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

Your notes in a chaotic manner scattered throughout the notebook, and every time you spend a lot of time to find the desired item? Life hacking, which we will share in this article will help you to organize all your notes.

Adam Akhtar, the author of this post, visited Japan and learned life hacking, which helped him to structure all your notes in a notebook. Given that this little trick can be useful for many people who love to lead paper records, we decided to share it with you.

Tools like Evernote help structure the information, as well as quickly and find the right document easily. In spite of this, I often find myself thinking that still use the good old notebook to write down important ideas and thoughts, especially when I have to do it on the go.

However, the notebooks can be difficult to structure their entry. You either share your notebook into several thematic units and stop pointless to translate the paper, or continue to record their ideas in a chaotic manner, as they come to you in the head, thus complicating his task, because to find these notes would later be more difficult.

If this is familiar to you, then you will be useful to a little trick I learned in Japan from the friendly salaryman (Japanese term meaning "salaried employee"). It's a bit sloppy way to take notes, which is appropriate in all cases, but sometimes you might find useful.

How it works

Let's imagine that you have a book with recipes and on the first page, you decided to write down the recipe of Chinese cuisine.

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

Then you go back to the first page with the recipe and on the same line in a row, where you left the tag "Chinese food", making a small mark on the right.

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

Now, if you want to find, say, the recipes of Chinese dishes, you just look at the labels of the location of the Chinese recipes. This simple way to quickly access the desired page currently displayed.

Of course, not necessarily limited to one tag per page - you can put two or even three labels. For example, if you write a recipe fried chicken, it can be noted tagged "chicken" and "Chinese food". So you can look for the desired recipe on several labels, such as ingredients or national cuisine, to which it relates.

What else can use tags

Although I have not tried to do it myself, but I think that the tags can be used as a kind of frequency graph.

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

You can think of many more ways to use tags - it all depends on the purpose for which you make a recording.