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lil  ·  3612 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How do you take notes?

    How many notebooks do you write a year?

Life, hubski, blogging, working, interfere with my notebook-keeping. During my time of greatest personal growth (end of marriage, new life, new relationships), I filled a thick notebook every month with content, not collage. Now it includes collage (for example, on the first page of my current notebook there is a sketch of a dog that wasoxygen sent me in June 2014 when that journal starts. While I might be working on one journal since June, I've also filled 4 or 5 teeny tiny notebooks.

I might also print up something that I sent in an email and stick it in the journal. I'd like to print out occasional comments on hubski and put them in the journal as well (note to self: add this to goals list). Lots to do.

In any event, the system hopes to be linear but often is chaos. Yet somehow I manage to function.

Question no-cheating: What is your GOAL in keeping notebooks. To organize? to remember? to use as source material for creation? to solve problems?

Leonardo da Vinci kept many notebooks. They are all on line now, brought to us by Project Gutenberg.

HINTS for people keeping notes in notebooks and not digitally:

1. date fucking everything.

2. don't use abbreviations that you will forget in 20 years.

In one notebook entry from long ago, I was writing randomly about sexual experiences and I mentioned having sex with t. d. & h. Several years later, I went back to that notebook for some reason and I had no idea what I was talking about. Who was t., d. and h? I didn't remember having sex with t. d. and h. and I couldn't find any other references to them. I drove myself crazy wondering what I had written about.

Then I realized it was a reference to the expression "Tom, Dick, and Harry" - as wikipedia calls it "a placeholder for multiple unspecified people."