Organize Your Notebook
With nothing but a pen.
Carrying a notebook and a pen increases productivity. But how do you organize it?
I’ve owned a couple Moleskine notebooks I used for everything and nothing, and all of them were an incredible mess. They would contain class notes, drawing and sketches, algorithms and diagrams, and almost anything you can think of. Trying to find something specific requires looking at every page; talk about efficient search algorithms.
One of the item in the welcome package Google sends to Google Summer of Code students is a notebook, and as I am starting a new one, I figured I should come up with a proper way to organize it. Needless to say, I am already failing pretty badly. There are a bunch of tutorials and articles that undertook this task, but some of them require multiple pen and stickers. Let’s come up with a strategy to organize a notebook with nothing but a pen, to let notebooks owners keep it as portable as possible.
Tentative Advice #1: start each topic* with the date and separate them by a blank line.
I’ve noticed that keeping track of the date is usually most helpful when reading a notebook a long time after it’s been used. The blank line helps separating the different topics.
Tentative Advice #2: dedicating entire pages to a topic
If you know you’re going to need a considerable amount of space for a specific topic and want to avoid having it spread over several pages separated by other topics, you can estimate that amount and leave some blank space to finish your topic. Better save more space than not enough, because you can always fill the unused space with beautiful sketches, while not saving enough space forces you to break apart your topic.
Tentative Advice #3: number your pages
It will let you keep a Table of Content at the beginning or end of your notebook and if you know how many pages your notebook has, it will give you a quantitative idea of how much space left you have.
Tentative Advice #4: keep a Table of Content
Searching through your notebook will still take linear time, but searching through a list on a page takes less effort than flipping through a book. Whether you should keep it at the beginning or the end of your notebook is up to you, but keeping it at the end and writing it backward gives you the possibility to keep its size flexible.
For short-term purposes, a chronological ToC seems most logical.
For long-term archiving, you can save some space at the beginning or end of your notebook and sort your chronological ToC alphabetically (good luck with that) when your notebook is full.
I am not a very organized person and I’m sure most of you writers have better organization tips than these. Please share them as notes and I’ll add them to this list!
*a topic refers to a block of content treating a single subject
