Introduction
I keep a lot of notes.
As a kid, I’d watch those TV programs with the scientist in the lab, and the scientist taking notes in a lab notebook. Sometimes the camera would focus on that notebook and the writing was so clean and pretty, full of graphs, paragraphs and calculations. it was neat.
Then I saw another program where the scientist did something, but wasn’t able to replicate it, and he’s talking to another (more mature) scientist who said “if you didn’t write it down, you didn’t do it” or something like that.
In high school i was a fairly good taker. Buy my senior year I figured out I need a thin but expandable notebook for each subject. And it required discipline to keep all subject matter roofer in the proper notebooks in alpha order.
But then I grew up, got a job at a computer store, and occasionally I would speak to people. I was never good at remembering names, but I was fairly good (or just fair) at remembering conversations. But what I was finding was if I speak to 5 people a day, and one person comes in after a few months – they generally pick up the conversation from where they left. I would find myself lost. What’s even worse is that I kind of sort of remember the conversation, and it’s different then what that customer is saying! A good notebook would had come in pretty dandy at the time.
The computer store was mostly a standup job, when I spoke with customers I would be standing. I did spend a lot of time programming, which is a sitdown job. so I might have kept task lists at the desk, but usually I did not keep notes when talking to customers. At the end of the meeting I’d run to the desk and add tasks.
When I became a full time programmer, the need to take notes became more and more important.
At the county, you get email messages, you goto meetings, people interrupt you, you are playing on the internet and find something important, you are doing a task, and it reminds you the need to do something else.
In any case, information is flying at you from all sorts of directions and the need to keep track of that information is important.
At first, I put everything into a single notebook. This was good, but not great. Notebooks would fill, and finding information in the notebooks get’s kind of difficult when you are looking for old information. BUT starting with a single notebook is an excellent start.
Today, time have changed. All of my meetings are done remotely (zoom, teams, slack etc) so i keep my meeting notes on one wood document. I keep my work in progress in a second word document. I keep track of my work in an old notebook. The tasks are kept in a task tracking application (Jira). So.. you might say, I have several notebooks