I was so thrilled when I ran across this notebook hack, allegedly from Japan, on Instagram. I fill up lots of notebooks and frequently use a single journal for work ideas, personal projects, and domestic planning (trips, meals, shopping, etc.). Finding things, across volumes, and within volumes (of Maker’s Notebooks), can be a real chore. The only real way of fixing this access problem is taking the considerable time to index everything.
This simple approach allows you to fairly quickly build a back-of-book (or front, if you like) index of significant content as you go. Here’s how it works:
First you start off with your content. In this example, Adam, who runs the blog High Five, is making a recipe book. Here’s his first recipe.
He begins a listing of recipe types on the final page of his recipe notebook.
Based on his index of recipe types, he puts the appropriate marking on the outside edge of the page for this Chinese recipe.
And here you can see that by placing corresponding marks on the edges of the pages that map to the recipe index in the back, Adam has organized his recipes for much easier access.
I’m definitely going to start doing this in all of my notebooks. We’d love to hear from you in the comments below on how you organize and index paper notebooks and project journals.
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