I took iPhone snapshots of doodles from 3 years worth of notes at my old job:

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I try to keep a legal pad at my work desk at all times, so that whenever I get stuck or bored, I can just move over to the legal pad to keep my hand in motion, making marks until my brain gets back on track. (I learned this technique from Lynda Barry.) I use a legal pad and not a nice sketchbook because it’s cheap and I don’t feel like I’m wasting good paper on my crummy scratches.

Every once in a while I’ll come up with a doodle I really like:

And sometimes a podcast or a video will compel me to start taking notes, like with this excellent speech by Richard Nash on the future of publishing:

Notes on The Fog of War (see them bigger)

The filmmaker Errol Morris’s blog for the NyTimes has quickly become one of my favorite reads on the internet, so I Netflixed a bunch of his documentaries. I started with The Fog of War (Amazon), since the film’s subject, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, died a couple weeks ago. (There’s a good Fresh Air with interviews of McNamara and Morris.)

This was a lazy set of notes for me: I knew ahead of time that there were “Eleven Lessons” from McNamara’s life, so I just listed them as the movie went along, with a few other scribbles here and there.

The one thing notable about them is that I used the page on the right of the sketchbook for straightforward notes, and the page on the left for doodles. I was thinking of Lynda Barry — how she keeps a legal pad next to whatever she’s working on, so she can keep her brush moving when she gets stuck.

Of course, to me, the doodle page is much more interesting. The right side is straightforward information, the left side is free-associative, with me riffing off the information, processing it. In my better notes, I combine these two sides…

These are little phrases I doodled next to in a terrific Will Oldham article in the New Yorker. I erased everything surrounding and collaged them together. Just a little experiment. Just goofing around…

Had some awesome seats and great weather to see the Rangers spank the Red Sox last night in Arlington, TX: Rangers 15, Boston 8. Ate a jumbo hot dog, a ton of nachos, and my first kolache at the Czech Stop in West, Texas along the way.

There’s a bunch of great stuff you see at a baseball game, so I always try to take my sketchbook and draw a little. Meg had the camera and caught me in action: