

A little known hack from Japan to get your notebook organized - icebraining
http://blog.highfivehq.com/posts/a-little-known-hack-from-japan-to-get-your-notebook-organized

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danso
This is a pretty sweet hack. One of the hardest problems in categorization is,
well, besides appropriate categorizing things (e.g. perhaps I should tag it
"Asian" instead of "Chinese", as my notebook will contain a great many variety
of cuisines...or "Food", instead of "Chinese"...as my notebook won't contain
many food recipes to begin with)...is normalizing those categories...My
Pinboard collection is a bit of a mess because some articles I've tagged as
"databases" and others just "database"...or worse, "dbs"....but with this
hack, you can easily see the number of existing categories _and_ how many
pages fit into each category...and since it is a manual process, there's even
less chance you'll have a cluttered namespace.

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JacobAldridge
I would add a colour element as well. I've been using coloured pens in
business for almost ten years now, and the time saved by having that extra
dimension of communication (my Shirlaws team are trained in using the same
colour scheme globally) is immense.

Less so for single theme notebooks (like a recipe list) but for journals (use
colours for feelings - red = mad, yellow = glad, pink = lovable etc) or
business (red = support, blue = cashflow, black = strategy etc) the side-on
view would tell you more than just quantity.

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pXMzR2A
Yay! Org-mode for notebooks :)

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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8173979](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8173979)

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personjerry
HN allows reposts?

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dang
From the FAQ:

 _If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill
reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok. Please don 't
delete and repost the same story, though. Accounts that do that eventually
lose submission privileges._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

We didn't kill this one, but rather demoted it as a dupe. Killing it would
have closed it to additional comments, and we try not to do that when there's
an ongoing discussion.

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jamessb
The earliest reference to an index in the English language is from 1593 [0]: I
don't really think it qualifies as a "A little known hack from Japan".

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_%28publishing%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_%28publishing%29)

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kgen
I don't think the hack is the index as much as it is the visual skip-list of
sorts, and then being able to jump to the page with the content without having
to do a binary search of sorts for the page number you are looking for.

That said, physical journaling is a hard habit to keep :) I feel like I've
tried every trick under the sun. Bullet Journal seemed to work for a while,
[http://www.bulletjournal.com/](http://www.bulletjournal.com/) [no
affiliation], but it's still tough to rigorously keep an index up to date when
you just want to jot down something quickly.

