The allure of stationery

I absolutely love wandering around stationery shops and it's taken me a good long while to begin to resist buying absolutely unnecessary notebooks which I inevitably end up not using very much of.

For a long time I did use notebooks very heavily and my love for them has come and gone but now I have found a pretty good digital system and so stationery is more an intermittent part of my life.

So when I have to really fight the urge to buy a new pen, to buy a cool notebook, to buy some other more novel trinket, it seems that that is an emotional response that's worth exploring and it made me think about what is the promise of stationery?

I think the clear lure there is that of to-do lists, of systems and processes just waiting to be tried, that this £2 pen, this £12 Moleskine, this complex designed bullet journal system, is going to make a notable impact on your productivity, on the orderliness of your mind, your ability to do things.

And even more so than say to-do lists and other productivity apps, the fact that it's a physical artefact seems to be a powerful part of that.