The Best Way to Use a Notebook: The Pocket Catch-All

Part 5 of 5 of the Ultimate Guide to Using Notebooks

I’m writing the ultimate guide to using a notebook in a series of 5 posts.

You’ve found the 5th post in the series. I didn’t mean for this to be such an in-depth treatment but then again, I didn’t expect to become the accidental notebook czar of YouTube either but here I sit amongst a ridiculous pile of notebooks. It’s dangerous business setting out on an education, you never know where your studies will lead you—in my case, it led to analytic philosophy and then to using the tools I learned in my formal study to “chart the logical space” of all notebook methods.

In part 1, I introduced the series and explained that I’ll be cataloging 30+ notebook methods across my three main categories of thoughts, experience, and self-mastery. Then I covered the first half of the Thoughts category: self-generated thoughts. Read that post here: Part 1 - Collecting Your Thoughts

In part 2 I covered what I call ‘gleaned thoughts’, that is, the thoughts you’ve gleaned from others. So instead of using a notebook to collect or think through your own thoughts, the methods in that post will help you collect, store, and retrieve the thoughts of others. Read the second post here: Part 2 - Collecting Thoughts from Others .

In part 3, I covered notebook methods in the experience category. These notebook methods help you log your experiences and reflect on your emotions. Read that third post here: Part 3 - Logging Your Experience .

In part 4, I covered notebook methods in the self-mastery category. These notebook methods help you manage your time, master your attention, and help you stay on track with your productivity goals. Read the fourth post here: Part 4 - Mastering Yourself.

Here in part 5 I’ll finish with the pocket catch-all notebook which is a blend of all three categories and the most important notebook in my whole collection

You’re going to hit a pay wall here soon. These kinds of posts are my first takes on the content of my forthcoming book, Journal Like a Philosopher, so I can’t have them just out there in the wild. But this process of writing them up for paid subscribers has been both motivating and rewarding. It’s really good to get feedback from paid subscribers who are invested in my stuff and I feel good about answering your questions in detail. I’ve already reshaped some stuff for the book based on feedback I’ve got from my paid subs here. So thanks to everyone of you who supports my work and helps me communicate more clearly.

I’ll also drop some of my affiliate links and discounts down at the end of the post so stick around for those or find them in the description of my ParkNotes videos on YouTube.

So let’s jump in with the catch-all notebook method.

The Catch-All Notebook

The catch-all notebook is literally the most important notebook method that I use. I’ve tried to come up with another name for this method but ‘catch-all’ is probably the best name for it because