This notebook is one of the gems of my collection because I’ve never seen anything else quite like it. I must have bought this in the early 80s, at one of the various five-and-ten stores in my area. It’s just a generic mass-produced notebook. But this cover just fascinates me! There is something so weird and trippy about the image, which seems to be a collage of architectural photographs around the photo of a thinking man. Whose idea was it to put this image on the cover of a mass-produced notebook? Other notebooks on the market at this time had plain colored covers, or cutesy images or sunsets or rainbows or Snoopy. The story I’ve invented for myself is that the fuddy-duddy old owner of a printing company was trying to pass on the family business to the next generation and his acid-dropping hippy son begrudgingly involved himself by designing some notebook covers that would look a bit more mod and happening than their other offerings.

Anyway, whatever the real story is, I remember staring at this cover, trying to fathom its mysteries. You can still see where I traced some of the image outlines with a ballpoint pen. As for the back cover, for some reason, I’d taped a piece of notebook paper over it. You can see underneath that it was sold by the Top Scholar company of Columbia, MD, but made in Korea.

Inside the notebook, the pages are covered with the usual things I filled notebooks with in those days: lists of information we were studying in school, and doodles and drawings and diagrams, from some sort of electrical wiring idea to a sketch of a bearded Wonder Woman.

There was even a commentary on the notebook itself:

Click through to Flickr to see more…

Read more about his experience using fountain pens in these notebooks at seize the dave: paper review: moleskine cahier.

One Notebook or Many? Part 1: The case for one notebook

One book is cooler. A volume covering all of ones life, being read by descendants long after my death, like the journals of Leonardo da Vinci, makes a nice day dream.

It’s fun to read through a diverse journal with sketches and notes on all kinds of things. Paging through an old journal and coming across doodles my daughter made is a treat. Sketches of things I was planning to build or of other things reminds me of the diversity of my life, which is often handy when I’ve become too focused on one narrow aspect….

One Notebook or Many? Part 2: The case for many notebooks.

A single subject notebook increases focus. When I’m writing in a single subject notebook, I feel a discipline to focus on that subject. It’s a reminder of what I’m doing, and there’s no risk that while I’m paging through old entries I’ll end up on some trip down memory lane. Instead, paging through the book reminds me of other aspects of the subject, helps the focus, and can even help with writer’s block…

One Notebook or Many? Part 3: The case for loose sheets

Blank sheets are versatile and adaptable. Since it’s not part of a book, it doesn’t have a dedicated purpose. The paper can be used for anything – I can write a letter, leave a note, give it to my daughters to draw on, or fold it into an airplane. This is especially useful when traveling, because it means I carry less…

One Notebook or Many? Part 4: What’s been working for me

Separate book vs. in the journal. I’ve found that unless the new book has a very strong purpose (like the NumberQuotes notebook) or has a specific place in my life and routine (weekly planner), it’s at risk of being abandoned. The food journal hasn’t quite become a reliable partner yet, but the birds book has. The weekly planner has become very important, and I record some things there that could be in my journal. Despite many attempts to find an electronic replacement for my weight records, pen and paper have proven to be the best and most reliable.

If the work has a lot of structure, and clear boundaries, a separate book seems to work best. If the work is somewhat amorphous, a separate book just doesn’t feel right. For example, I just used the large Leuchtturm1917 Jottbook I received to start a web-focused notebook, only ideas and thoughts related to my various websites that don’t have books of their own, or for ideas (like selling ad space) that are common to all sites. That lasted a short while before the book become refocused on this blog. So far, it’s been earning its keep.

So many things in these posts resonated for me. I’ve tried various approaches, and like Steve have ended up with a hybrid solution: one main notebook for most things, plus a few satellite notebooks for specific topics or uses that require a different format. But the other solution that I was surprised Steve didn’t mention was to use a Filofax or similar binder– you can incorporate different page formats, devote a few pages in a section to different topics, and carry over pages you want to keep for reference while filing away others. I used small looseleaf notebooks for years and loved them… but then electronic devices replaced the calendar and address book sections of those notebooks… and for what was left, a stack of bound journals did just seem cooler than a box full of rubber-banded looseleaf pages. But I keep feeling like I should give it a try again.

How about you? One or many? Join in the discussion here or at Recording Thoughts.

So here it is another new year, and here I am once again, picking up and cleaning up, getting rid of the old to make way for the new, editing and shredding, filing and piling, giving away and throwing away – all in an effort to tidy up the past to make room for the future.

It’s a daunting task.

I am not a collector, but you live long enough and you end up collecting things. Handprints your kids made when they really were kids. Greeting cards that go back 50 years….

… And notebooks. Dozens and dozens of notebooks.

I started with the notebooks, because boxes full of them are crowding my office: white reporter notebooks, which I have been using for 35 years.

They live in cardboard boxes, 2006 mixed in with 1985 and 1992 and 2001.

The wheat from the chaff. That was my goal. That’s all I had to do. Look inside these notebooks, give them a cursory read and decide what to keep and file, and what to throw way.

But it’s all daunting. Cleaning up and organizing, staying focused and on task – impossible, because here’s the thing. You cannot look through notebooks or greeting cards or books or records or even a drawer full of scarves without losing your direction.

