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Sketch by the Author
Narrow shoes, corsets, cluttered homes, and notes surrounded by unrelated verbosity have something in common: there’s not enough room to move in ways that consistently promote positive progress.
Joan Westenberg’s Object Pages System applies this principle to note-taking in a stunningly simple way: give each separate idea its own page.
No symbols to remember, nothing to migrate. A markedly different approach than Bullet Journaling.
Joan defines six note categories:
Note pages are divided into three parts: the header, note content, and the footer.
The Header Block contains the note category and the date. Next is the Content Block, which could be anything at all. At the bottom is the Footer Block with status, no more than two tags, priority, and connections.
Just look at the Object Pages site! That white space is stunning.
My favourite part of this system is how easy it is to start. Write down an idea, add simple metadata later.
According to Joan, the clarity that comes from following a one-idea-per-page approach is worth any perceived waste. Now, I love writing on paper, but my brain initially struggled with the thought of ripping through a mountain of good notebooks that would then need to be stored. (Where??)
This is why I love how Joan promotes paper notebooks as an interim means of organising information.
She scans notebook pages worth keeping, then (eventually) discards them. I could see myself using a Paper Saver notebook (a holder for reusing scrap paper) this way — but never a Moleskine, Rhodia, or Leuchtturm.
The way I think about paper has changed dramatically from when I was a uni student in the late 80s. Back then I printed my own planners and had a notebook for anything and everything. Computers were too new and too desk-anchored back then to be anyone’s first choice of knowledge management. Reams of the stuff were everywhere. Most of us had stacks of notebooks in boxes at home.
Writing on paper is one of the ways I give my brain texture that pixels can’t provide (thanks to Andy Rosic for that turn of phrase). I delight in using a nice fountain pen, in the act of refilling, and seeing ink dry in subtle variations of shade. It’s all part of the experience and something I treasure. Remember, you don’t want to go fully paperless if you hope to leave a lasting legacy)
I’m glad to be using a lot less paper than I did in the 80s — to be paper, less, rather than paperless — but something about the picture Joan paints of each idea on its own page has me yearning for the old days!
Where paper was invisible because it was all that we had.
Check out this piece to read (or listen to) more about how Joan recently deleted her second brain. I like the way she looks past the tool to what it’s helping her to do. And to be.
These days I’m using paper to plan my time, turn ideas into scribbly pictures, do gratitude journaling, and capture tasks and ideas. The latter are triaged then transferred to my digital task manager or disregarded (there’s a Dash-Plus symbol for that).
Only a small percentage of notes captured in my notebook or One Big Text File (OBTF) end up with their own digital space. Thankfully! Many things that seemed worth writing down in the moment fade into irrelevancy over time. Those that pass muster usually graduate to a digital note in my Obsidian vault.
And so I’ve adapted Object Pages to the way I work.
Behold, the birth of my very first Object Page! (That’s a Kokuyo Campus A5 soft ring notebook)
Each page of my notebook now has an Object-Pages-like header and footer. And I’ve created a new page type: Capture. It’s powerful!
Some pages already have a distinct unified type (Idea, Reflection, Decision), but for those that don’t, Capture is the perfect classification. I immediately know this is a hodge-podge, and only need to check the footer to see if it is Active or Completed. Completed pages have had every note processed as a note type, or moved to another list.
It strikes me that the header and footer practices Object Pages promotes would be a good way to set up the metadata of digital notes, too. Rather than using actual headers and footers I’d pop it all into the YAML:
---
type:
title:
date:
status:
tag1:
tag2:
priority:
connections:
---Properties in my main Obsidian vault are in a bit of a mess at the moment. The Object Pages approach might just fix that.
Here’s how the metadata of one of my current tasks might look:
---
type: task
title: Create a greyscale version of the ER-9000 planner
date: 2025-07-05
status: active
tags:
- project
- planners
priority: 2
connections:
- [[Planning Resources]]
- [[Teachers - needs, challenges]]
---As you can see, I’m torn between using the standard “tags” property, and reminding myself to use no more than two with “tag1” and “tag2”!
I loved the Object Pages concept enough to pay for the more detailed explanation and templates. The basic concepts are free on Joan’s site, but in the guide you’ll find detailed explanations and examples, and troubleshooting tips for choosing object types, avoiding having too many active objects, and how to go about finding specific information.
If I was all-in on paper, I’d likely be all-in on this approach.
It’s simple enough to avoid overwhelm, with just enough complexity to link notes in useful ways that don’t need folders or long lists of tags.
Joan created Object Pages in rebellion against the pressures and constraints she perceives to be part of complex analog systems, like the Bullet Journal method.
To me there’s nothing wrong with any of those systems. But just like clothing off the rack, not everything will be a good fit.
The truth is that there’s no way to make a whole raft of pages a useful resource for your future self without some measure of complexity. All that remains is to pick the details (including the constraints) that you can live with.
Every note, task, and idea worthy of your time and attention deserves its own space, with enough room to consistently promote positive progress. For some that will be on paper, while others, like me, prefer nurturing notes in the digital realm.
The brilliantly simple analog Object Pages system could be a much needed detox for analog people who are feeling all BuJo’d out.
I’m grateful to have been introduced to Object Pages and for the way it’s simplifying the structure of my analog and digital notes.
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