Skip to main content

Notebooks are Bonkers. Who Knew?


Most of us lead pretty complicated lives. We juggle work, social, play, relaxation and panic as best we can to achieve successes ranging from survival (ideally) to ecstatic amazement at our achievements – and all points between. Rarely does everything neatly fall into place precisely when it’s meant to. My life is no different from most, a chaotic combination of serendipity and attempts at using structures and disciplines to prevent me becoming overwhelmed. I muddle through.

When I had a proper job, I had tasks assigned to me, I developed To-Do lists and I adopted the Urgent/Important prioritisation matrix to decide which tasks to tackle first:
… which you can read more about here. But there was a catch. My lists and prioritisation techniques were defined by time. When should I do what? And in order to do most of the stuff in my lists, I needed information… and a lot of that information was in handwritten notes, recorded in the most haphazard way possible – sequentially. One after the other with nothing relating one note to the next except that it had been made after the one before it. 

So I had goals and tasks defined by priority, and information resources to help me achieve them defined by the unrelated factor of when they had been created. Actually, it was worse than that. If I could relate a note to a date, then I had a chance of finding it again if I could recall that date or had a diary index system (like bullet journals perhaps). But like most people who don’t have the patience to create a bullet journal and who have decided not to use digital media to store notes (which automatically records dates and indexation), my notes were made one after the other. A note about a meeting might be followed by a mindmap, followed by a shopping list, followed by a jotted phone number.
The only thing relating one to the next was the completely irrelevant juxtaposition of what I was doing with my notebook before I made it, and then what notes I made after it. My ability to find a note was defined by my memory of what I was doing before and after I’d made it. When I searched for it, my brain was constantly deciding ‘was the note I want made before or after the one I’m currently looking at? Should I therefore head backwards or forwards to find it?’ Crazy!

Why did we all put up with this? Answer… because it was simple and we’d universally got used to it.



Which is why I invented TABi where every page has it's own tab to write a clue about what's on it. Suddenly I was more productive. My notes might still be made in chronological order (although I love using the project sets on the bottom row to cluster stuff I know I’m going to use a lot), but the relationship between each of them is no longer significant. My chaotic life can continue to be reflected in a series of randomly made notes, but my ability to find them again is no longer controlled by the order in which they are taken.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Phillips screws - yes I'm angry about them too

Don't get me wrong. They're a brilliant invention to assist automation and prevent screwdrivers from slipping off screw heads - damaging furniture, paintwork and fingers in the process. Interestingly they weren't invented by Mr Phillips at all, but by a John P Thompson who sold Mr P the idea after failing to commercialise it. Mr P, on the otherhand, quickly succeeded where Mr T had failed. Incredible isn't it. You don't just need a good idea, you need a great salesman and, more importantly, perfect timing to make a success out of something new. Actually, it would seem, he did two clever things (apart from buying the rights). He gave the invention to GM to trial. No-brainer #1. After it was adopted by the great GM, instead of trying to become their sole supplier of Phillips screws, he sold licenses to every other screw manufacturer in the world. A little of a lot is worth a great deal more than a lot of a little + vulnerability (watch out Apple!). My gromble is abo

Would we pay more for their stuff?

I'm confused. Brexiters argue the Germans, Italians and French will still want to sell us their cars, so continued free trade with the UK is in their best interests. But we'll have to negotiate this (with an EU unwilling to make leaving easy) by threatening to make their cars more expensive for British people to buy. We'll do this because WE need to make imports more expensive to try to restore our balance of payments. Are Brits prepared to pay more for their Audis, Fiats and Renaults in order to make British cars more appealing, or do Brexiters want to pay more in order to punish them for taxing our insurance and banking products? Either way, imports will cost more. While in the EU, we buy their cars because we like the choice and don't want our own government to tax them. Indeed it would be better for British car manufacturing if we went back to the good old days of being encouraged to buy cheaper British cars (made by foreign owned factories). Is that what Brexite

Addictions. Porn, Drugs, Alcohol and Sex. Don't prevent it, make it safer.

In 1926 New York, during Prohibition, 1,200 people were poisoned by whiskey containing small quantities of wood alcohol (methanol). Around 400 died, the rest were blinded. The methanol they drank was in the moonshine they had bought illegally. In fact it had been added by law to industrial ethanol in order to make it undrinkable. Prohibition existed to protect everyone from the 'evils of the demon drink'. However, people still wanted to enjoy alcohol. So bootleggers bought cheap industrial alcohol and attempted to distill it to remove the impurities the state had added, but the process wasn't regulated. The state was inadvertently responsible for the suffering - although it was easy for them to blame the bootleggers and to justify escalating the war. This didn't stop the bootleggers. In fact it forced them to become more violent to protect their operations, and even less cautious about their production standards. Volumes of illicit alcohol, and therefore proportionat