Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Knowledge is difficult to obtain and precious to me. Therefore, I write notes in notebooks and I keep the notebooks.

This photo shows my notebooks (click photo to enlarge). I have filled these with various types of notes since 1984. Yes, that is about 25 years of notebooks.

I use three types of notebooks.

The first and most used is the Steno Pad – those tan, spiral-bound things on the right. I keep one on my desk at work. I jot short notes of what I do during each day. I get three days per page, and the standard-size Steno Pad lasts one year. I have kept a Steno Pad on my desk since June of 1984. Ask me what I did on any day since then.

The second notebook is the Computation Notebook. That is the large brown thing in the left center of the photo. I use the National Computation Notebook model 43-648 (Google “Computation Notebook 43-648” to find them). I have used these since 1990. I think the National company has been bought and sold several times since 1990, but the notebooks are still available.

I have two uses of the Computation Notebook. (1) My personal work log at home. I have the dates and amount of time I spent writing 100+ articles and four books. (2) A record of meetings at my day job.

The third notebook is my personal journal. That is the pile of brown and then black notebooks stacked in the center of the photo. I started writing a journal in December of 2000 (see my blog post on journals). I started with a brown hardback book, but the company quit making those, so I switched to the Moleskine black hardback book. I find the hardback book works much better in my lap than the softback book.

I find one indisputable advantage to paper and pencil notebooks: they are all backwards compatible. I can still read my notes from 1984. I cannot read my 5 1/4″ CP/M floppy disks from that date. Several people I know at work keep their notes on the office computer system. They have lost years of notes due to technology changes.

Of course, you can’t grep trees. I can, however, find what I want. It seems that just looking at the pile of notebooks helps me remember things. I cannot explain how that works, but it does.