Interesting, and that sort of jives with the reason I'm a bit put off by the idea - I think I'd find it too easy to ignore the lines because they're so much less visible than normal gridlines.
I'll keep this link though, and if I ever have a reason to use lined physical paper again I'll buy something from them and give it a try, because I am intrigued by the idea, maybe my impression is wrong.
Moleskine is expensive for what it is: high price, name with reputation, medium-quality paper and binding. If you're happy with the quality, you can get the same for less money by going with whatever store-brand equivalent you can find, in my opinion.
Where I live, Moleskines are indeed ridiculously expensive, but every other available option has tissue-thin paper and heavy black lines which obscure whatever I'm writing/doodling.
Bar one: Whitelines, which have very light grey pages with white lines. But they're spiral wire bound, and I prefer saddle stiched.
All of the non-Moleskines have square corners which are a design antifeature.
The biggest thing going for Moleskine (which is what I used when I kept paper notebooks) is availability and consistency. They are widely available and you always know what you’re going to get. It may not be the next, but was certainly more than adequate for my needs. And then I didn’t need to tryout half a dozen other options.
I’m now trying out the Remarkable tablet, which has a lot of the advantages of paper, but it’s not quite there yet. It has the paper feel for writing, and isn’t half bad when it comes to “ink quality”.
But where I think all electronic notebooks fail is data locality. Meaning, when I’m searching for a note, in a physical notebook, I know it’s roughly halfway in, on the left page, etc. As I thumb through the pages, I can tell where I am in time. That experience just isn’t quite there in the electronic versions yet.
Yea echoing the other commenter I was very disappointed when I picked up a moleskin and found it felt like lower quality than the cheaper non name brand I got on Amazon.
I think it's possible to get so excited about the tool you're using that you forget its purpose. I have to watch that myself --- and I believe the writer here is teetering on that edge. I try to hold myself to a) having a separate notebook for each purpose for which I'm using one, b) having it marked appropriately for its use, and c) having it be handsome. (I fear I've displayed my failure to restrain myself.)
Some years ago, I was on the margins of notebook enthusiasm, but never went all-in, because I quickly discovered that while I really enjoyed the physicality of notebooks, I came to dislike their pre-digital limitations. I still prefer the free-form capability to mix text and drawing and color and scribbles that pen or pencil on paper offers, but I then scan the finished pages into the computer.
As a result, my favorite notebook is now a pad of A4 paper with a good weight, ruled, and perforated so I can easily detach pages and feed them through the scanner.
I switch between field notes for every day notetaking because they can fit in a pocket and are basically disposable but high quality and are allowed in areas where electronics cannot go, and my remarkable for places where electronics are allowed or for more long form that syncs to my computer / Obsidian.
I have a similar digitization system, however in some cases typing is just easier.
For example when taking meeting notes that will become minutes, I’d much rather type. My notes from a meeting for distribution aren’t my own individual thoughts so this is primarily transcription. Writing is far too slow to keep up with discussion and it needs to be digitized or typed up later. There would be benefit to learning shorthand but I’d still have the digitization hurdle.
If it’s an online call another more modern option is recording the meeting and adding automatic transcription, but I haven’t seen this done often.
For scanning notes with the iPhone I saw a kickstarter for a notebook that is the same aspect ratio as the iPhone screen and has a black border. I thought about making my own throwaway version of this by just cutting down A4 paper and putting a couple paper clips through card stock.
Exactly so. I love the idea of scribbling in a leather-bound gilt edge notebook, like a modern Thucydides. I can't find anything later without flipping through, and I hear people keep index in the notebook! Ain't nobody got time for that. I throw all my notes into a text file, check them into git and grep away! For impromptu notes I still use my National Brand Computational Notebook with grid ruled green sheets, roommy real estate, thick paper, page number, $12 each.
