The Best Way to Use a Notebook | The Ultimate Guide pt. 2 of 5: Gleaning Thoughts
How to use notebooks to collect the thoughts of others
I’m writing the ultimate guide to using a notebook in a series of 5 posts.
You’ve found the 2nd 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 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.
You do not need to keep lots and lots of notebooks! This is a guide to help you find which notebook method is best for you. Maybe you’ll end up keeping two or three—that’s cool. I have a weird mind. I am helped by compartmentalizing all of my various projects. Additionally, I make part of my living by exploring the notebook space and systematizing different methods. So I am not actively using each and every method I discuss in this series—yes, I do actively keep more than seems reasonable to most people though. So that’s just a disclaimer. Use the ones that work best for you but don’t load up on notebooks just because.
This series has grown out of an outline I made for one of my ParkNotes YouTube videos where I catalogued all the different ways that you can use a notebook to help yourself live better. That outline blossomed into a book pitch which led to a contract for my forthcoming book, Journal Like a Philosopher. So now I’m fleshing out the outline a bit more to include as an appendix for the book and I’m giving my paid subscribers early access to it—though the final catalog will be more detailed and look a bit different as I connect it with the details of each chapter.
If you haven’t read part 1 yet, you should, it’ll set up the series better than I did here:
Okay, so you’ve read part 1 and know that I’m going to catalog 30+ notebook methods across my three main categories: thoughts, experience, and self-mastery.
In part 1 I covered the first half of the Thoughts category: self-generated thoughts.
Here in part 2 I’ll cover 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 this post will help you collect, store, and retrieve the thoughts of others.
Pt. 3 will cover notebook methods in the experience category. Pt. 4 will cover notebook methods in the self-master category. Then I’ll finish with pt.5 where I’ll cover the pocket catch-all notebook with is a blend of all of them.
So let’s jump in with 10 more notebook methods to help you glean thoughts from other thinkers.