The doodles in your notebook margins are what your brain does when nobody’s assigning it anything. Look at them sometimes.

Unassigned time is the only time your mind chooses for itself. In class there is a task, at work there is a task, and in the margin there is nothing, so whatever appears got picked without supervision. That makes it a sample of your default setting rather than your effort. It does not have to be any good to be worth reading.

Keep the same notebook long enough to compare. Once a month, look only at the margins and ask what your unsupervised mind keeps making, whether that is patterns, faces, machines or words. If you like what you find there, give it some assigned time too.