Notebook System

I've kept :physical notebooks for over a decade now, I've used various analog task-tracking/planner systems and for the past five years or so I've been working on a project I call the primer. I'll spare you the :origin story and just focus on the method I use now.

Every notebook gets the same setup:

I usually have a few notebooks active at any given time. The division isn't so much topical as it is related to the context in which I would want to look back at something I've written. Right now I've got:

Everything of importance is written into the notebooks. This ensures no writing can get lost without it being very obvious and also ensures that everything can be referenced in a uniform way.

:x story

I started out using the Bullet Journal method but found it didn't suit me.

While I still use something like the bullet journal method of marking tasks, the higher level process is much more in the style of Getting Things Done.

I've also taken some inspiration from the principles of Zettelkasten, but the idea of using loose index cards doesn't appeal to me (except for recipes).

References

References are written shorthand that :links things together. I try to keep the topic of each page atomic so that references point to a :single idea.

here are some examples:

:x single ideas

This is tricky when some 'single ideas' are actually a connection between other ideas, some sort of narrative, or an argument that connects ideas in sequence. If an idea is worth refering to in isolation it gets its own page (and a backlink from the sequence).

:x links

In the messy world of ideas, I've found that organizing things is a struggle.

The idea of tagging generally implies a duality between the task of generating content and categorizing it. One side or the other inevitably gets neglected, and ultimately it's a false duality anyway, since metadata is just data. What happens if you have thoughts on the category as a whole? Is there a privileged index which is somehow special? Pretty soon you'll have :ten thousand kinds of data.

Categories are like tags but worse, since they also enforce an unwarrented heirarchy. Also, because namespaces within two categories are separate, you must always copy the whole path to disambiguate references

I haven't gotten completely away from these problems with this reference system, but it's simple enough to keep using. References are unintrusive as possible. 'Categories' or 'Collections' and even the 'Index' are just pages that are referenced like any other.

Closing Thoughts

This is the core of the system, just a uniform way to number things so they can be referenced, yet I've found it incredibly valuable to look back through my thoughts on occassion. Its simplicity and flexibility are the real strengths.

In the future I'll polish up a few sections of notes to add to the site.

:x TODO

I prefer the Sapphire A5 dot-grid Rhodiarama Soft Cover (~$18) notebook with a black Pilot Metropolitan (~$19) fountain pen and Noodler's Heart of Darkness (~$19) ink.