I'm partial to Rhodia No 16 dotPad. It takes ink well, without much bleed through the page or spread across the page. For reference, I use a variety of inks and fountain pens, with Pelikan-4001 and Waterman-graduate-allure being my go-to combination.
I prefer the dots to either grids or lines, because they provide enough guidance without getting in the way.
The spiral binding is convenient, and the back cover is stiff enough to use on a lap.
The pages are not numbered, but I do that myself, with yyyy-mm-dd and a title at the top-right of any new set of notes, and circled numbers 1, 2, ..., on successive pages of that topic.
Not that anybody asked... what is it about note-taking that makes people yammer so?
Same here. After trying many types of notebooks and paper, I find the Rhodia dotpad paper to be very pleasant, and it works well with the other tools I like to write with:
2013-02-27 is the current standard, but more so as a result of "this is how we've done things" and not "this is the best way to do it". The hyphens make the notation ambiguous with substraction, therefore in programming languages dates are quoted and represented as strings, which in turn get passed to a parsing function.
The obvious alternative is to use an unambigous notation from the list such as dot notation. 2022.03.27 doesn't collide with floating point number notation, nor with ipv4 notation, nor any arithmetic operation and thus can be used to represent dates in programming languages directly - without quotation and without the need to stringly type them.
It's one of those many examples where "best practices" really only mean "current common practices".
Dots don't allow it not being a full date though, e.g. the month 2022.04 is indistinguishable from the number two thousand and twenty-two point zero four.
When writing on paper I personally like something like "Saturday 30th of April 2022", or some abbreviation of it, in addition to global context it also adds some weekly context that can be nice when trying to remember when you did something.
And some seasonal context from the month, like 06 doesn't bring many associations to my head, June tells me it was probably hot, and the type of atmosphere and activities going on around at the time.
> The hyphens make the notation ambiguous with substraction
In Lisp they wouldn’t, and in statically typed languages it probably wouldn’t be a problem either, as the compiler would tell you that you can’t use a date as a number.
On the other hand, the need for date literals in program code is rare enough that it likely doesn’t warrant introducing a dedicated syntactic form.
In Lisp, operators and function calls are all prefix, so this would be subtraction: (- 10 5) I think (it's been awhile lol). A hyphen anywhere else wouldn't be confused with subtraction. This is just a guess though.
> 2013-02-27 is the current standard, but more so as a result of "this is how we've done things" and not "this is the best way to do it".
That may be, but it's also codified as ISO 8601 [1], so that's a strong reason not to use a non-standardized format.
> The hyphens make the notation ambiguous with substraction, therefore in programming languages dates are quoted and represented as strings
If you're hard-coding a date in code, you have other choices. You can use a UNIX timestamp (uint). You can create a Date object directly, eg:
Date Created = new Date(2022, 04, 30);
I don't know of any languages where Date is a primitive type (are there any?) so having a literal notation - which I think is what you're advocating - doesn't really make sense: there has to be an allocation or conversion anyway. This is in contrast to actual primitive types like float, int, char, etc where most languages do have a literal way to express those in source.
If you're reading a date from user configuration, you need to parse at some point anyway. Otherwise, store dates as serialized date objects and in your database as date-type columns (or as UNIX timestamps, if date isn't an available type).
Float is an imprecise transformation from text to a binary fixed size representation. I don't see how floats would be considered a native type while datetime types not.
Having it non-native while the option exists seems to be like a voluntary torture. But it makes sense considering community bubbles surrounding programming languages and not bridging the gaps between them. What can be a 100 lines of Java can be expressed in 20 of Python can be expressed in 5 lines of a data language.
The units get smaller from let to right, which is what you expect. The American system doing things like month/day/year is unintuitive and causes ambiguity, but if it was done in an intuitive way in the first place (day/month/year), there would be none.
I really like using notebooks and writing my thoughts, helps with ADHD and with grounding when I'm in full panic mode. I feel I think more clearly and structured when my thinking is paired with writing.
