How Austin Kleon Keeps it Fun and Weird

"Because I am insane, I keep four different notebooks"

Jun 01, 2026

It’s my birthday this week!

For the past few years, I’ve shared a favorite creator from my youth to celebrate. This year, I’m sharing a favorite creator who has just written about child-like things—in the most ebullient way.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to feature none other than Austin Kleon!

Here’s what I’ve always appreciated about Austin’s work: He takes complex ideas, boils them down to their essences, and makes them really fun and approachable.

For example, in Steal Like an Artist, he consolidates the creative energy implicit in commonplace books into a deceptively simple message. He does the same thing in his new book—out June 2nd—Don’t Call It Art—this time he captures the imaginative genius of childhood.

Reading anything Austin has written feels like a shot of creative energy.

The reason why? He’s having fun. It’s so obvious that Austin enjoys making art and sharing ideas with us. My favorite part of Don’t Call It Art is the section titled “Who’s Having Fun?” Being creative should be fun. It is fun. But then we weigh it down with all these adult concerns.

When I think back to what I did for fun as a kid, it included a lot of notebooks—writing in my diary, sketching silly pictures, or inventing ridiculous stories about the tooth fairy.

I had so much fun with notebooks—and I continue to have a lot of fun with them. They remain one of our best tools of imagination.

If you feel like your notebooks could use a jolt of creative energy, look no further than this guest post. I dare you to read about Austin’s notebooks and not come away with an idea to steal (to use Austin’s language).

And now I’ll hand it over to Austin, who has graciously offered to give us a tour of four of his notebooks! I hope you love this post as much as I do!

Because I am insane, I keep four different notebooks: a diary, a pocket notebook, a logbook, and a commonplace book. Each of them serves a different function.

I keep my diary the way many writers do: Every morning, I sit down with a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, and I fill 3+ pages. I’ve done this since 2017, when I fell in love with Thoreau’s journals and wanted to keep my own.

A few years ago, a friend of mine asked me to detail how I keep my diary, so I wrote these two pages in my diary for him:

What’s not-so-normal about my diaries is that they’re full of drawings and collages and newspaper clippings. I also like to write in it with a brush a la my hero, Lynda Barry:

When I’m writing a book, my diary gets terribly boring because it is mostly me whining about how hard writing is combined with little pep talks to myself to get off my ass and into the studio and get to work. Here’s a fun spread about my long-suffering editor:

I have a bunch of what I call “silly rituals” around keeping my diary. First, I always assign “guardian spirits” to the inside flaps — people to watch over things and provide an aspirational vibe. For example, my summer diary from June 2022 features Dee Dee Ramone by the pool:

I think silliness is really underrated in creative work. Being silly makes you playful, and when you’re playful, you’re more likely to get good ideas and make good stuff.

More silliness: I weigh the diary before I start using it, and then I weigh it when I’m finished. Here is a video of me performing this silly ritual.

People always ask about the date stamps: they aren’t rare! You can get a date stamp at any office supply store.

I also glue a library card pocket in the back of the diary and keep little paper scraps and souvenirs in there:

I try to have my pocket notebook nearby all the time, whether I’m in the house, in the studio, or out and about in the world. It’s basically just a ”waste book” for scribbling and doodling ideas.

I like the way my pocket notebook mixes the mundane and the profound, like this spread that has a to-do list on one page and a newspaper clipping about Margaret Fuller on the other page:

Here’s a spread that shows me working on (self-rejected) cover designs for Don’t Call It Art — if you can read my handwriting, you’ll notice that these were done back when the book had a different subtitle:

Because I fuss over my pocket notebook the least out of all my notebooks, I usually find it the most interesting to flip through.

I think all the time about how we emphasize the importance of keeping notebooks and sketchbooks but we almost never talk about the importance of revisiting them and re-reading them. I have found a weekly review hugely helpful: just once a week, sit down and re-read your notebooks and see if there’s anything you can use.

