How to organize notes in a notebook: a little trick from Japan

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Are your notes scattered all over your notebook in a chaotic manner, and every time you spend a lot of time to find the entry you want? The life hack we'll share in this article will help you organize all your notes.

Tools like Evernote help you structure information and find the document you want quickly and easily. Despite this, I often find myself thinking that I still use my good old notebook to jot down important ideas and thoughts, especially when I have to do it on the go.

However, in notebooks, it can be difficult to structure your notes. You either split your notebook into several thematic parts and stop meaninglessly translating the paper, or you keep jotting down your ideas in a chaotic manner as they come to your head, thereby complicating your task, because these notes will be more difficult to find later.

If this sounds familiar to you, then a little trick I learned in Japan from the friendly Sarariman (Japanese term for "salaried employee") will be helpful. This is a slightly sloppy way of keeping records, which may not be appropriate in all cases, but sometimes it can be useful to you.

How it works

Let's say you have a recipe book and on the first page you decide to write down a recipe for a Chinese dish.

Then you need to open the last page and create a "Chinese cuisine" label by writing it on the first line, close to the left edge of your notebook.

Then you go back to the first page with the recipe and on the same line on which you left the tag "Chinese cuisine", make a small note along the right edge.

Repeat this process for other recipes, and all your notes will be visible on the edge of the notebook.

Now, if you want to find, say, Chinese recipes, you just need to look at the tags that indicate the location of the Chinese recipes. This is a simple way to quickly access the page you need at the moment.

Of course, you don't have to limit yourself to one tag per page - you can put two or even three tags. For example, if you write down a recipe for fried chicken, you can tag it with the tags "chicken" and "Chinese food." So you can search for the desired recipe by several tags at once, for example by ingredients or by the national cuisine to which it belongs.

What else can you use tags for?

Although I haven't tried doing this myself, I think the tags can be used as a kind of frequency graph.

For example, if you use a notebook as a personal diary, you can track your mood throughout the month. To do this, you need to create tags "happy", "sad", "tired" and so on. Then, at the end of the month, you will be able to understand what emotions you experienced most often.

You can think of many more uses for tags, depending on the purpose for which you are recording.