I also _love_ good quality notebooks but I feel guilty when using them for everyday scribbles like meeting notes. It feels like sacrilege.
I use notebooks for thinking at work but I've noticed I'm only ever really making progress when talking to a colleague. Now that helps untangle thoughts and get from ideas into an actionable plan. Even the notebook doesn't really help me with that.
I dedicate the very last page of all my work notebooks - Mnemosyne N195As, so very nice indeed - entirely to doodles and scribbles, both because with fountain pens sometimes you need a sheet like that, and because sometimes a person needs a sheet like that.
If I'm doodling in a work notebook, that's an indication that I need to either re-engage with the meeting or leave it, and perhaps also have a quiet word afterward to whoever was ostensibly running it. (Or I'm testing a freshly reinked or swabbed pen.)
If your fountain pen blots, you may want to consider a different ink. Western pens have larger nibs and feeds than Japanese, so tend to be very wet when filled with thinner Japanese inks. Contrapositively, Western inks tend to flow poorly in Japanese pens, especially those with smaller nib sizes. A shame; I miss my J. Herbin violet.
It could also be due to rough handling, and probably is if you tend often to find ink on the inside of the cap and the outside of the section, and thence of course on your fingers.
You might also write with too heavy a hand, which tends to splay the tines of the nib; this is especially likely if you tend to see lines that don't properly fill with ink, since too wide a space between the tines will fail to sustain the capillary action that draws ink smoothly from the feed to the tip, and will also make dripping more likely since the flow of ink from the feed is no longer properly controlled. Gold nibs are especially vulnerable here; if you're new to fountain pens, consider switching for a while to a steel nib, which will feel somewhat rougher but write just as well and be much more forgiving of mistakes as you learn how correctly to use this type of tool.
If none of these apply, then perhaps the pen just needs to be flushed and cleaned, which is something worth doing with a fountain pen after every few fills at most, or between different inks and especially different brands. This merits concern not just for color mixing reasons, but also because some inks when mixed exhibit chemical behaviors that can lead to clogging. And just generally, a well-maintained pen will write much more neatly and reliably than one that hasn't been looked after in a while.
Your meeting notes don't have to be scribbles. Learn to take quick and accurate notes while listening and talking, and they become an enormously valuable reference.
I'm not being purely metaphorical in this use of "valuable", either. Last year this skill made me about twenty-four thousand dollars.
No, but I'm sure you can think of any number of situations in which it's of material benefit to have the best memory in the conversation. Taking good notes means not having to rely for specifics on the squishy stuff between your ears.
The author misses Rite in the Rain, which makes my favorite notebooks, they're printed with heavy, acid-free, waterproof paper. Pairs great with a Fisher pen cartridge (waterproof, pressurized ink made for writing in almost any condition).
As for dating, I like to do something a little different; it's still ISO8601 but with a slight twist. Each page top has the date in basic form (eg, 20220430) and each note on that page has a timestamp to describe that note and a title for the first line (eg: "T1234 Groceries"), followed by the note body below, a little like a git commit message. This allows me to link between notes by enclosing the date and time stamp in pointy brackets. To save some ink when linking, I use the date at the top of the page for context. If my page top is dated 20220430, and I want to link to a note from the 23rd at T0631, I write it like <23T0631>. Since the year and month are the same as the context I'm in, I don't bother writing those. I don't use page numbers at all.
Some other notebook habits I have: I like to use the first page for my contact info if anyone finds my notebook (and maybe offer a reward). The next page is for goals I'd like to work toward during the anticipated lifespan of that book. I also like to create a weekly index. When I've filled the notebook, I create an index of index pages on the very last page. If I wait to index the entire thing when the book is filled, I usually don't. Also, I use the last few pages to create monthly calendars. I fill in dates on them with letters (A, B, C...) for an event, which I reference on the back side of the page, either with a short description or a link to the timestamp I wrote down event information on. Finally, after filling a book, I write the range of timestamps that book covers in the spine so I can quickly find notes in the future.