My logbook is just a list of what I do every day. It’s like an appointment book in reverse. I try to keep it as the day progresses, but I always make sure over coffee that yesterday is logged before the rest of my morning begins.

The mundanity of this notebook is very important. It is the place to put everything — including the stuff that I’d feel stupid about or bored by recording in my diary.

Here’s what I wrote about the logbook in my book Steal Like an Artist:

A logbook isn’t necessarily a diary or a journal, it’s just a little book in which you list the things you do every day. What project you worked on, where you went to lunch, what movie you saw. It’s much easier than keeping a detailed diary, and you’d be amazed at how helpful having a daily record like this can be, especially over several years. The small details will help you remember the big details.
In the old days, a logbook was a place for sailors to keep track of how far they’d traveled, and that’s exactly what you’re doing—keeping track of how far your ship has sailed.

Here are two pages from my logbook from 2009, a weekend off from my day job before I’d published any books or had any kids:

I have a terrible memory for things that happen to me, so this is the most valuable notebook I keep. I can’t tell you how weird it is to have a record like this going back seventeen years. For example, I can literally tell you what I did on every single day of my sons’ lives. It’s just bizarre to have this kind of index to your life. (I often use the logbook to look something up, and then consult my diary to see if I wrote more about it.)

Here is a peek inside my commonplace book. This is a weird little 5-year-diary I kept from 2021-2025, but with quotes I read instead of things that happened to me.

For the first two years, every day I wrote down random quotes that I’d heard or saved, but in the third year, I started building themes and riffing off of other quotes like you’d do in an old-fashioned commonplace book. (I keep a huge Apple Notes file called “QUOTES” that I dip into.)

You can see on this page that sometimes I clipped things out of print and pasted them into the book:

I really liked making this book and I love flipping through it, but I actually didn’t start another one once I finished. Keeping it — and a fully-searchable digital copy on my computer — made me realize how helpful and powerful it would be to keep a bonafide commonplace book, organized by topic, digital and fully searchable. So that’s what I’m trying to keep now, but on the computer.

Of course, I’ve actually been doing this for years: I built almost all my books off of blog and Tumblr tags and newsletter issues. But it’s nice to have a private file that I can let get weirder and wilder and more messy.

What’s interesting to me is that I never would’ve made the decision to keep a digital commonplace book without the exercise of keeping an analog one.

I’m sort of known as an analog guy, but digital stuff is a huge part of my work. I often think of my life as a kind of analog/digital loop. Most of my ideas start in my notebooks, on paper. Then I get them into the computer, manipulate them, and share them. Then, I head back to the notebooks to see if I can find some more ideas…

Hi, again! It’s Jillian.

I can’t sign off without sharing my notes on Austin’s notes. This is what I’m holding onto from his post.

Notes on Austin’s Notes

A little bit of work over time really adds up: Austin is remarkably consistent. And he’s a great example of how creativity rewards those who show up again and again. Not every day is going to be a great creative day, but the work compounds over time. This brings me to my second point…

Note-taking is a kind of ritual: Note-taking tends to work best when built into the structure of your days—when it is something that happens habitually, whether that’s the weekly review, morning pages, or weighing your diaries. Austin is particularly good at rituals, and he introduced me to one that I’ve been practicing for nearly two years. The “bookends approach” is simple—just begin and end each day with a book. Here’s Austin’s illustration of it:

*Read more about Austin’s bookends approach here*

Notebooks are great containers: I love notebooks because they bring me back to the physical world. And I love how Austin fully embraces the notebook as a physical object—with all its storage capacity. When I look at Austin’s notebooks, I think of Joseph Cornell’s assemblages or Susan Sontag’s notebooks stuffed with paper.

Austin’s published books replicate the same expansiveness of his notebooks. Don’t Call It Art is part creative guide, part commonplace book, part photo-album, and pure creativity. Reading it has made my writing days more fun. I think it will for you too!

Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts. Which of Austin’s note-taking tools do you want to steal?

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