notebook

Notebook Organisation:

Aside | | Paul Greer

reblogging study-well:

There are lots of different ways to oraganise a notebook so here’s a quick guide to some options:

Date pages and entries. Write today’s date on the page and start writing. This is helpful if you want to a time record of your ideas, and notes.

Prepare a table of contents. Leave a few pages blank at the beginning of the notebook and write “Table of Contents” on the first page. Save this space for a place for you to jot down the major sections of your notebook as well as any accompanying page numbers. Some notebooks, such as the  leuchtturm1917notebooks have built in blank table of contents.

Create your own sections. Divide up your notebook into as many different smaller sections as you need. You could use sticky notes or tabs. You could combine this with a table of contents.

Dedicate specific pages of the notebook for different needs. You could keep the left page of a journal for your diagrams and charts and the right side for your notes, and thoughts.

Make an index. Flip to the back of the notebook and set aside about ten blank pages for an index. Mark the first page of this section “Index” and then write three letters of the alphabet to each page. As you take notes in your notebook, you can jot down specific or general subjects in this index to help you find items.

Use a tagging system. Make your entry into your notebook. In the example, they have recorded a Chinese recipe.  Go to the back of the notebook and add a tag or title, e.g. “Chinese” on the left edge of the page. Go back to the first page where the entry was, and on the same line number as you wrote “Chinese” make a black mark on the edge. You make this mark so that even when the notebook is closed, the mark is visible. After repeating this for various recipes, you now have various tags visible on the notebooks edge. If you ever wanted to find a Chinese recipe, you simply look at the index, locate the label, and look along the visible edge which has been tagged as Chinese. Then just flick to each marked page. You’re not limited to one tag per page. You could tag a page 2 or 3 times. So if you jot down a chicken stir fry you could tag it as “Chicken” and “Chinese”. This is described with pictures here.

Sources; 1, 2

Seven and a half minutes worth of writing

Video | | Paul Greer

reblogging nearsightedmonkey:

“People have been looking for the timing videos for Lynda Barry’s Writing the Unthinkable excercises. Here is the one for seven and a half minutes worth of writing.

OK LET’S GO! BUT BEFORE YOU START THE VIDEO….. STEP ONE:

First write ten nouns on ten little pieces of paper. Any nouns will do! Cake! Fire! Teeth! Ticket! Etc!

Number a page from one to ten

Relax your whole body from top to bottom and say the alphabet to yourself or something else you have memorized and think back to early days in your life….

turn over one of the pieces of paper and write down the first ten images… sort of like snapshots…. that come to you from that word

Read the list over

Circle one that seems vivid or has trouble in it and write it on a clean sheet of paper like it was a title to a story and then draw a big X on the page.

NOW start the video.”