Years back, somewhere around 2004 or so, I lifted from Tinzeroes the idea and practice of carrying around a small notebook, where I'd put everything I'd write. (I haven't always been consistent about this, and have lost a few things over the years that I had scribbled on scrap paper or whatever. Bummer.) As years passed, I started to layer ideation atop that key central thought, not just "put everything in here", but "structure the notebook so it's easy to put things down in it, and find them later, and make the down-put things easy to jog up against one another, which is where ideas come from".1 That is, one wants a system, one wants something working and workable.
Structuring the input requires a bit of attention to the notebook itself. Luckily, I used to do zines, so I have an amazing and incredibly high-tech way of mapping out how a notebook works. Basically, what I do is draw thumbnails of each page, then think about what might go on those pages.
The thumbnails look like so (diagrammatically, anyways: usually I just scribble on the back of an index card).
As I've worked on my notebooks, I've also worked on a few other things, like building good habits, keeping track of what I read and what I watch, making notes as the year grinds on of what HEAVY TUNES I may be particularly wallowing in, etc. So, for these stable projects, it makes some sense to devote specific areas of each notebook to them, after which I have blank pages to fill with what I will (which mainly turns into notes for episodes ofI Don't Even Own a Television: A Podcast About Bad Books, my current main artistic / productive activity, or notes for the renewed blogging activities you have no doubt noticed.
What that ends up looking like is something like this, again, diagrammatically.
This takes a little getting used to. Particularly jarring is that looking at a "spread" requires you to look at a left page and a right page and set the beginning to the left page, where most books start things on the right page. Moving to the specifics:
- Index: I number each page (by hand)2,3. As I fill each page, I mark across the top what generic bucket this page's contents go into: #Reviewiera, #Vim, #IDEOTVPod, etc. Then, on the index, I mark what page I started on and what bucket it was. This is more or less an analog version of Evernote, or a stripped-down, not-that-fussy approach to so-called bullet journaling.
- Habit Grid: every day, I'd like to do certain things: drink water; do pushups; read; drain the world's oceans to kill god; brush my teeth; and so on. A tool I have found useful is to make a list of those things, under a date, and mark them when I do them.
- Workout Log: On the habit grid, I mark a simple X to indicate a workout of one or another kind; on the Workout Log, I note what I did: was it 5BX?, or did I go for a run, or did I do TRX?
- Movie/Book Log: As I finish things, I write them down, with the date. Also shows go here, trips to the ballet, etc. I've recently been logging the Avs games I watch, but that's mostly just so I can shame myself for spending 25 yua a month to watch maybe one Avs game a week. (And as of tonight's 3-6 Columbus debacle, I suspect I will wean myself off this particular habit.)
- HEAVY TUNES Log: As I recognize myself falling for something, I make a quick note of it, or anyway I try to. This is particularly interesting at the end of the year, as I start to work on my HEAVY TUNES of the year, because usually by then I've forgotten like half of what I listened to in any given year. Plus if I do a half-decent job, I get a little bit of insight into my year qua year, like a little diary!
- First Free Page: Helpfully, this is a right-hand page, which keeps the cognitive dissonance (of starting something on a left-hand page) down. From here on to the end of the notebook, I can just use it as normal.
If I fill up one of those original pages I've set aside, I just go to the next blank page or spread and start again there, noting this in the index. This happens a lot when I'm not writing very much. During those times, the notebook is mostly just a set of various breadcrumb trails of long-term projects (the logs, the self-improvement, the sundry, the what have you), punctuated by notes for the podcast (which I record every two weeks).
This is pretty standardized for me now, and pretty polished. Which means, of course, that I am now completely bored with this as a format. I'm finishing the notebook I started January 5, and will do it again in a new Field Notes, but after that, I'm interested in trying something new in some new type of notebook, just for a change. I have a system, it's working, it's workable, but also one wants some novelty, for half the fun of working on a system is tweaking it. Thus I end up rotating new pens in and out, but now even that substantial jolt fails to thrill, and I'm going to need to seek out a new form factor, I fear. (All this, novelty and rotation and craving, I have touched on before.)
Also there are a few substantive reasons to seek improvement: First, the system described above was created and smoothed when I wasn't writing much, and in this system, I am reserving numbers of pages for month-plus spans of time: even in the as-streamlined-as-I-can-get-it version above, I'm reserving 7 out of my 48 pages, which is a lot to lose if I end up filling the other pages before I've filled those 7. (This was a worry, because this notebook was sketched to span 5jan2019 - 7feb2019, but by 27jan, I had only 2 pages left. Luckily (?) I didn't write anything for a few days, so the concern abated a bit, but not wholly. Second, as the year turned, I decided I wanted to knock out a few weekly goals. These will require their own charting system.
For weekly goals, I'm a huge fan of Bram Moolenaar's Vim desktop calendar. (It's how I scheduled Like a Shit Sandwich, and there's just something very congenial about it to me.) But Bram's calendar doesn't fit well in a Field Notes notebook, which makes it harder for me to chart the weekly blog / workout goals I've already identified as important for my 2019.
So what comes next: one more Field Notes, default writing implement my beloved Pentel 205 mechanical pencil. And after that? Something probably 6x9, that far I've gotten. But no farther. Yet.
1 My "notebook" is one instantiation of the idea of maintaining a "file", as described in the great C. Wright Mills book The Sociological Imagination, in the chapter entitled "On Intellectual Craftsmanship", which, n.b. if you use a search engine you can find in the convenient Portable Document Format, an activity I suggest, because it's an interesting, exciting, inspiring read:
[Y]ou must set up a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist's way of saying: keep a journal. Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist's need for systematic reflection demands it.
In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned. In this file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you experiencing as a person. [...]
Under various topics in your file there are ideas, personal notes, excerpts from books, bibliographical items and outlines of projects. It is, I suppose, a matter of arbitrary habit, but I think you will find it well to sort all these items into a master file of 'projects', with many subdivisions. [...]
After making my crude outline I examined my entire file, not only those parts of it that obviously bore on my topic, but also those which seemed to have no relevance whatsoever. Imagination is often successfully invited by putting together hitherto isolated items, by finding unsuspected connections.
2 Yuck, yeah, for certain.
3 Mostly for the past couple years, I have used Field Notes notebooks. Their paper is pretty amazing, the size is good for most shirt pockets, for when it comes to that, and they're only 48 pages long, so the numbering process isn't too onerous. Plus, I was given a million of of them, and I love using them, so it's pretty much hustling from win to win fast and nimble and clean.
NOTE: this chronology is not comprehensive: I carried personal notebooks from probably Grade 7 on through the first couple years after high school; these are where I'd write my poetry, and the place I'd practice free-handing the AC/DC logo. At least one principle established all the way back then has carried through to present: a certain obsessive concern with chronological order. Also back then is when I discovered the problem where you jot something down on a page, but what do you do if you only have one line thus jotted, and no follow-ups emerge, did you just devote an entire page to this!? As so much Natalie Portman might chimeyelp, "CONUNDRUM!"
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