Why I’m now using A6 paper for notetaking

The surprising way my mindset shifted by limiting the size of my ideas

When I started elementary school, the notebooks that we used were A5 size in landscape (with the hinge of the short side). In Mexico we call these “Italian notebooks”, although I still don’t know if they really come from Italy. As we progress in the educational system, we eventually switched to the standard A4 in portrait: the “big kid” notebooks.

For many years after I finished my education, I kept taking most of my notes in A4 notebooks and paper. Sometimes I would switch to A5 for things like journaling, but going to smaller sizes never crossed my mind. I thought a single idea could barely fit in an A6 notebook. Maybe it was also myself from the past, telling me that the smaller notebooks were for small kids.

Picture by author.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been looking into buying a Supernote. They only have the one that is size A6 available, with the new A5 version coming out soon. My first instinct was to think that A6 was too small, and that it would be better to wait for the new A5 version to come out. However, since the release date is yet to be confirmed, I was willing to give the A6 a shot.

To get an idea of how it would feel to work on this size, I got myself a 1-euro A6 notebook with 70 pages and committed myself to using as much as possible for my notetaking. To clarify, this notetaking consists of me writing about how my research work is going, as well as everyday journaling.

Visualizing an idea at the time

I was right in thinking that A6 can sometimes barely fit a single idea. What I didn’t consider is that this would be an advantage rather than an issue. To my delight, A6 is useful for avoiding clutter of information in a single page. The fact that the space is so limited forces me to keep every entry simple. Also, when reviewing, it’s easier to immediately see what the page is about.

Ease of discarding a page

Another thing that I appreciate about A6 is how low commitment it feels to put something on a page. When I’m writing in A4 and make a mistake that is beyond correction, it feels like a big waste to discard the whole page. Therefore, I make an unconscious effort to commit as few mistakes as possible. This rigidness can backfire, and in my effort to write only what’s necessary, I might be missing out on the type of insights that only come from making errors.

The A6 size solves this issue. If I make an error that is beyond correction, tearing down an A6 page is four times less severe than tearing down an A4. Because my mind unconsciously knows this, I’m able to write more freely, without worrying too much about errors, and this has allowed me to tap into new things that I wouldn’t have written otherwise.

Grouping ideas

I think my enjoyment of A6 comes down to the type of sorting of ideas that it allows. Words are “units of language” that form sentences, but beyond that I have been struggling to define where sentences become paragraphs and pages. It’s very easy for me to lose track of individual ideas once they’re within an A4 page. What I have done with A6 is to add an extra step: one or two paragraphs form an A6, and two to three A6 pages form an A4.