93 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
93 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
Tom MacWright
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tom@macwright.com
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Tom MacWright
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• [1]Writing⇠
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• [2]Reading
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• [3]Photos
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• [4]Projects
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• [5]Drawings
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• [6]Micro
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• [7]About
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Paper notes
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From 2006 to 2016, I wanted to be the kind of person who carried a paper
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notebook around. I bought nice notebooks and consistently got halfway through
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each one before abandoning it and giving up again.
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In 2016, everything changed all at once. Every month since I’ve finished a
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paper journal. Here’s what I changed and the flaws that I discovered in my
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previous attempts.
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Time not topics
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Paper notes are append-only: treat them as such. The unlimited flexibility of
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computer note-taking gave me warped expectations of paper notes, and early in
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my journey I’d try to maintain notebooks about certain subjects. I tried to
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keep notes about a certain book in one contiguous section, add a table of
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contents at the beginning, and stay organized.
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Organizing paper notes like digital notes is a fool’s errand. The only
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organization strategy that I’ve found that works is this one.
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The only consistent structure is time. Notes go forward in time. You write the
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date span of notebooks on the cover, and the date of notes on the pages, and
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keep the notebooks in order. Try to keep all notes from a certain point in time
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in the same notebook.
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Summarize topics when you finish notebooks, never when you start. Add a list of
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topics to the front cover (inside or outside), and then after a year, summarize
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the topics from all notebooks in another notebook.
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Simplicity not heaviness
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Durability, portability, and capacity are part of the same continuum. An
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80-page notebook will probably need a rigid cover, like the kind on a Moleskine
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or Leuchtturm notebook. That’s the kind that I tried using for a long time – I
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was hesitant to sacrifice the fanciness of that for something that was
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pocketable. I was completely wrong about that: when I finally switched to Field
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Notes, I understood the other, personally better corner of the space. The small
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notebooks are delicate, and start breaking down after a month being carried
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around in a pocket or a backpack, but – at 48 pages long, by the end of that
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month, you’re about finished using it anyway.
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Note box
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Taking notes is useless without a place to put them when you’re done.
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Continuing on the theme of Field Notes fandom, I bought their ‘Archival Wooden
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Box’, a wildly overpriced but perfectly-sized… box… made to hold finished
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notes. Key to this strategy is that your notebooks are precisely the same size,
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so that they line up neatly and if you mark a corner of the notebook with its
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start & end date (as I do), that corner will fall in the same place for each
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notebook in the stack. This also gives you a place to add structure with dated
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& labeled dividers, so it’s easier to hunt down a specific notebook later on.
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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I also take digital notes: [8]Day One as a digital journal, and [9]The Archive
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for work-related or reference notes. Like with [10]todo lists, I suspect those
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applications will change and be replaced over time, but thankfully as I’ve
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started to understand my own habits and preferences, that change has slowed.
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January 2, 2019 [11]Tom MacWright ([12]@tmcw, [13]@tmcw@mastodon.social)
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References:
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[1] https://macwright.com/
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[2] https://macwright.com/reading/
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[3] https://macwright.com/photos/
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[4] https://macwright.com/projects/
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[5] https://macwright.com/drawings/
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[6] https://macwright.com/micro/
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[7] https://macwright.com/about/
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[8] https://dayoneapp.com/
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[9] https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/
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[10] https://macwright.com/2015/09/10/todo
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[11] https://macwright.com/about/
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[12] https://twitter.com/intent/follow?screen_name=tmcw&user_id=1458271
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[13] https://mastodon.social/@tmcw
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