26 Years, 85 Notebooks | Hacker News Reader

26 Years, 85 Notebooks

designobserver.com

53 pointsdanw16 comments

I have tried to keep notebooks, but I always end up filling them with random doodles. I will randomly start doodling on a page and try to stop, but I can't. Seeing a page with random drawings compels me to draw even more. My notebooks end up being like illuminated manuscripts, which looks unprofessional compared to the crisp, clean notebooks of my fellow engineers.

I guess it's a nervous habit.

I have a similar problem. I had this brilliant idea that I would keep a collection of my thoughts in a Moleskine notebook. I bought the standard pocket size notebook and a pen set.

To make a long and boring story short, I wasted $15 on the notebook because I've yet to use it for something other than collecting dust. I'm just not a pen and paper type of person.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

My notebooks do similar things. My trick to keeping it organized and "professional" is to skip a page and summarize your doodles. It's like an index to your brain.

I'm up to about a dozen full notebooks. I've settled in on the Eureka Lab Books, gridded, of course. Now that I've discovered jetpens.com, I can get really nice micro-fine point gel pens, so they look great. When someone new drops by my office the notebooks are noticed right away.

I don't seem to have enough discipline these days to fill in the TOC, or have important events countersigned. I do manage to fill the pages and date 'em, which does come in handy in patent depositions.

Biggest downside is the lack of backup and no way to do a text search. I'm too lazy to scan and OCR, but maybe someday!

I'm with you. I still do the TOC, but often it's retrospectively (relaxing in the evening with not much going on, paging through and indexing). I prefer gridded, but don't want to fork over the extra $ so I'm with regular spiral notebooks now. Separate ones for separate endeavors.

Buckminster Fuller kept an exhaustive journal from 1920 until he died. He called it the Dymaxion Chronofile. You can read more about it here: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/fuller/about.html

Granted, not as tidy as 85 notebooks, but I read he kept it as a "scrapbook" and documented his life every 15 minutes.

Someone named Robert Shields documented every 5 minutes of his life for 25 years... The nutbar typed 37.5 million words:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Shields_(diarist)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/us/29shields.html?_r=2&...

I feel a bit saddened by this since my life's work will likely fit on a USB drive. There's something to be said for not going all-digital.

It's very satisfying working with pen and paper at times. I try to keep notebooks of ideas and projects and am marginally successful at it, but this guy was dedicated. It's really cool to be able to see your work like that.

I tried keeping a notebook once. Then I wanted to Ctrl+F...

"Screw this."

Well I once kept a notebook (I called it "White Noise Log") in which I recorded all the dilbertian stuff that went on in the company I was working for at the time, along with some supporting doodles and cartoons, all indexed by date and time. I get a good laugh out of it once in a while.

I know the feeling. I keep a running jargon.txt file that I use to capture marketing junk I hear at meetings, e.g.

  liase with
  leverage
  common voice
  knowledge base
  proliferate

I was half thinking to make a website so other people trapped in meetings could contribute their own jargon. Sort of a social bored at meetings spot.

I love writing on notebooks. But I have to guard them with my life as it is not easy to make backups. Any ideas?

Photocopier or scanner, but it's a real pain.

You can now take photos of documents with a digital camera and the current high resolutions.

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