Life Contained's Personal Productivity Blog

How to Organize Notes

  

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We all need various systems to keep and maintain our personal productivity.

• A method for tracking our contacts and the interactions we have with them
• An approach for storing and honoring our appointments
• A reliable place to house reference, archive and support material
• A technique for capturing and completing tasks and storing ideas
  
• And a place to collect our notes from meetings, phone conversations, etc.
  

This post is all about notes. A simple way to organize notes is to

• Buy a single notebook you love dearly

• Chicago bookstores, stationery places and museum shops are terrific sources for specialized notebooks
• Size can be a critical factor to adoption, considering not only the notebook footprint when closed, but also when open
  
• Are you looking for a pocket (3.5 x 5.5), junior (5.5 x 8.5) or large full sheet (8.5 x 11) sizes?
• Is having the notebook lay completely flat a requirement?
  

• Select a complimentary pen/pens you enjoy using

• I'm a big fan of using any color other than black so the notes feel a little less like work
  

• Consider what rules you want to apply to your notebook…for instance,

• What components should each entry contain?
• Name(s)
• Topic
• Date
• Where do actions live?
• Within body & marked
• In margins
• Outside of notebook
• What shorthand will you use to denote certain items?
• circle actions not done
• X actions completed/captured
• / strike areas where review no longer needed
• * important information
  

• Take it everywhere you go

• Page through your notebook @ least once per week to uncover undocumented tasks

When I'm playing organizing coach, I've found a direct correlation between people loving their notebook and people using their notebook, so I've been on a search or two for something special. I want to point out some of those finds in case their handsomeness can help you get and feel more organized.

• Circa notebooks are the offspring of a binder and a notebook; they are a superb choice when you need to incorporate reference papers, divide, add to, & possibly re-order pages (yes you can re-order pages with ease!)
  

• Action Day Notebooks are another good choice, as they are beautiful & offer structure including an index; the meeting & idea notebooks in particular are worth investigating

• A quick search on SeeJaneWork will faithfully result in a feminine notebook or two in their ever-changing inventory

• I'm intrigued by these Japanese notebooks with unique dotted lines that beg for good handwriting and drawings; though the notebooks are thin, they just might be this professional organizer's next choice

• Behance, one of the companies I heart so, produces several lovely notebooks, most are better for task management systems, but the dot-grid selections at the bottom of the page are good for organizing notes

• Built with the premise dark lines distract and white lines don't (amen!), Whitelines notebooks are another winner; they feature a gray sheet with white lines as such on the right
  

• Moleskin is a popular choice because they offer a variety of sizes, styles, colors, and their paper is beautiful; I buy the Cahier Large Squared Notebook in Kraft Brown and then typically adorn the cover with pretty paper (you already knew I was a geek, right?!); my several notebooks (an advanced maneuver) are pictured at the end of this post (and, yes, those were my notes @ the top of the post)