It started with golf. And a problem I didn't even know I had.
During the pandemic in 2020, I picked up the game and ran with it — hard. By the end of the year, I had played over 50 rounds. I had a shoebox full of scorecards to prove it. But somewhere around round 40, I realized something that should've been obvious a lot sooner: I had no idea if I was actually getting better.
The scorecards told me what I shot. They didn't tell me anything else. Not my fairways hit. Not my putts per round. Not the pattern of mistakes I kept repeating on the back nine. They were receipts, not records. I'd capture the number and lose the context. Every round started fresh, disconnected from the one before it.
I knew I could build something better.
A Better Scorecard
What I wanted wasn't complicated. I wanted a small, pocket-sized log I could carry in my bag — something purpose-built for tracking a round the way a golfer actually thinks about a round. Fairways. Greens in regulation. Putts. Notes on conditions. A place to track progress over time, not just record a final score.
Nothing on the market did exactly that. Generic notebooks were too open-ended. Scorecards were too narrow. Golf apps existed, but pulling out your phone mid-round to log data felt like the wrong answer to the right problem.
So I designed the Golf Log. Compact. Structured. Analog. Built to be carried, used, and filled up.
Then Came the Film Cameras
Around the same time, I was deep into film photography — rotating between five cameras and never quite knowing what was in any of them. What film stock. What ISO. How many frames were left. What I'd already shot on a half-finished roll sitting in a camera I hadn't touched in three weeks.
If you shoot film, you know the feeling. You pick up a camera, pop the back by accident, and ruin six frames trying to remember if it was loaded. Or you finish a roll, send it off for development, and have absolutely no idea what you're getting back or under what conditions you shot it.
I needed the same thing I'd built for golf: a dedicated log. Small enough for a camera bag. Structured enough to be useful. Simple enough that you'd actually use it every time.
The Film Photography Log came next.
The Pattern Behind the Products
Two problems. Two notebooks. Same root cause.
There are things worth keeping track of — rounds played, rolls shot, medications taken, financial records, daily tasks — that don't have a great analog home. Generic notebooks are too blank. Apps are too intrusive or too fragile (batteries die, platforms change, data gets locked up). And most specialty notebooks, where they exist at all, are designed for display, not use.
WRKBKS exists to fill that gap. Every product in the lineup starts with a specific task and works backward: What does someone actually need to capture, track, or remember? What format makes that effortless? What size fits the life they're already living?
Purpose-built. That's the whole idea.
We Only Build It When We Can Build It Better
The Golf Log and the Film Photography Log came first, but the lineup has grown from there — a Daily Task Planner, a Medical Record Journal, a Crypto Wallet Log. Each one started the same way: with a real need and a clear gap between what existed and what should exist. Not "this category has search volume." Not "people buy notebooks." The only question that matters is whether we can make something meaningfully better than what's already out there. If the answer is yes, we build it. If it isn't, we don't. There are plenty of notebooks in the world. WRKBKS isn't here to add to the pile — we're here to replace the ones that were never quite right.
Made in the USA. Designed to Be Used.
Every WRKBKS notebook is printed in Indiana and built to the same standard: small enough to pocket, structured enough to be useful, durable enough to survive the bag, the range, or the darkroom.
These aren't display pieces. They're tools. And like any good tool, they earn their place by doing their job without getting in the way.
If you've ever looked at a stack of scorecards and wondered what they actually meant — or picked up a camera and had no idea what was inside — you already understand why WRKBKS exists.
We built it because we needed it. And we think you do too. 🐦
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