How do I organize my notes and journal entries?
During one of the cowriting sessions last week, Cindy asked for tips on how to organize her notes and journal entries. I’ve provided some ideas below. Please feel free to leave a comment below if you have any ideas, thoughts, questions, resources, or links to add to this thread.
Digital. Use an app like Evernote or Google Docs to organize your notes using folders, hashtags, and other tools.
Color-coded notebooks. Use different notebooks or journals for different themes, topics, and purposes. You can use colors or simply labels to distinguish between them. Perhaps you have one for taking notes and researching. Another for writing down memories and life stories. And another for documenting your process and making plans. Another way to look at it is to have different notebooks or journals for different passions and interests.
Table of Contents. At the beginning of each notebook, create a Table of Contents:
Helps you find sections without having to search through the entire notebook.
Label the top of the first two or three pages “Table of Contents.” Then number the pages as you go along.
Any time you start an entry, write the subject and date at the top of the page. When you finish your entry, add the subject and coordinating page numbers to your table of contents.
Over time develop a consistent naming convention that will help keep your titles consistent and east to find when you’re searching.
Hashtags. This tagging method is helpful to organize your ideas under chosen themes or categories just like hashtags. (Sorry about the solicitation at the bottom, but this was a great description of the process.) This method helps me incorporate ideas from my phone to my notebook/journal and eventually to my computer drafts.
Notecards. Many folks swear by this notecard method, but I find it more challenging to be consistent with it. This one is most helpful for collecting and cataloging ideas that you collect through reading, watching informational content, etc.
Bullet Journaling, Scrapbooking, and more. This article has some great ideas for how to organize notes and information. The writer is talking about organizing notes for a novel, but I find these methods are helpful for organizing any kind of journaling or creative project notes. In fact, organizing the notes and info you already have is a great project in and of itself because in the process you will likely discover the abundance of creative material that you already have and new ways to work with it.