If you just do the date at each page header and timestamp each note to enable linking, your notes will get much easier to deal with. I actually started doing this because I'm fairly undisciplined and generally pretty disorganized.
Two small tips that got my GTD system going on paper:
- Don't worry too much about having a perfect written system, I always was worrying too much about having the perfect system and this meant that I ended up not writing anything down because I hadn't found the perfect place to put it. Don't be afraid of re-writing things, think of re-writing as re-thinking, rather than as having made a mistake that you are correcting. Your system is an organism that evolves with as you keep thinking through the things.
- Nested lists are a nightmare to look at, and add too much context that you don't want. Nested lists are ok for project planning, brainstorming, and thinking. But keep nested lists away from any page that you want to look at often. Better to have 10 separated pages with 10 lists than 1 page with 10 sub-sections. In general try to keep the system as dumbed down as possible, because the point of having a written system is that you can look at it when you don't feel like thinking and the system provides very basic steps for your head to do (like pick one thing to do from here, or remind me of all the people I am waiting for to come back to me with answers, ...)
Thank you for sharing that. I've been testing paper systems with inspiration from GTD for the past few months. I agree that it was much easier when I let go of fearing rewriting. But so far I do find it difficult to not feel overwhelmed with the great number of pages that I've accumulated and often duplicating certain topics when I forgot I already had a page for something. I also wish for better indexing habits to find what I'm looking for. I've contemplated setting a limit on the number pages I accumulate and then when reached entering them into a persistent digital storage (markdown files synced across devices) and then starting over again on paper.
Overall I keep wishing for the notebook to fix my productivity problems and I'm slowly admitting that it is actually something in my internal orientation that needs to shift.
What type of information do you find yourself losing track of? The GTD sections shouldn't be that big even when tracking a huge amount of projects, like if you had for example 100 projects and 100 next actions that you are actively working on. Each of those shouldn't take much space, maybe 1-2 lines on a notebook for each one project and each task, clear outcomes for projects, and a simple actions for next actions, about 20 pages overall? And that's for a huge amount of projects, I've never gotten anywhere near that in active projects, maybe 50-80 projects at times. Those 2 categories, plus a calendar, and a "waiting for" list, are the sections you may be looking at often on your day to day work when following GTD.
Everything else about your "active" projects goes a bit out of scope of what is defined by GTD and should go to "project reference material", like project planning, TODO lists, project structure, notes from meetings, sketches, ... those are kept in a much messier form by me, but I feel like as long as the big picture and hard commitments are clear on the GTD part, it's ok if sometimes I have to "dive down" into a specific project mess to clarify some things. It's just not ok if those 2 are mixed and make looking at your day-to-day GTD sections a nightmare.
I keep my paper GTD system on an A5 ring binder, something like a Filofax but a cheaper brand, with 1 plastic divider for each 4 (projects, next actions, waiting for, someday/maybe) of the 5 GTD hard-categories [1], with each section having about 1-5 pages. The calendar goes to Google Calendar just because it's convenient how it auto-adds meeting invitations.
For project reference material I keep an alphabetic index [2] on the same A5 binder for small projects, some dedicated folders or notebooks if the projects are huge, or a directory with files if the projects have some digital material, images, or links, that can't be easily tracked on paper. Those will look very different for each different project so don't really have much of a "system" for it, aside from keeping the hard-landscape tracked on GTD.
It has a sewn binding, lies flat more easily than the larger Confidant II, and is more "disposable" (which the OP mentions being a good thing, though I keep all my notebooks for later reference). It also comes in a variety of sizes, though the "Flagship" size is my go-to. I love the feeling of finishing a notebook, and ones with fewer pages help me get there often. I also find the soft-cover notebooks a bit easier to store than the hardcover ones.
