One of the things that High School tried to teach me was note taking skills. It didn’t really take until I got to college and even then I didn’t have a good system until around late sophomore year. I ended up only carrying a notepad of quadrille paper (three hole punched) to classes, taking all my notes and doing up my work and then filing it in 3 ring binders for later referral. That way I didn’t have to haul around a bunch of different binders or notebooks for my various classes.
I’ve gotten away from that system now. I only have two notebooks, one for personal stuff and one for work. My work notebook contains a lot of phone logs and records of conversation, plus lists of things to do. Very occasionally will it have sketches or numbers that document engineering work. That mostly is handled through the various software that I work with, however there is nothing quite like a hand sketched map with notes and annotations.
My personal notebook contains a lot of more notish stuff; much more like a journal than a logbook. In this notebook I currently have the layouts of two different gaming campaigns (one D&D from a while ago and one GURPS), the beginnings of my recording of my toothpick bridge building and some construction sketches for stuff around the house (it’s very early into the notebook’s life).
My current two-notebook system dovetails nicely with the modified GTD setup that I use. I go back through the notebooks at the end of the week and see if there are any outstanding “to do” items that need to be encapsulated in my system. It also lets me see what it was I did that week; I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s arrive at Friday afternoon and wondered what the heck it was that occupied all my time.
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