Notebook to actions/projects/someday maybe: Good habits and processes

Question

So following on from Equipment for computer-printing, into a notebook I eventually found what I was looking for and now have a notebook that I use in meetings/trains and anywhere a pen is more natural that a keyboard.

Here it is:

It's full of lists of tasks, meeting notes, spider diagrams and is generally messy. Like so:

At the moment I process the pages once or twice a week like it's any other inbox, but the notebook itself is pretty unoranised. Can people give examples of stratergies for organising this sort of 'capture device', either their own or established methods?

Answer 1

I carry a notebook and pen that looks much like yours, all the time. I treat the notebook as a capture device / inbox, and don't consider the pages of the notebook worth preserving, once I've processed the data on the pages.

I regularly (at least every couple of days) take any text and process it into my GTD system, adding to my Project or Next Actions lists or reference material as appropriate. Sketches, mindmaps, and other graphic information might be entered in a software package (for example, software design drawings I might enter in a UML drawing program) or I might scan or photograph it to create a document or add to Evernote.

Once I have processed a page, I tear it out of the notebook and get rid of it.

Answer 2

Interesting. I generally don't use static capture for lists anymore - at least not low-level lists, preferring the ease of copy/paste to move and organize. Having said that, when I first finished Getting Things Done, and a few other books, I did start low-tech and inexpensive.

What I found was I needed to organize/group list items either by separation or by naming convention. So, all my phone calls were grouped together, and/or started with the word "call". Then there was scheduling time to "organize" the list - usually once a week. Which was usually when all my disjointed tasks, of a similar nature, were put into groups. One might also use a 5 subject notebook instead of a single to accomplish something similar.

Something else to consider would be the concept of "promotion". In my low-tech days, I kept one big ol' notebook for all my one-time actions, ideas, process improvement notes, et al. If I found myself going back to a particular topic often enough, I promoted this vein of thinking to its own notebook. Then, if I felt the ideas were evolved enough I would take the time to translate them to a digital format - be it a graphic in a graphics editor, or text in a word processor.

I still have "notebooks" I write in by hand, but they are digital on a tablet now. I still promote ideas and thoughts to different media.