It would be cool to see the author's notes on why they chose their ratings. Their expectations roughly align with some of mine but I don't know if their reasoning is the same. For instance, I love writing on the Rhodia spiral-bound book but the pages tear out way too easily so I've stopped buying them for that reason. I also settled on Lechtturm.
I haven't used all the notebooks, but I am a terrible notetaker. My issue is that too much in my life is digital, so adding physical notebooks is avoided at all costs. The only time I really used them was during job interviews (both as an interviewer and interviewee).
For me, an iPad/Apple Pencil was the solution to writing more regularly. I wonder if OP has tried the digital route?
I pretty much abhor adding any extra analog artifacts to my life, and especially irreplaceable ones.
All my notes are in Obsidian at the moment, and I sometimes go weeks or months without writing anything on paper. I pretty much only use it for things like greeting cards, or for roleplaying games since electronics totally break immersion in a fantasy setting.
So pleased to see the Leuchtturm 1917 dotted grid at the top of this list. It's been my go-to notebook for the last few years. It comes with some nice stickers for labeling so that you can find past notebooks on the shelf. Lots of colors are easily available on Amazon.
The Leuchtturm is my go-to as well for the last few years. I’m also glad they are very easy to source.
I like to have mine around for jotting ideas down and drawing diagrams. I don’t have a system or anything. I think I used to be far more prescriptive about what I put in it but now it’s just a playground for my ideas and that suits me really. I carry around everywhere so it’s ready to be used.
I enjoy taking notes. A colleague sent me this link, so I'll post here to amuse him.
My favorite notebook is the National Brand "Engineering and Science Notebook" - which has become my go-to. [0]
I like to diagram, so having the reverse page be graph paper makes it easier for me. I also prefer spiral bound since they tend to hold up better in travel, but that's purely subjective.
Author didn’t mention Midori notebooks, and they’re by far my favorite. The paper is nice to write on, and the blank covers give space for documenting what it’s for. Pairs great with my favorite pen, my Ohto Horizon.
I am _shocked_ that Midori isn’t more represented in these comments. The lay-flat binding is amazing, the grid is pretty cool, and the indication at the top for the grids is great. Plus the price is about right compared to other premium notebooks.
You miss out on pockets and multiple bookmarks but you can pair it with a Kokuyo systemic notebook cover to cover all the bases.
Yeah, a great pen, sadly AFAIK out-of-production - and the successor (GS01) doesn't have the side release button, which was really nice to fidget with :(
I was hoping to read some comments about digital note-taking devices like the Remarkable or the SuperNote. I've been considering jumping ship to one of those just to save the trees :) SuperNote seems really cool in all the ways it allows you to write and organize your notes.
I used these Leuchtturm1917 A5, dot-grid with fountain pens for years. Still love paper and pen, but have switched almost completely to the Remarkable2 for well over a year now. It's close enough that the infinite-capacity notebook and syncing to cloud are worth the slightly worse than paper experience.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadhttps://www.whitelinespaper.com/product/wirebound-notebooks-...
I'll keep this link though, and if I ever have a reason to use lined physical paper again I'll buy something from them and give it a try, because I am intrigued by the idea, maybe my impression is wrong.
Where I live, Moleskines are indeed ridiculously expensive, but every other available option has tissue-thin paper and heavy black lines which obscure whatever I'm writing/doodling.
Bar one: Whitelines, which have very light grey pages with white lines. But they're spiral wire bound, and I prefer saddle stiched.
All of the non-Moleskines have square corners which are a design antifeature.
I’m now trying out the Remarkable tablet, which has a lot of the advantages of paper, but it’s not quite there yet. It has the paper feel for writing, and isn’t half bad when it comes to “ink quality”.
But where I think all electronic notebooks fail is data locality. Meaning, when I’m searching for a note, in a physical notebook, I know it’s roughly halfway in, on the left page, etc. As I thumb through the pages, I can tell where I am in time. That experience just isn’t quite there in the electronic versions yet.
I like the utilitarian look of the classic Rhodia. And I love writing on them, of course.
I find nerding about with notebooks and fountain pens a nice change compared to work days, when I have to nerding about HPC and text editors.
With years of exploring, I found VS Code to the best for me.
As a result, my favorite notebook is now a pad of A4 paper with a good weight, ruled, and perforated so I can easily detach pages and feed them through the scanner.
Content warning for the following paragraph.
I then destroy the originals.
For example when taking meeting notes that will become minutes, I’d much rather type. My notes from a meeting for distribution aren’t my own individual thoughts so this is primarily transcription. Writing is far too slow to keep up with discussion and it needs to be digitized or typed up later. There would be benefit to learning shorthand but I’d still have the digitization hurdle.
If it’s an online call another more modern option is recording the meeting and adding automatic transcription, but I haven’t seen this done often.
For scanning notes with the iPhone I saw a kickstarter for a notebook that is the same aspect ratio as the iPhone screen and has a black border. I thought about making my own throwaway version of this by just cutting down A4 paper and putting a couple paper clips through card stock.
Exactly so. I love the idea of scribbling in a leather-bound gilt edge notebook, like a modern Thucydides. I can't find anything later without flipping through, and I hear people keep index in the notebook! Ain't nobody got time for that. I throw all my notes into a text file, check them into git and grep away! For impromptu notes I still use my National Brand Computational Notebook with grid ruled green sheets, roommy real estate, thick paper, page number, $12 each.
I prefer the dots to either grids or lines, because they provide enough guidance without getting in the way.
The spiral binding is convenient, and the back cover is stiff enough to use on a lap.
The pages are not numbered, but I do that myself, with yyyy-mm-dd and a title at the top-right of any new set of notes, and circled numbers 1, 2, ..., on successive pages of that topic.
Not that anybody asked... what is it about note-taking that makes people yammer so?
* tactile turn pen (bullet slim w/Pilot G2 0.7mm refill)
* rotring 600 mechanical pencil 0.5mm
* staedtler pigment liner 0.4mm
A blaze orange notebook - they are available from other brands too - is incidentally very easy to find and hard to leave behind.
2013-02-27 is the current standard, but more so as a result of "this is how we've done things" and not "this is the best way to do it". The hyphens make the notation ambiguous with substraction, therefore in programming languages dates are quoted and represented as strings, which in turn get passed to a parsing function.
The obvious alternative is to use an unambigous notation from the list such as dot notation. 2022.03.27 doesn't collide with floating point number notation, nor with ipv4 notation, nor any arithmetic operation and thus can be used to represent dates in programming languages directly - without quotation and without the need to stringly type them.It's one of those many examples where "best practices" really only mean "current common practices".
And some seasonal context from the month, like 06 doesn't bring many associations to my head, June tells me it was probably hot, and the type of atmosphere and activities going on around at the time.
In Lisp they wouldn’t, and in statically typed languages it probably wouldn’t be a problem either, as the compiler would tell you that you can’t use a date as a number.
On the other hand, the need for date literals in program code is rare enough that it likely doesn’t warrant introducing a dedicated syntactic form.
In fairness, they do say it in that order too, so on some level perhaps that really is 'the more relevant' (or natural) to them.
IPv4 addresses in numbers-and-dots notation can contain one, two or three dots.
10.11.12 would mean Nov 12, year 10. Or the IPv4 address you'd perhaps be more tempted to write as 10.11.0.12.
Perhaps we can put the pile of poo emoji to good use?
That may be, but it's also codified as ISO 8601 [1], so that's a strong reason not to use a non-standardized format.
