An item I have had on my master list for far too long is one called “notebook review.”
I keep a journal also, and try to make at least one entry a week, usually on Sundays when I am planning the coming week. But my notebooks are separate from the journal.
I also maintain and contribute to an “editorial bible” – basically an ongoing log in Word of anything that strikes me as a story idea, a suitable blog post, song idea or potential action item.
A lot of them suck, but still.
The “notebook review” idea is this: Flip through my old notebooks in an orderly fashion. If something jumps out at me, I will then expand on these things or flag them for action in my current notebook. Some of these items would then go into the “master list,” others would get fleshed out in the editorial bible – or as talking points for my podcast with my brother.
There are song idea fragments all over the place, too.
I remember once listening to filmmaker Robert Rodriguez the Tim Ferriss Show podcast – talking about his compulsive notetaking and his methodical way of indexing them for easy retrieval. While I’m not ready for such an arduous process of organization, I know that there is potential “gold in them hills.”
I believe that my plan of carrying forward the worthy items is a good way to eliminate the dross and revisit the good stuff.
Although I love the idea of things like Evernote, OneNote, Dropbox, et. al., I am still somewhere in that anteroom between paper/pen and technology.
The tactile response to scribbling – and that hand-to-eye-to-brain connection – is hard to quit.
Roger Yale 