The doodles in your notebook margins are your brain telling you what it would rather be doing.

Attention drifts toward what it prefers the moment you stop supervising it. Margins fill with the same shapes, the same characters, the same half-finished designs, and none of it was chosen deliberately, which is exactly why it is worth reading. Nobody doodles strategically. What appears is whatever your head reaches for when the official task is not holding it.

Flip through the edges of this term’s notebook. Look for whatever keeps repeating. Then give that thing forty-five deliberate minutes and see whether it holds up with your full attention on it.