> The hyphens make the notation ambiguous with substraction, therefore in programming languages dates are quoted and represented as strings
If you're hard-coding a date in code, you have other choices. You can use a UNIX timestamp (uint). You can create a Date object directly, eg:
I don't know of any languages where Date is a primitive type (are there any?) so having a literal notation - which I think is what you're advocating - doesn't really make sense: there has to be an allocation or conversion anyway. This is in contrast to actual primitive types like float, int, char, etc where most languages do have a literal way to express those in source.If you're reading a date from user configuration, you need to parse at some point anyway. Otherwise, store dates as serialized date objects and in your database as date-type columns (or as UNIX timestamps, if date isn't an available type).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
https://code.kx.com/q4m3/2_Basic_Data_Types_Atoms/#253-date-...
Float is an imprecise transformation from text to a binary fixed size representation. I don't see how floats would be considered a native type while datetime types not.
Having it non-native while the option exists seems to be like a voluntary torture. But it makes sense considering community bubbles surrounding programming languages and not bridging the gaps between them. What can be a 100 lines of Java can be expressed in 20 of Python can be expressed in 5 lines of a data language.
I also _love_ good quality notebooks but I feel guilty when using them for everyday scribbles like meeting notes. It feels like sacrilege.
If your fountain pen blots, you may want to consider a different ink. Western pens have larger nibs and feeds than Japanese, so tend to be very wet when filled with thinner Japanese inks. Contrapositively, Western inks tend to flow poorly in Japanese pens, especially those with smaller nib sizes. A shame; I miss my J. Herbin violet.
It could also be due to rough handling, and probably is if you tend often to find ink on the inside of the cap and the outside of the section, and thence of course on your fingers.
You might also write with too heavy a hand, which tends to splay the tines of the nib; this is especially likely if you tend to see lines that don't properly fill with ink, since too wide a space between the tines will fail to sustain the capillary action that draws ink smoothly from the feed to the tip, and will also make dripping more likely since the flow of ink from the feed is no longer properly controlled. Gold nibs are especially vulnerable here; if you're new to fountain pens, consider switching for a while to a steel nib, which will feel somewhat rougher but write just as well and be much more forgiving of mistakes as you learn how correctly to use this type of tool.
If none of these apply, then perhaps the pen just needs to be flushed and cleaned, which is something worth doing with a fountain pen after every few fills at most, or between different inks and especially different brands. This merits concern not just for color mixing reasons, but also because some inks when mixed exhibit chemical behaviors that can lead to clogging. And just generally, a well-maintained pen will write much more neatly and reliably than one that hasn't been looked after in a while.
I'm not being purely metaphorical in this use of "valuable", either. Last year this skill made me about twenty-four thousand dollars.
Could you please elaborate?
As for dating, I like to do something a little different; it's still ISO8601 but with a slight twist. Each page top has the date in basic form (eg, 20220430) and each note on that page has a timestamp to describe that note and a title for the first line (eg: "T1234 Groceries"), followed by the note body below, a little like a git commit message. This allows me to link between notes by enclosing the date and time stamp in pointy brackets. To save some ink when linking, I use the date at the top of the page for context. If my page top is dated 20220430, and I want to link to a note from the 23rd at T0631, I write it like <23T0631>. Since the year and month are the same as the context I'm in, I don't bother writing those. I don't use page numbers at all.
Some other notebook habits I have: I like to use the first page for my contact info if anyone finds my notebook (and maybe offer a reward). The next page is for goals I'd like to work toward during the anticipated lifespan of that book. I also like to create a weekly index. When I've filled the notebook, I create an index of index pages on the very last page. If I wait to index the entire thing when the book is filled, I usually don't. Also, I use the last few pages to create monthly calendars. I fill in dates on them with letters (A, B, C...) for an event, which I reference on the back side of the page, either with a short description or a link to the timestamp I wrote down event information on. Finally, after filling a book, I write the range of timestamps that book covers in the spine so I can quickly find notes in the future.
My only complaint about RITR is that the feel of the paper seems a bit odd.
- Don't worry too much about having a perfect written system, I always was worrying too much about having the perfect system and this meant that I ended up not writing anything down because I hadn't found the perfect place to put it. Don't be afraid of re-writing things, think of re-writing as re-thinking, rather than as having made a mistake that you are correcting. Your system is an organism that evolves with as you keep thinking through the things.
