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Comment by Niten | Hacker News Reader

Do you attempt to group your notes by subject and project within the higher-level chronology?

I also keep a paper notebook for software engineering, but I find it less convenient than my old chemistry lab notebooks were. The problem is that in my software engineering job, I must alternate between tasks and meetings many times a day. So either I keep things strictly chronological and have a difficult time maintaining a usable table of contents, or I have a new page for each of the day's projects, at the cost of constantly jumping from page to page and inefficient use of the notebook's space. I've yet to find a happy solution.

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I'm experimenting with a combination of loose sheets of paper in a binder, and re-writing. I tend to favor rewriting to summarize coupled with archiving as I find I rarely actually go back and review the notes otherwise, and rewriting them tends to lead to summarizing and compacting and excising unnecessary information, while I can keep the old pages.

(This is especially relevant for things like task lists, plans etc., where things often change substantially over time, though it's important not to overdo it and "lose" context etc.)

Recently I've tried something similar, using paper notes as a temporary store and every few days rewriting into my wiki and agenda. The process is similar to a GTD inbox that gets processed regularly. Lots of the TODO items can be handled while rewriting(e.g. email Casey about the widgets).

Exactly - I think one of the great benefits of rewriting is that it creates work that makes it pointless to defer small tasks, while it also lets you weed out a lot of things that have become irrelevant since you wrote it first time.

TODO lists in particular, I feel gets stale very quickly and accumulates obsolete info.

Nope, purely chronological. I do a short index in the back, that's as close as I get to subjects.

Thanks, I'll give that a try!

I've used https://www.rekonect.com/ (magnetic notebook & paper) for solving precisely this problem. New page for each project/meeting and then just pull it out and slot it in to the correct spot. Can be done cheaper with a 3 ring binder but cheaper isn't always the goal.

On paper notebooks -- I keep one, too, and I tried subject grouping which always failed for me within a few months.

I now write clearly visible headings and maintain chronological order. I often color code the headings: just underlining or highlighting the title with subject color makes it easy to find. Thid, with chronological order ingeneral, works well for me in lieu of a table of contents. YMMV.

I keep one, too. I don't bother with keeping subjects. I thread them - there are references pointing to different page numbers everywhere - just like computers do.

The way this was approached with paper back in the day was a chronological journal + subject files.

I find that this works for me. I keep the journal in hand-writing form, and subject files digital. This also has the advantage from my perspective of keeping my thought process on an analog medium that is easier to control.

Some type of disc bound notebook might be good, unless of course you require something bound. I like the Arc from Staples.

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