No rules, no formatting, just write. Add dates or little notes for clarity so entries make sense 60 days from now. Keep it with you, write when an idea strikes, or you notice something interesting, and revisit regularly.

I block 30 minutes on Fridays to review mine—pulling actions into productivity systems, reflecting, and spotting insights that weren’t obvious in the moment.

Leaders Are Creatives Too

The best managers, leaders and people know they are creatives too, even if they're not working in a "creative" industry or role - and tools like this help them lead with clarity, empathy and creativity.

Sure, we may not be painting artwork or making films, but our creativity will lead to better workplaces, novel solutions for systemic issues and new ways to open up potential for ourselves, our people and the business.

Consider your catalogue notebook your personal creative studio and collection of ideas. It's your place to play with ideas and thoughts. It's an archive to help you get better.

Fill the books, flip through them, mash things together or simply create an archive of your chapter in the business.

• How much of your daily thinking is captured somewhere outside your head? Would it benefit you to get it out of your head?
• Could your notebook become a map of your leadership journey—a record of experiments, successes, and failures?

💬 Quote of the Week

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” — Benjamin Franklin

I cover this idea in Workshop Mastery - the need to involve students in the learning itself, and to avoid dullness at all costs.

📖 Books I’m Reading

• The Notebook by Roland Allen — a superb book about the history of paper and notebooks. Couldn't put this book down. If you're interested in stationery, notebooks and personal information management, this is a cracker.
• High Bias - the distorted history of the cassette tape by Marc Masters — as a kid of the 1980's I spent a lot of time making mix tapes on cassette. This book is brilliant and explains how music genres like hiphop and metal may not have grown without the emergence of the cassette tape, plus how the big corporates failed to lock down the musical freedom that tapes brought musicians.

🚀 Creative Soul Projects

Alongside Cultivated Management, I take on small creative projects that stretch my skills and spark ideas I often bring back to work—sharing them here to inspire your creativity, communication, and leadership.

Parent Car Scene was a failed creative and community experiment that finally ended up as this fun photo eBook. The original idea was to launch a local community group of parents who enjoy cars. It didn't quite work out that way.

👉 Download the Parent Car Scene photo eBook

🤝 Support Cultivated Management

This newsletter is a labour of love and will always be free, but it's not free to create it - if you’d like to support my work please consider:

1. Sharing this content with others you feel would get value from it.
2. Buying my latest book. Workshop Mastery.
3. Downloading the free ebook 10 Behaviours of effective employees.
4. Buying a copy of Zero to Keynote
5. Buying a copy of Take a Day Off
6. Sitting the online Communication Super Power Workshop to develop your super power in work 

Until next week.

Take care of yourself and others.

Rob..