The Best Way to Use a Notebook | The Ultimate Guide pt. 3 of 5: Capturing Experiences and Emotions
I’m writing the ultimate guide to using a notebook in a series of 5 posts.
You’ve found the 3rd 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:
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:
Now in part 3, this post you’re currently reading, I will cover notebook methods in the experience category.
In part 4, I will cover notebook methods in the self-master category.
And I’ll finish with the pocket catch-all notebook which is a blend of all three categories, in part 5.
So let’s jump in with 7 or 8 more notebook methods, this time from the experience category.
Experience
Notebooks in the ‘experience’ category emphasize daily life, events, experiences, emotions, affections, etc., rather than the more cognitive aspects emphasized in the ‘thoughts’ category. Now, we are rational, volitional, emotional beings—so we’re not going to be able to wholly compartmentalize out our different aspects into different notebooks—and we probably shouldn’t want to do that anyways. With that said, you are going to include