The doorbell press happened in person, on purpose. Peter McKinnon had driven out to Niagara Falls — not for the falls — but to knock on John’s door and watch a man open a stack of 26 completely filled notebooks. McKinnon had convinced himself that this required a face-to-face visit. It did.
The question McKinnon brought with him was specific: how does someone track every waking 15 minutes of every day, across more than 200 consecutive days, without missing once — and what does that actually produce? He had Evernote, Apple Notes, email, Slack, WhatsApp, and what he described as every version of a text data entry application on his computer. None of them were solving his core problem. He was still procrastinating. He was still running out of time. The notebook on his desk during Zoom calls was doing more work than any app.
What Casey Neistat found in a notebook from July 2003
Before the Niagara drive, McKinnon sat in Casey Neistat’s office in New York, where Neistat pulled a notebook from 2003 off the shelf. It had a floor plan of Dr. Pong, a ping pong bar in Berlin, drawn out by hand. It had a layout of a Saab 3400 aircraft. It had a microfilm printout of Andy Warhol explaining beauty taped inside. A page called simply ‘Dominate’ that Neistat described, without irony, as looking like a plan for global domination.
What stopped McKinnon mid-sentence was something Neistat said almost casually: most of what he would have recorded into a journal back then now manifests into videos. McKinnon paused on that. He has dozens of notebooks from last year alone, filled with thoughts, conflicts, feelings, and ideas. The possibility that each of those entries could be the starting point for a video — not a memory to store but a plot to develop — was something he had not considered before Neistat said it out loud in that office.
Neistat also showed a notebook from February 29, 2004 through June 2005. On each page, 16 squares. Each square was one day. Inside each square, minute-by-minute records of what happened. One entry read: ‘No data recorded on 3/27/04 due to severe illness. Written in retrospect.’ Neistat could not fully explain why he did it. ‘It’s pretty sick though,’ McKinnon admitted. It was.
John’s two notebooks and what the 15-minute grid actually looks like
John carries two notebooks now. One is a time tracker. The other was inspired by McKinnon’s own previous work on habit logging. The time tracker captures every task switch — not on a timer, but at the natural end of each activity: done with the drive, done with the call, done with the hot tub. Then he writes down what that block was. The habit notebook tracks sleep start time, wake time, and total hours in color-coded columns. It tracks whether he worked out and for how long. Whether he had breakfast. Whether he complimented someone. Whether he worked on business development, marketing, watchmaking, or his power list. Two weeks per spread, over a year without stopping.
John’s explanation for why he does the 15-minute time tracking was direct: as the owner of his own company, he is not accountable to anyone. The notebook creates the oversight. If he is doing something, he knows he is going to write it down. The guilt, as he put it, is the mechanism.
McKinnon tried it for five days. Wake up, get dressed, breakfast, load out, driving, phone with sister, meeting with Adam. Then 9 to 9:15, 9:15 to 9:30. Grain Nation downtown at the lab. Instagram. More driving. His finding after five days: nothing in those pages jumped out at him as something he would never have otherwise realized. If he wasted time, he already knew where. The 15-minute grid, for McKinnon, did not produce new information about his own life.
What did produce something useful was the other column in John’s notebook — one line per day labeled ‘cool things that happened today.’ Last week, John wrote: Leif and I visited Peter McKinnon.
The typewriter that cost two dollars
On a different shelf in what appeared to be a studio or home office, McKinnon encountered a journal where every entry had been typed on a typewriter and then taped onto the page. No handwriting anywhere. The entry McKinnon read aloud: ‘Tuesday. 3C. Cold americano and pourover. Visit from Kirk. Phone from family. FaceTime with Alex. Editing for the rest of the day.’ Another entry ended with: ‘Move the needle. Editing most of the day. Move the needle. Felt good.’
The person behind the journal — whose name was not captured clearly in context — had ten typewriters, each with a different typeface. Cursive. Serif. Non-serif. Children’s handwritten notes slipped into envelopes and tucked between pages. Photos from New York. A hotel room number written on a print: 812. Some entries were two sentences. Some ran longer. A $2 typewriter had produced at least one of the fonts visible on the page.
A receipt in a pocket, a boarding pass in a book
McKinnon’s conclusion after all of it — Neistat’s scrapbook notebooks, John’s 211-day time grid, the typewritten journal — was that none of those specific systems were his. The Dr. Pong floor plan was not something he would draw. The minute-by-minute day log did not tell him anything he did not already know. But the boarding pass, he would keep. The receipt from a meal, he would keep. The physical momento that could go into a journal page later — that worked.
What he settled on was a notebook that functions primarily as a creative record: shot lists, gear lists, production meetings, brand calls, but also ideas that could become videos, conflicts that could become stories, feelings that could become a script. Casey Neistat had unlocked that framing in a single sentence in his New York office, and McKinnon had written it down.
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This article was reported in June 2026.
OHN Editorial Note: This article is based on publicly available sources. If you spot an error or have updated information, contact us at editorial@onlyhappynews.com. We correct mistakes promptly.