You may be aiming for the future, eyes on a clutter-free tomorrow, heart in the right direction, but then you stumble upon a sentence, or a signature, or remember a song and where you were and who you were when you first heard it. Or you hold a knitted scarf in your hands and see the sweet 11-year-old who knitted it for you, her first real scarf, and all of a sudden you’re not looking at the future anymore, you’re not even in the present. You’ve been hijacked to Memory Lane.

via Is there room for the past in the future? – The Boston Globe.

Below is a corner of my office where I was going through boxes of notebooks and had stashed some used ones that needed to be put away. There are a few months of daily notebooks, notebooks already reviewed, notebooks to be reviewed, and some childhood notebooks. (All of these have now been put back in a closet– I try to keep the notebook clutter under control!)

A close-up of some of the daily notebooks. I write the dates they cover on the bottom.

On top of my file cabinet: some stray samples to be given away someday, and some stuff already reviewed, and a small looseleaf binder I used many years ago that I’ll do a post on at some point.

Here’s the shelves in one of my closets: shoeboxes full of small notebooks, and stacks of larger journals and sketchbooks.

Here on a bookshelf are my Moleskine City Notebooks (though I’ve since bought more). Amsterdam is the only one in this stack that I haven’t used yet. The others are New York, London, Paris, Istanbul and Lisbon.

And finally, this is the stack of notebooks-in-waiting I keep in my desk. These are all notebooks that have made the cut as ones I like enough to use as daily notebooks or sketchbooks at some point (mostly Moleskines, HandBook Journals, Piccadillies, and a couple of others). I’m not worried about running out at the moment… but only because I have an additional stack of spares elsewhere!

There are close to 100 notebooks visible in these photos, not counting the ones in the unopened shoeboxes and additional notebooks I have stored elsewhere. Welcome to my world!

I also loved this quote:

Why do I insist on keeping a notebook? To quote Dwight Schrute, “I keep secrets from my computer.”

Actually there’s just something about a blank page that inspires creativity and thought. For as digital as my life gets I still love paper and pen….

Read more at gtd hack – /tacanderson.

A few quotes from paper fans:

“I’ve got an iPad, an iPod, I’m on Twitter and Facebook and I’m talking on my BlackBerry now,” said Nelson George, a cultural critic, filmmaker and producer, in a phone interview. “But that’s enough. I’m an old-school paper calendar person.”

Mr. George uses a datebook that fits in his back pocket. “People make comments about it,” he said. “They show me their little technology. But then they sit there tapping on their device, and by the time they’ve gone through all the log-ins and downloading, I’ve already flipped the page.”

…

Elizabeth Beier, executive editor at St. Martin’s Press, has kept the same agenda since the mid-’80s, when she bought it in London at the Filofax boutique. “I have the standard size with a cover that used to be green and a handsome little snap that has since rotted off,” she said. “I feel like it’s lived with me so long that it’s earned its decrepitude.”

…

“There’s absolutely nothing anyone could say to get me to switch,” said Dany Levy, founder of Daily Candy and a faithful Filofax keeper since high school. “People are shocked. Here I am a dot.com entrepreneur, I should be on the bleeding edge of hip technology, yet I use a form of scheduling that dates to the dinosaurs.”

Dany Levy’s Filofax is below:

I have to say, I have my difficulties with paper when it comes to keeping a calendar. I have adoringly used many paper agendas over the years, including several years’ worth of Filofax calendars. But the arrival of the Palm Pilot coincided with my professional life revolving more and more around meetings and travel, and I found it much easier to keep track of with a handheld device that could sync with Outlook. Once I switched, I never really looked back. Now, I can easily have 15 or more meetings a week, plus personal appointments, birthdays and reminders. Having something beep on my computer or iPhone is often the only thing that saves me from forgetting to attend meetings, which are now almost always scheduled by electronic invitations. In some ways, I do miss being able to just flip through a date book, but that just wouldn’t be practical for me now. But I do keep a journal and daily log in my paper notebook, and I keep to-do lists both electronically and on paper– the split is more or less business tasks and long-term projects kept electronically, and personal, short-term tasks kept on paper.

This is probably the last Filofax calendar I ever used:

How about you? Are you all-paper? All-electronic? Some hybrid of the two?

Photo by Periwinklekog on Flickr

Whether it’s a pile of food-splotched printouts or a cluttered digital desktop, many cooking enthusiasts are swimming in recipes, with no good system for storing them. Is there a better way to collect and store recipes so they can be easily retrieved later on?

Even the pros struggle. Most chefs rely on some combination of digital readers, apps and email—so much the better if the device fits in the back pocket of chef’s pants—plus traditional paper notebooks or index cards….
Some chefs refuse to give up old-school methods. For many chefs these involve a pocketsize notebook made by Moleskine, with plastic-coated covers and an elastic bookmark. Robb White, the dean at the Culinary Institute of Michigan, has filled more than 300 with recipes, each one with a sketch of the dish or a plating idea on the back. Notebooks are designated by entrée or appetizer type, and he stores them by year. His system helps him spot and keep track of food trends, he says. “I get made fun of a lot—all my chef buddies think I’m nuts,” Mr. White says.

300 pocket size Moleskines full of recipes and sketches… be still, my heart!