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Making Better Notes
- Latest Changes
- Principles
- About These Notes
- Always have a pen
- Calendars are for Appointments
- Choose Your Pen
- Commonplace Book
- Displacement Activity
- Fountain Pens
- Front Matter
- Good Home
- Improve The Moment
- Incremental Formalization
- Information Triage
- Meta Space
- Moleskines
- Permanent Record
- Prep Your Pages
- Reading
- Sketching in Airports
- Storm Sort
- Tinderbox: Automatic Prototypes
- Tinderbox: Color Schemes
- Tinderbox: Prototypes
- To Do
- Weekly Sweep
- Write It Down
- You Need Two Journals
- Other Resources
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Journal © Steve Goodwin. Reproduced by permission of the artist.
Many people prepare the pages of their notebooks before use, adding elements that will help improve the notes later. Some things we've seen include:
- numbering each page, for reference.
- providing placeholders to remind you to date each page. (Some people will also need to provide space for location, or a line for a witness to attest to the date; lab notebooks in particular need to be witnessed.)
- ruling frames to provide placeholders for illustrations or storyboards -- either filling entire pages or notebooks or simply inserted on various pages to remind yourself to add illustrations or paste ephemera from your journey.
- information blocks for metadata that will be added later, such as topical tags, call numbers, keywords, or URLs.
A simple cardboard stencil can help speed repetitive work, such as drawing 4:3 storyboard frames. Office supply stores sell mechanical stamps called automatic numbering machines that stamp page numbers in your book, advancing the page by one each time the stamp is applied; they cost about US$45. Electronic date-time stamps are available for about $85; these can apply page numbers as well.
Prep helps reduce the anxiety of the blank page.
When working with Tinderbox, page prep might include setting up a Color Scheme and creating some suitable Prototypes.
Preparing your pages can be an effective displacement activity.
Eastgate Systems Inc.