My Notebooks

A long, long time ago a great boss taught me a simple trick to stay organized. Ed kept a simple, spiral notebook on the desk at work. Each day the date was written in the center of the next blank line. Anytime a phone call was answered, or placed it was recorded in the notebook. The time went out to the left in the margin. All the notes from the day went in that notebook. If multiple people were working in the office, you put your initials next to what you wrote. When you called a person back, or finished a task, it was checked off in the left margin. All orders that came in over the phone were also written in this notebook. The start date and end date are on the front cover.

I started my first notebook when I worked for Ed, in 1991, before Ryker was born. Somewhere, in a storage unit, I have stacks of notebooks filled with my daily activities and phone calls for years of my life. On many, many occasions, the notebook has saved me. I have been able to make copies of pages and prove that a critical conversation happened. I have been able to go back and look up the date and time an order was placed, and repeat that order for a customer.

I have been self employed, with an office staff of me, myself and I for many years. The notebook went everywhere with me. I started writing my daily to do list in it at the beginning of each day. I also balanced my work and personal check book in it for a few years. I wrote the list of the passwords I was most likely to forget on the back page for awhile, and when I was traveling often, my frequent flyer numbers.

A couple years ago I started playing around with the organization features on my Black Berry. I love gadgets and gadgets can do all that my notebook does. I started to stray from my notebook habit, and would put some stuff in my google calendar which synced with my phone. Then about a year ago I got the iPhone, which can do anything. I found an ap simply called, "to do list". It is really good. I used it for a while, even until last week I was still trying to keep things current in there. It is really well done, and lets you sort the way I like, by project, due date, location, and priority. Of course you have to enter all of your items into this software.

I found myself writing daily lists on blank pieces of paper as well as putting the important stuff in my phone. There is just something about sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and filling it with words that I like. I think that somehow seeing my lists, or my thoughts, or my conversations, written makes they real. They become tangible when I put pen to paper. I see them on the page and my brain takes a picture. I know my list today was about half a page and the shopping items still need to be done, and that phone number, for the new client, is written in red sideways across the right side. Weeks, or months later, I can quickly scan through the book for that red number on the side of the page and find it.

I also enjoy checking of the items on a list. I like to see them all neatly checked off at the end of the day. Having an entire spiral notebook full of pages with checked off lists, is very satisfying. Having boxes of those notebooks stands as a witness that I accomplished something.

There are no forms to fill out in my notebooks. I can write anything I want. I am not limited to a list, or any categories. I can write or print in any color of ink. I can write upside down, or sideways. I can jot down a note in the middle of a list, or a phone number, or a quote I just heard that I don't want to forget. I am not limited. I can write something important in GIANT letters and then underline them in red and hit them with a bright yellow highlighter, just to be sure I don't forget. The blank pages beacon me to fill them as I fill each new day. The blank page is as if the blank day before me. I can cary over the unfinished business from the day before, or I can start out clean and fresh with something totally new. It is precisely, what I make of it.

But more importantly, I think it is the physical nature of a sheet of paper that starts blank, and then fills with words which are people, conversations, tasks, events, that come to mean progress, that is meaningful to me. That is why today, I went back to my notebook.