I recently got this email from a reader:

I’m Riccardo from Italy and I love your blog. 
I think I have a “problem” with notebooks and paper in general. I want every paper object  to be perfect. Today I misspelled my email address in my personal info in my planner and… You can imagine what a rough time I had. 
Am I the only one? Is there anyone who is as “perfectionist” as me? 

For many of us, the obsession with notebooks extends into some form of perfectionism. Lots of us search for “the perfect notebook,” that meets a very personal set of criteria. Then there is the attention to detail in the construction and quality of a notebook. It drives me crazy when a notebook is uneven, crooked, not square, sloppily finished. In the notebooks I use daily, if one corner sticks out a little more than the other, I find myself fiddling with it and pushing at it, as if I could whittle away the extra material to achieve perfect symmetry. I didn’t just get into this habit because I review notebooks on this site and have to look for all their flaws– I was this way even as a kid with 25 cent notebooks from the local newsstand. If one notebook wasn’t quite right, I’d try to fix it somehow, or want to buy another one. This obsession with perfection is also why I’ve stockpiled over 100 unused Moleskines from the early 2000s when their construction was slightly different and their quality control was tighter–a difference of a millimeter or two in cover overhang means those old ones are as close as I’ll get to “perfect” so I bought as many as I could.

As for the contents of notebooks, I am not a perfectionist at all. I’ve seen many sketchbooks displayed online that look “perfect,” in terms of having beautifully executed artworks inside, or impeccable calligraphy and precise handwriting. I admire that, and I’d like some of my pages to be more “beautiful,” but I don’t aspire to perfection. I scribble and cross things out and allow myself to make a mess. I’ve even done what Riccardo did, writing my email address wrong. But I just crossed it out and kept going.

I have also seen many people talk about how perfectionism holds them back from using notebooks– the notebook is “too nice,” so they are afraid to make a mistake and mess it up. And on another blog recently (I thought I saved the link but now can’t find it!), someone talked about his “DGAF notebook.” At first I thought DGAF was some cool new brand I hadn’t heard about, but it just stands for “Don’t Give a F**k.” It’s the notebook you allow yourself to use for pen tests, torn-out pages, taking notes in the bathtub, or whatever. A notebook with absolutely no need for perfection, and nothing to hold you back.

How do you feel about notebooks and perfectionism? Do your notebooks have to be perfect? Or are you more of a DGAF person?