Sometimes it takes a good long time for the penny to drop, even if you’ve been doing it for a seriously long time. For me the way in which I take and write notes (both at work and during play) has changed on the basis of getting an iPhone, installing Notational Velocity and having a web interface with Simplenote all linked together.

The effect that I didn’t actually expect was that the above three occurrences effectively changed my general workflow and how I take notes in my moleskin, and what ultimately that moleskin is actually used for, and by doing that it’s solved one of the biggest problems I actually had with taking notes in my moleskin.

###Moleskines My favourite type of notebook to use is my moleskins. I’ve been using these for nearly 7 years by now. Definitely read the wikipedia entry about the history of the Mokeskine, it’s actually pretty interesting. The ones that I have been using exclusively are the A5 notebooks, in black hardback, no lines, with the thinner pages.

I used my moleskine for two things really. Taking notes and sketching ideas out. Most of my projects and designs start like this. Based on the way my mind works, I thought that it would be best to handwrite all of my notes and thoughts down and then later take these notes out and put them onto the computer.

What I noticed was that I would come back to my diagrams, sketches and doodles all the time, but I’d rarely come back to my long form notes, and I’d end up rehashing sometimes these notes and ideas again and again. The problem was I never actually did that, and it was pretty rare that I would go back and actually use these written notes in a meaningful way. Basically I was using the moleskine (at least when it came to notes) as a note dumping ground, with some useful sketches inbetween.

And that was fine. The new way is better.

The way I justified it was that before writing any meaningful words, I was getting them out of my system first. Ultimately the system was flawed, and rather than try and find a way to fix it, I kept using the same method. It’s always good to rethink something that you’ve been doing for a long while and actually assess whether or not that is the best way to do things.

###Whitelines Obviously before I got settled on Moleskine notebooks, I went through a vast number of notebooks, and still try out various ones from time to time. The ones that I am actually contemplating on getting are the Whitelines series of notebooks. I’ve owned one in the past, which was the wirebound A5 version. The paper is lovely to use and honestly the work does in fact pop off the page. However I think it’s definitely not the right size for the kind of work that I would use that for. I think I’ll be getting the A4 size for the sketching I envision in those notebooks and keeping my A5 moleskins for the general smaller ideas/sketches and notes that I like to take throughout the day.

###The New Paradigm I’ve now basically separated the way in which I organise my thoughts (because that’s what I’m doing). The first has most (over 90%) of my notes written within one of the three inputs I mentioned above, while the moleskines are basically used only for sketches and maybe small notes if I don’t have the facility to actually input the data electronically (because it wouldn’t be in the moment).

What this does is it basically allows me to now search all of my notes instantly. It also allows me to organise them and file them in a structured way - which definitely appeals to my filing junkie nature (I will be talking about this elsewhere in the future).

My moleskines are now effectively books filled with sketches, doodles, ideas, quick thoughts. There’s something pure about that setup. There’s something empowering. I must admit that out of habit I do go for my moleskine to start writing my list of things to do at work, and have to stop myself a bit and redirect myself to the computer to type that stuff in, but now when I look at my book, it’s just filled with sketches and diagrams and tiny notes that are so much more useful.

The single best bit of advise I can give about filing your notes is given by (of Mac Power users and macsparky fame). Here’s a couple of posts to get you going:

I basically follow the same convention and went ahead and changed all of my colons to an ‘x’ as well. This didn’t take me too long as I have only 100 notes so the pain barrier was pretty small.

• Notational Velocity Naming Conventions
• Notational Velocity Naming Redux

But here are a couple of tips I have myself to ease things for me as well. The way I come up with the initial letters to use is basically using the first and last letter of that particular word. So wedding would be wg. When it’s two words, then it’s basically the first letter of each word, so Broken Kode would be bk. This way I don’t have to think about whether or not I’ve used this particular word or not.

###Organisation Having finally organised my written notes, it was time to organise my moleskine a bit as well. The thing that I definitely don’t like is how my book after a while becomes messy on the inside. It’s not as clear what project I’m talking about instantly, because I never used a unified header for each and every page.

This is something I’m still working on to be honest, and so don’t have a clear solution, but the convention I’m working on at the moment basically lays things out in the following way. Right at the top of the page I put the following three items:

• Date
• Project Name
• Function

The function is usually on of the following:

• Notes
• Calcs
• Sketches
• Site Visit
• Meeting

This is neatly lined up at the very top of the page. This convention only took me 9 years of engineering to come up with (d’oh). I guess it’s better late than never and it proves that you can always find better ways to doing something, that makes you sit up and think, well that’s much better.

###Alternatives The fact that I’ve settled and fallen in love with this setup, doesn’t mean that it’s the right setup for you. Instantly Notational Velocity and Simplenote have become my favourite productive tools in the world. They organise my thoughts and information in such a way that information relating to me is now at my finger tips (literally).

There are those that want more information. That want to put images and other things within their documents/notes, and for that sort of thing there are soo many alternatives, so I guess it’s a question of trying what works best for you, but hopefully this setup gives you an insight as to what works for me, and maybe you can pull on some of that to make it work for you.