- Nested lists are a nightmare to look at, and add too much context that you don't want. Nested lists are ok for project planning, brainstorming, and thinking. But keep nested lists away from any page that you want to look at often. Better to have 10 separated pages with 10 lists than 1 page with 10 sub-sections. In general try to keep the system as dumbed down as possible, because the point of having a written system is that you can look at it when you don't feel like thinking and the system provides very basic steps for your head to do (like pick one thing to do from here, or remind me of all the people I am waiting for to come back to me with answers, ...)
Overall I keep wishing for the notebook to fix my productivity problems and I'm slowly admitting that it is actually something in my internal orientation that needs to shift.
Everything else about your "active" projects goes a bit out of scope of what is defined by GTD and should go to "project reference material", like project planning, TODO lists, project structure, notes from meetings, sketches, ... those are kept in a much messier form by me, but I feel like as long as the big picture and hard commitments are clear on the GTD part, it's ok if sometimes I have to "dive down" into a specific project mess to clarify some things. It's just not ok if those 2 are mixed and make looking at your day-to-day GTD sections a nightmare.
I keep my paper GTD system on an A5 ring binder, something like a Filofax but a cheaper brand, with 1 plastic divider for each 4 (projects, next actions, waiting for, someday/maybe) of the 5 GTD hard-categories [1], with each section having about 1-5 pages. The calendar goes to Google Calendar just because it's convenient how it auto-adds meeting invitations.
For project reference material I keep an alphabetic index [2] on the same A5 binder for small projects, some dedicated folders or notebooks if the projects are huge, or a directory with files if the projects have some digital material, images, or links, that can't be easily tracked on paper. Those will look very different for each different project so don't really have much of a "system" for it, aside from keeping the hard-landscape tracked on GTD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done#/media/Fil...
[2] https://appelboom.com/filofax-refill-personal-cream-alphabet...
It has a sewn binding, lies flat more easily than the larger Confidant II, and is more "disposable" (which the OP mentions being a good thing, though I keep all my notebooks for later reference). It also comes in a variety of sizes, though the "Flagship" size is my go-to. I love the feeling of finishing a notebook, and ones with fewer pages help me get there often. I also find the soft-cover notebooks a bit easier to store than the hardcover ones.
For me, an iPad/Apple Pencil was the solution to writing more regularly. I wonder if OP has tried the digital route?
All my notes are in Obsidian at the moment, and I sometimes go weeks or months without writing anything on paper. I pretty much only use it for things like greeting cards, or for roleplaying games since electronics totally break immersion in a fantasy setting.
I wrap my latest notebook in a Coal Creek leather cover to look all fancy (and hold my phone and pen). https://www.coalcreekleather.com/collections/a5
I like to have mine around for jotting ideas down and drawing diagrams. I don’t have a system or anything. I think I used to be far more prescriptive about what I put in it but now it’s just a playground for my ideas and that suits me really. I carry around everywhere so it’s ready to be used.
My favorite notebook is the National Brand "Engineering and Science Notebook" - which has become my go-to. [0]
I like to diagram, so having the reverse page be graph paper makes it easier for me. I also prefer spiral bound since they tend to hold up better in travel, but that's purely subjective.
[0] - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E69X52
https://andregarzia.com/2022/01/got-a-passportsize-traveller...
You miss out on pockets and multiple bookmarks but you can pair it with a Kokuyo systemic notebook cover to cover all the bases.
Their list seems like all the notebooks they found when searching "notebook" on amazon lol.
responding to your comment specifically because Midori is the best :)
Yeah, a great pen, sadly AFAIK out-of-production - and the successor (GS01) doesn't have the side release button, which was really nice to fidget with :(
click clack
As a bonus, their collections of notebooks range from 75-99% recycled.
https://www.badlymadebooks.com/