Stowe Boyd linked to Sacha Chua's blog post about how she uses Moleskine notebooks to document her (clearly growing) network (and other things). It's wonderful to read her reasons for making notes and I thought the hyperlinking practice particularly neat. I'm a lot more haphazard about this, but will experiment with Sacha's "go to /come from" markup. I think having an intra-notebook linking practice is good.
I also date pages when I start a new entry and use the notebook to keep action item lists. Sacha marks actions with an asterisk, but I discovered I need more data about actions so my practice is to mark actions with an underscore before them. Like this:
_____ Do this
Then I just put an "X" on the line when it's done, or a check mark if it's only partly done (and sometimes I need to write sub-actions). And I cross an item out only when I choose to not do it. Sometimes undone items get copied forward, but not always. Sometimes I just look through the notebook and read the action item lists.
I also carry blank index cards with me at all times. Sometimes these end up being copied or pasted into my notebook.
I don't worry about indexing my notebooks, but I have lost track of a few references and ideas. C'est la vie de Guillaume.
Technorati Tags: documentation, Moleskine, notebooks, practice, paper, writing