3 ms·

In my experience, I am an academic and supervise numerous PhD/MSc students and interact with many different projects. With paper notes I always found it challen

by ninjin 6y ago

In my experience, I am an academic and supervise numerous PhD/MSc students and interact with many different projects. With paper notes I always found it challenging to maintain a single line of notes for a specific topic (multiple notebooks? I would need 20 of them…). For the reMarkable I just have a virtual notebook for each project/student with a date at the top of each page as to when the meeting took place and it becomes trivial to keep track of. Not to mention that I can carry a whole library of research paper PDFs with annotations…

throwanem 6y ago
Not that it'd scale to your rather impressive needs - but I've found numbering pages in my books, and maintaining an index, to work well for keeping track of multiple subject threads in a single series of notebooks. It can get a little complicated with references across multiple volumes, since unless you copy the entire index into each later volume, you have to check each book - but what I frequently find myself doing is referencing other volumes by page number in the actual content of notes, to simplify later lookups. That and knowing which volume contains which page numbers (I use a single type of notebook and they're 160 pages each, so e.g. page 210 is easily identified as being in volume 2) makes it pretty easy to keep track of the whole thread and retrieve whatever context I need at any given time. Granted, this gets a little more complicated when you work sometimes from home and sometimes at the office; unless you carry all your notebooks from place to place, you can find yourself unable to follow a reference. But it's pretty rare in my experience to need to look back more than one volume, and in any case I intend to be strongly remote-first for the rest of my career, with all the money and effort I've put into setting up a maximally productive workspace in my home office during COVID.
- pronoiac 6y ago
  Possibly dumb question, but why not use notation like vol 2, page 50 instead of page 210?
  - throwanem 6y ago
    It's an entirely reasonable question! The answer is, because I started this numbering scheme with the diary I began back at the start of 2018, and I'm more pleased that that's just about to reach page 1000 than I would be if it were about to reach page 100 of volume 5. Since I was already in the habit, it made sense to employ the same system in my work notebooks when I likewise standardized those. In both cases, it also makes for a more compact scheme of reference, since I only need to write "pp. 380-382", rather than "vol. 3 pp 20-22" or "pp. 3/20-22" or some other such notation that requires an explicit volume number - not that that's not a somewhat post hoc reason, but I have found it to be convenient, and there's nothing wrong in any case with deriving some enjoyment from the fact that the very page numbers themselves reflect the extent to which I've developed journaling and notetaking into deliberate and durable practices in their own right. (Especially when I number the pages of a fresh volume, as part of the process of preparing it when I approach the end of the one I've been filling. Numbering from 1 to 180 over and over again seems like it'd get dull! Numbering from 999 to eleven hundred and whatever, as I did yesterday, is much more enjoyable.) All that aside, I definitely don't have any argument for why the scheme I use is the scheme everyone should use. It's just what works best for me, and in the context of any running document someone maintains for their own use, what works best for them is what matters.

by ninjin 6y ago

throwanem 6y ago

Not that it'd scale to your rather impressive needs - but I've found numbering pages in my books, and maintaining an index, to work well for keeping track of multiple subject threads in a single series of notebooks. It can get a little complicated with references across multiple volumes, since unless you copy the entire index into each later volume, you have to check each book - but what I frequently find myself doing is referencing other volumes by page number in the actual content of notes, to simplify later lookups. That and knowing which volume contains which page numbers (I use a single type of notebook and they're 160 pages each, so e.g. page 210 is easily identified as being in volume 2) makes it pretty easy to keep track of the whole thread and retrieve whatever context I need at any given time. Granted, this gets a little more complicated when you work sometimes from home and sometimes at the office; unless you carry all your notebooks from place to place, you can find yourself unable to follow a reference. But it's pretty rare in my experience to need to look back more than one volume, and in any case I intend to be strongly remote-first for the rest of my career, with all the money and effort I've put into setting up a maximally productive workspace in my home office during COVID.

pronoiac 6y ago
Possibly dumb question, but why not use notation like vol 2, page 50 instead of page 210?
- throwanem 6y ago
  It's an entirely reasonable question! The answer is, because I started this numbering scheme with the diary I began back at the start of 2018, and I'm more pleased that that's just about to reach page 1000 than I would be if it were about to reach page 100 of volume 5. Since I was already in the habit, it made sense to employ the same system in my work notebooks when I likewise standardized those. In both cases, it also makes for a more compact scheme of reference, since I only need to write "pp. 380-382", rather than "vol. 3 pp 20-22" or "pp. 3/20-22" or some other such notation that requires an explicit volume number - not that that's not a somewhat post hoc reason, but I have found it to be convenient, and there's nothing wrong in any case with deriving some enjoyment from the fact that the very page numbers themselves reflect the extent to which I've developed journaling and notetaking into deliberate and durable practices in their own right. (Especially when I number the pages of a fresh volume, as part of the process of preparing it when I approach the end of the one I've been filling. Numbering from 1 to 180 over and over again seems like it'd get dull! Numbering from 999 to eleven hundred and whatever, as I did yesterday, is much more enjoyable.) All that aside, I definitely don't have any argument for why the scheme I use is the scheme everyone should use. It's just what works best for me, and in the context of any running document someone maintains for their own use, what works best for them is what matters.