I am sort of a notebook addict. I love a fresh, empty notebook. I fantasize about doing wonderful, organized, productive things with them. Whenever I'm feeling ambitious I buy a new notebook because clearly that is the first step to success with, um, anything.
Unfortunately my notebook usage habits don't really live up to the daydreams. I tend to grab whichever one is nearest whenever I want to write something. Which means I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 notebooks (or folders full of loose papers, we're counting those too) that, for the most part, contain absolutely no logical combination of content. If I want to find, say, the notes I took on a particular book I read, I have to look through every single one until I find it (assuming I bothered actually noting what book I was reading...which, as I discovered today, I'm not great about. TITLES ARE IMPORTANT. And I have pages upon pages of notes that make absolutely no sense because I didn't label what they were for. They're just random lists of words. But I digress.)
So today I put on my new christmas-present CD (David Byrne & St Vincent...I'm liking it, I think), plopped myself in front of the heater, and went through every notebook in my possession and made little sticky labels for the front telling me WTF is inside them. (The sad part is that I consider this a perfectly enjoyable friday night activity. Self-employment is weird.)
I don't know why I didn't think of that before. If I can actually keep things to the most appropriate notebook (or at least add a label when I use it for something new) I might actually be able to make use of the darn things.
Just to give you an example of my scattershot approach to notebooking, one of them now says:
- Bath & Body Recipes
- Product Reviews
- Terrarium Notes
- House Maintenance To-Do List
- Doomsday Costume Lists
- Knit Idea Sketches
That last one is on probably a solid 3/4 of notebooks :-/ Eep.
But yeah. Not a terrible start to "Get Your Shit Together 2013", considering it's 2012. (Nevermind that "Get Your Shit Together" is my resolution pretty much every year. It turns out that it's an ongoing thing. Like laundry. Never done.)
What I do is that I use those post it note flags. Everything is color coded (book ideas are yellow, knit ideas are red and blog ideas are blue) so I know what flag means what. Plus, I go ahead and just block out pages in my notebooks for each of those three categories.
ReplyDeleteTo do lists? They get jotted down anywhere and every where.
Y'know I totally thought about those, but I don't have that many left and I was too lazy and impatient to go buy more. I'm thinking that flagging the ones with knitting sketches might be good so that at least I can find them all at a moment's notice when I want a new project. I'm tempted to re-draw all the sketches into one place, but I think doing that (or starting to do that and then getting tired halfway) is why I have like 10 separate notebooks of them in the first place.
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