I have tried to keep notebooks, but I always end up filling them with random doodles. I will randomly start doodling on a page and try to stop, but I can't. Seeing a page with random drawings compels me to draw even more. My notebooks end up being like illuminated manuscripts, which looks unprofessional compared to the crisp, clean notebooks of my fellow engineers.
I have a similar problem. I had this brilliant idea that I would keep a collection of my thoughts in a Moleskine notebook. I bought the standard pocket size notebook and a pen set.
To make a long and boring story short, I wasted $15 on the notebook because I've yet to use it for something other than collecting dust. I'm just not a pen and paper type of person.
My notebooks do similar things. My trick to keeping it organized and "professional" is to skip a page and summarize your doodles. It's like an index to your brain.
It's very satisfying working with pen and paper at times. I try to keep notebooks of ideas and projects and am marginally successful at it, but this guy was dedicated. It's really cool to be able to see your work like that.
I'm up to about a dozen full notebooks. I've settled in on the Eureka Lab Books, gridded, of course. Now that I've discovered jetpens.com, I can get really nice micro-fine point gel pens, so they look great. When someone new drops by my office the notebooks are noticed right away.
I don't seem to have enough discipline these days to fill in the TOC, or have important events countersigned. I do manage to fill the pages and date 'em, which does come in handy in patent depositions.
Biggest downside is the lack of backup and no way to do a text search. I'm too lazy to scan and OCR, but maybe someday!
I'm with you. I still do the TOC, but often it's retrospectively (relaxing in the evening with not much going on, paging through and indexing). I prefer gridded, but don't want to fork over the extra $ so I'm with regular spiral notebooks now. Separate ones for separate endeavors.
Well I once kept a notebook (I called it "White Noise Log") in which I recorded all the dilbertian stuff that went on in the company I was working for at the time, along with some supporting doodles and cartoons, all indexed by date and time. I get a good laugh out of it once in a while.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 47.4 ms ] threadI guess it's a nervous habit.
To make a long and boring story short, I wasted $15 on the notebook because I've yet to use it for something other than collecting dust. I'm just not a pen and paper type of person.
Granted, not as tidy as 85 notebooks, but I read he kept it as a "scrapbook" and documented his life every 15 minutes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Shields_(diarist)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/us/29shields.html?_r=2&...
"Screw this."
I don't seem to have enough discipline these days to fill in the TOC, or have important events countersigned. I do manage to fill the pages and date 'em, which does come in handy in patent depositions.
Biggest downside is the lack of backup and no way to do a text search. I'm too lazy to scan and OCR, but maybe someday!