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From Japan, a Brilliant Notebook Hack for Organizing Your Notes

A simple trick to easily index and find the information you need

By Rain Noe - July 14, 2015

in Organization | design.edu | Hand Tools

My notes are a mess. I desperately wish I could carry just one notebook, but every time I've tried it, I can never find the information I need at the moment I need it. So I've resorted to doing this:

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That's me capturing all of my projects on loose sheets of scrap paper with holes punched in them; then I try to organize them in binders with tabs. It's a real pain in the ass and it doesn't work that well.

So I was elated to find this notebook hack (purportedly from Japan) from HighFive that is perfect for people like me, who do not develop projects one-at-a-time in a linear fashion. Here's how it works:

"Let's imagine you're keeping a notebook for recipes and you just wrote down a Chinese recipe on the first page." [Image/description via HighFive Blog]

"Next you'd go to the last page and create the tag 'Chinese' by writing it on the first line right next to the papers left edge." [Image/description via HighFive Blog]

"Now you'd go back to the first page where the recipe is and on the exact same line as the 'Chinese' label you just wrote you'd make a little mark on the right edge." [Image/description via HighFive Blog]

"You'd make this mark so that even when the notepad was closed the mark would be visible. After repeating this for various recipes you'd now have various tags visible on the notebooks edge. Now if you ever wanted to find a Chinese recipe you'd simply look at the index, locate the Chinese recipes label and look along the visible edge to find every single page which has been tagged as Chinese. Then it's simply a case of flicking to each page." [Image/description via HighFive Blog]

I'm definitely going to try this out.

Anyone have a better/alternate system?

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Tommy Lane

2 years ago

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archive.org link to original content:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210323085327/https://www.highfivehq.com/

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Mike Nelson Pedde

8 years ago

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Marcia suggested that you could have two columns to your index by using two different colours. Write on the right side of the page in blue ink or whatever and make blue marks to reference.

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Nora F

8 years ago

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The Bullet Journal (http://bulletjournal.com/get-started/) system is a good one. I don't use it in full, but he has a number of strategies that I've been able to adapt for my notebooks.

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Johan B

8 years ago

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Ha, the ONE I was looking for! thanks!

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Chou-Tac Ｃｈｕｎｇ

8 years ago

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Just simple and awesome removing a lot of pain.
I definitely wanna try it as well. I could imagine using this system at the end of a book - instead of using multiple post it.
Thanks for sharing :)

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