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m that way*.

Time will tell whether such an experience has been useful to me or not. I still do not know, and will not know for some time now.

The experience is very much a modern version of the "walkabout". Except for instead of going out there somewhere in the world, you hole up in your mind.

Is it useful? I still don't know.

Thus it is with great hesitation that I present for the public this work on notebooks. (That is, my notebook technique.)

I want to digress and say something here as well:

I am astonished that there isn't a field of study of notebooks. I have searched on the net, and while I have found a page here and there on some type of notebook method, it is almost ALWAYS one of the following two things:

1) The Diary A bunch of entrees, chronologically based, maybe with a TOC, in which a person keeps a record of their thoughts. aka "The Journal".

2) The Category Bins A bunch of notes, stuffed into category bins, maybe 2 or 3 levels deep.

That's IT. In all the world, people have only been putting their notes in the above two ways.

Sure, there are a few others, but people aren't comparing notes, talking about such things. I would think that something like intelligence augmentation through notebook study would be one of the first things that people talk about on the Internet..! I would think that one of the first things we would be greeted with on the Internet would be, "Did you know how to use Notebooks to be smarter?" At the very least, it would be accessible.

Instead, there is a vast desert.

(Ted Nelson in a very special case and deserves particular comment. Sadly, he seems a bit unhinged, and doesn't write much about the topic of keeping notes openly on the web.)

(Note added Later: David Allen's "Getting Things Done" system is actually pretty cool. Sadly, it does not appear on the Internet. But it's a cheap book. If you are interested in contributing to a study of notebook systems, this is a must read.)

My

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