Conquer Your Notebook Chaos – With These Simple Rules

Impose order to locate your ideas with ease.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

If You’re An Idea Machine

Creative people have lots of ideas.

Thoughts ooze out of them like they’ve been squeezed from an infinite tube of mental toothpaste. The ideas come out in the form of drawings, numbers, sketches or words. Architects, accountants, artists, and writers all have their different mediums, but many creative souls jot things down all the time.

• Have you ever been frustrated when you want to follow-up on an idea and then can’t find where you recorded it?
• Have you torn through stacks of notes looking for a fact you needed?
• Have you ever wasted time looking for a draft or sketch that’s essential to a current project?

Yep. Me, too.

Whether you keep your ideas in a file cabinet, a computer, or a notebook, you have to be able to access those ideas when you need them.

I’m a notebook keeper. For YEARS.

I’ve always got at least one or two idea books going simultaneously. I cover both the front and back of pages with random thoughts, quotes, ideas I’ve read about, weird dreams I’ve had, freewriting, story-starts, references to…