Ever since grade school I was always sketching in the margins of every paper I had my hands on. Teachers would find amusement in my sketches and always encouraged me to keep going (as long as my grades were good). This evolved into using entire pages out of my composition notebooks to sketch. Sometimes I would doodle a portrait of my teacher and they would catch me in the act,. They would call me up after class and instead of scolding me, ask if they could keep the drawing. I always obliged. I wanted to write about how my experience has taught me why sketchbooks are important.
Eventually I would dedicate an entire composition notebook to just sketching. This proved to be inefficient, since these sketches were obscured by lines meant for writing. I wanted to keep doodling in my notebooks while still being able to take proper notes for my classes. While the drawings seemed like a distraction on the surface, they always stayed thematically relevant to the lesson. They helped me retain the knowledge I would need later on.
When I started enrolling into drawing classes I transitioned from drawing in notebooks to drawing in sketchbooks. I made it a personal goal to fill every page with as many doodles as I could. The paper, always white and usually made of newsprint paper (the worst paper for drawing on!).
I eventually graduated to better sketchbooks - Moleskines, specifically. Using thicker paper (that doesn't bleed when using strong marks) evolved my sketching to a new level. While it was still the free-flowing creative format meant to help hone my craft, the high quality made it harder to commit to creating a line on a new page. Shouldn't this new sketch have perfect drawings since I'm writing into this perfect book? In a way, this made the purpose of sketchbooks for me take a turn - instead of staying loose, I would be more and more afraid to make each mark. To me, this was a step backwards from my goal. I wanted some sort of middle ground - a paper quality that was good enough to work for its purpose, but not high quality enough to make me not want to make any marks.
The best part of a sketchbook is that it's a low pressure way to practice and keep your creativity flowing. They aren't meant be submitted into your portfolio; there is no client expectation to see sketches. They are only meant for you. You can let your creativity go wild, not have to worry about being judged, get into learning something new (for me, it was always practicing and learning anatomy). A sketchbook is the place to explore. You could draw something simple, figure out a new logo, learn how to draw anatomy, draw a fantasy world or a page full of eyeballs. It's your own little universe and you're fully in control. Sketchbooks are important because they give you a safe space to practice your craft.
For the last few years I haven't been doing as good of a job of keeping a sketchbook. I got an iPad and started sketching in procreate. As much as of a tech nerd that I am, as much as I wanted this solution to become my end-all way to practice drawing, there was still something missing - in the end, drawing on pen and paper is the best solution overall. With an app, sure your limits are endless, you only need one drawing utensil to create any kind of mark you want, but there's still that tiny gap - as well as a frictionless surface - that's just not the same as pencil to paper.
Sketchrite Sketchbooks are the best of both worlds because they allow you to keep notes in a structured way, draw the way you want, and control the way you learn. I've personally always wanted to be able to marry my ideas with writing in a way that allows me to keep things structured and organized on one side while free-form on the other. That's why Sketchbooks are important - they are a way to record your ideas.