https://macwright.com/2019/01/02/paper-notes.html

Tom MacWright

tom@macwright.com

Tom MacWright

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Paper notes

From 2006 to 2016, I wanted to be the kind of person who carried a
paper notebook around. I bought nice notebooks and consistently got
halfway through each one before abandoning it and giving up again.

In 2016, everything changed all at once. Every month since I've
finished a paper journal. Here's what I changed and the flaws that I
discovered in my previous attempts.

Time not topics

Paper notes are append-only: treat them as such. The unlimited
flexibility of computer note-taking gave me warped expectations of
paper notes, and early in my journey I'd try to maintain notebooks
about certain subjects. I tried to keep notes about a certain book in
one contiguous section, add a table of contents at the beginning, and
stay organized.

Organizing paper notes like digital notes is a fool's errand. The
only organization strategy that I've found that works is this one.

The only consistent structure is time. Notes go forward in time. You
write the date span of notebooks on the cover, and the date of notes
on the pages, and keep the notebooks in order. Try to keep all notes
from a certain point in time in the same notebook.

Summarize topics when you finish notebooks, never when you start. Add
a list of topics to the front cover (inside or outside), and then
after a year, summarize the topics from all notebooks in another
notebook.

Simplicity not heaviness

Durability, portability, and capacity are part of the same continuum.
An 80-page notebook will probably need a rigid cover, like the kind
on a Moleskine or Leuchtturm notebook. That's the kind that I tried
using for a long time - I was hesitant to sacrifice the fanciness of
that for something that was pocketable. I was completely wrong about
that: when I finally switched to Field Notes, I understood the other,
personally better corner of the space. The small notebooks are
delicate, and start breaking down after a month being carried around
in a pocket or a backpack, but - at 48 pages long, by the end of that
month, you're about finished using it anyway.

Note box

Taking notes is useless without a place to put them when you're done.
Continuing on the theme of Field Notes fandom, I bought their
'Archival Wooden Box', a wildly overpriced but perfectly-sized...
box... made to hold finished notes. Key to this strategy is that your
notebooks are precisely the same size, so that they line up neatly
and if you mark a corner of the notebook with its start & end date
(as I do), that corner will fall in the same place for each notebook
in the stack. This also gives you a place to add structure with dated
& labeled dividers, so it's easier to hunt down a specific notebook
later on.

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I also take digital notes: Day One as a digital journal, and The
Archive for work-related or reference notes. Like with todo lists, I
suspect those applications will change and be replaced over time, but
thankfully as I've started to understand my own habits and
preferences, that change has slowed.

January 2, 2019  @tmcw

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