A regular topic-to-page-number index has served for about 1500 pages of work notes since ~2018, but my personal journal's quite a bit longer and I lacked the foresight to index that from the start. It's not that I mind an excuse to reread in detail, but I'd like to begin as I mean to go on and I just haven't come up with a way to do it that looks maintainable.
My indexes are probably a bit harder to read than topic-to-page.
I don't group anything when I'm writing and just stick to a more or less consistent set of general keywords per entry. Each index entry is its own numbered row. Index entries may need their own numbers so I can come back later to group. I may not even index if I'm really rushed until later as long as I mark my regions I can index it all later. Not hard to count them up.
An example of an index entry:
"56 2024-02-13@22:30 39.1 hn"
where the format is: "<index entry #> <timestamp> <page #>.<region #> <keyword>"
I would have to linearly search if I haven't yet updated my groups in a meta index that spans notebooks e.g. "showerthoughts: 3.30.3 9.42.1 10.3.2 ... " where the format is <book #>.<page #>.<region #> or more concisely <book #>.<index #> I've done both before. I prefer the latter when my index has lots of columns that are more helpful (such as bigger notebooks and I always label my columns so I don't confuse myself because not all my notebooks are the same format depending on size).
There's always time for indexing and metaindexing later and I find it relaxing. Sort of like washing the dishes. It's a discipline thing, but doesn't have to be perfect. If I had a bunch of old unindexed books I'd start by just broadly labeling the books first (mostly/all school, mostly/all work, mostly/all personal, etc.) and then lazily drill down into pages and regions and keywords as I actually need the info. Just as long as I didn't waste the effort I took to find things the hard way and be sure to index it's better than no index at all... wabi-sabi and all that.
Also worth pointing out I don't have separate books for topics. Fuck that it's going on whatever paper I've got on hand and I've even stuck loose pages into books later. As long as the actual content has matching numbers on it (in the corner) the index will keep track. I number it according to where I'm gonna stick it or just n+1 non-loose soon-to-no-longer-be-blank pages/regions. I truly treat paper like disk space and write whatever whenever. It really freed me to think that way. If the index is lost it's not unrecoverable either, just tedious.
Pretty sure I picked up the habit of decimal numbering in like the 3rd grade. I had teachers whose assignments were like that: <assignment #>.<problem #>
i.e. "Did you turn in homework 5.1 through 7.15? No?! You're going to the office if you can't sit in the hall to finish it by the end of class!" Thought all teachers were like that.
> My indexes are probably a bit harder to read than topic-to-page.
A master of understatement! But this is an impressively well developed scheme, and if I take nothing else away from it I suspect the idea of metaindexing will prove useful. Thanks for taking the time to go into such detail!
A regular topic-to-page-number index has served for about 1500 pages of work notes since ~2018, but my personal journal's quite a bit longer and I lacked the foresight to index that from the start. It's not that I mind an excuse to reread in detail, but I'd like to begin as I mean to go on and I just haven't come up with a way to do it that looks maintainable.