#104

Since I’ve been working from home for the last 9 months, I’ve been taking more notes by hand. This has turned into lots of practice time writing in cursive, which I’ve working back into my handwriting the last few years.

It’s turned into regaining both writing speed and legibility. In fact, it’s reignited my interest in Sutterlin, a form of German handwriting that was used in the first half of the 20th century, until the Nazi party outlawed it, along with several other typefaces.

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#105

Wow Wow Wow,
this is a thread I will need to go completely thru.
I’ve had a few periods of active paper note taking, but never a system in place.
Also will be sharing this with my wife, who is a notebook lover and wonderful choreographer/visual artist.

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#106

Right now:
Leuchtturm Bullet journal.
Pilot Fineliner (felt tip)

Next:
I’ve discovered that Leuchtturm has a Montly planner that can be used for both taking notes and project planning/habit tracking. Its calender (one month per page) could be used for something short and sweet, a daily haiku, a short log etc.

I neither have the time or disciplin to go full “bullet-journaling”. But I’ve found that note-taking can be a process of creating value for myself. Collecting nuggets and ideas I pick up. And by adding small drawings, colouring them with crayon pencils etc – it makes it a lot more fun to go back and re-read the wisdom I got from somewhere only to later forget etc.

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#107

I have been using a blank midori md notebook as a journal for a while and it’s been my favorite so far. I really like blank paper, and this notebook is almost completely bare except for its blank sheets. I especially appreciate that the notebook lies flat and that the paper does well with fountain pens. I normally write with a lamy 2000 but really whatever is at hand is fine.

In the past I’ve tried to be really strict with how I use my journals but I decided to be looser for this one and so I have a bunch of random writings in here and it’s very liberating to have a place to just write when I feel like I need to.

#108

I use a layered system: notebooks for loose/random entries, with anything I might want to reference later transferred to a slip box - which then might/might not get developed and published in some digital way. I wrote up a description here: System of Learning and Practice. This is more about intentional practice than productivity - my goal is doing fewer things that make me unhappy, rather than getting more things done.

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#109

This thread has really made me want a high-quality notebook that’s marked with dots or grids. I have a bunch of lower-quality ones that don’t lie flat and are a little weakly-bound with various scribbling from travel/travel planning/work-in-progress poetry, and I am just a tad jealous.

The idea of having an index is also superb, and I think it would greatly improve my organization. I say this as someone who has wanted to sing a song, and needed to page through six notebooks to find the bits of scribbling related to the lyrical themes I wanted to evoke… hella inefficient.

Also, I am working on some language-learning, and I think being able to put this side-by-side with other things in a normal notebook would be useful, both for psychological permanence, and so that it would be easily at-hand, and easy to extend. (In conjunction with the index.) My last set of class notes… are in a recycled notebook that is falling apart.

I guess my question is – what do you do with these when they’re done? Does anyone digitize old notebooks?

#110

it’s also possible that your system is actually best for you

#111

In some ways, yes, in others, no. My notebooks have a few good surprises in them, but they could stand some serious consolidation and organization, and both of those things would be easy to achieve.

#112

I spent a lot of time trying to create an organized note-taking system, and have since decided that I never will. I always come across some flaw in my system and have to abandon or alter it. I now just write the date, then write a random note. If I need to find something I just look for it, my notebook is small.

That said, I don’t have a backlog of notebooks to flip through either. I usually just throw them away after I feel done with them, as I found I never looked at them. I will year out and sort away the important pages, but 80% of all my past notebooks have been trashed without regret. They also didn’t contain any especially valuable ideas, though, haha

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#113

Years ago I was sooooper-organised (see my post further up the thread) but when I picked up notebooking again this year I quickly realised that this was no longer my way of working. Now I just doodle and write whatever, wherever in my various notebooks – and once a fortnight I collate and transfer the important stuff (aka ‘valuable ideas’) into their relevant digital documents (which are easily organised in ‘post-production’, as it were).

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#114

I think on reflection, I’m not super organized in my note-taking, and that’s unlikely to change. I can probably just scaffold an index onto my existing notebooks so I can track things better using one of the systems outlined above, and eventually, stuff needs to be scrapped when its usefulness is outlived.

I will at least start by copying some of the more relevant stuff out of a notebook that is falling apart.

#115

I’ve always dated my notebook entries with Walter Benjamin’s thirteen theses on writing in mind:

keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens

After poking through this thread, I think I’ll try using this as a launching point to try indexing and some other strategies mentioned.

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#116

If any of you wonderful people are in Manhattan, and you’d like to enjoy a blissful half hour of socially-distant shopping for stationery and pens and assorted writerly accoutrements, pay a visit to Goods for the Study, either on 50 W 8th Street or 234 Mulberry. The latter is a few doors down from a Sees Chocolate Shop where you can get your ur-Wonka on.

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#117

Sounds like I know what I’ll be doing this weekend!

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#118

Does anyone have tips on improving handwriting, particularly longhand cursive? I taught myself cursive years ago when I started journaling regularly, and it was once readable but now it’s just as atrocious as my printing.

I’ve already checked YouTube but most of that is people doing calligraphy. I just want to make my writing legible, which involves forming some new habits, and maybe some practice paper of some kind.

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#119

Quite a few years ago I “fixed” my (pretty bad) handwriting by essentially writing the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog hundreds of times. Taking a similar approach to music, I started slow and with great intention in my motions, then tried to work up my speed to a more realistic writing tempo.

I think from there, in your regular writing, you might take mental notes of any letter combinations that trip you up or could be improved. Then it’s a matter of going back to slow and intentional with those things until it’s “fixed”.

I’m not totally happy with my ‘m’, ‘u’, ‘r’, and ‘n’, but it’s been a while since I did any sort of practice.

edit: having pictures of peoples’ handwriting you admire nearby can be helpful too, I took inspiration from a few different places when I was relearning

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#120

i love moleskine (blank pages) notebooks, all sizes , from super tiny to the bigger onew. i had the chance to do sound design for them (and LEGO) more than a decade ago, have a look :slight_smile:

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#121

I remember a friend had one of those!
What a great video!

#122

Hi, slightly outside the topic, or not. I got an ad in my Facebook feed about a course from this site Domestika. It was probably a black friday-offer because I got an offer for a course of 10 bucks, so I enrolled. Pretty excited about the teacher and his Moleskine-doodles becoming both art and a career.

His site shows how he draws in his notebooks. https://mattiasadolfsson.com

I find his story very inspiring as an esthetic principle. Just work on your thing and stay with it, find your style, amplify it - and it will become something special and interesting.

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#123

:slight_smile: yes, i like it too :slight_smile:
they did a pretty good job with the slow motion.
i used the ms-20, my fave sound design mic ( sennheiser mkh 416) recording various sources (paper, aluminium, scraping of various objects), some library sounds and some sounds i recorded on movie sets. i think the sound design came out fine enough (i’d do it very differently now, but i still kinda like it). i was also asked to do a music soundtrack (which i did, it was a strange morricone meets nursery rhyms kind of style hehehe) but then they decided to not put music on it.
anyway, i’m glad i did it for the brand which produces my fave notebooks :slight_smile: