Someone recently approached me and asked about something she had read in an article here.  I think it was in one of our notebook reviews.  In it I mentioned that I like when a notebook has a Table of Contents in the front.  She asked me, “How do you use a Table of Contents?” and that’s a great question!

If you’ve been Notebooking for any amount of time you, no doubt, have a few topics that you write about often.  Maybe it’s a hobby or a project your working on.  Maybe it’s a topic you’ve been thinking about for a while.

Whatever the reason, your notebook may end up with lots of pages about a topic that are separated by pages of unrelated content.  Unfortunately, you can’t just tear pages out and stick them back in where you want them (that’s no way to live!).

If you google ways to organize your notebook, you will find all sorts of colorful and somewhat complicated systems.  Any of those might work fine for you but I’m lazy.  In fact, I would rather have an unorganized notebook than have to keep highlighters and sticky notes on hand or learn some code.  What I do is much simpler albeit possibly less efficient.

The first thing I do is number the pages in my notebooks if it isn’t already done¹.  As I already said I’m lazy, so if you think I number every page then you don’t know lazy!  At most I number every other page.  Honestly, every 5th page will get me where I need to go just fine.  I should mention that if a notebook doesn’t have a table of contents I’ll just write “Table of Contents” on the first page or three.

Then I write.  No need to fill out the table of contents yet.  Just write.

Eventually, there will be a topic I want to write more about.  So I do just that, write more about it.  Notice that I haven’t done anything with the table of contents yet nor looked at earlier writing.  There’s a reason for that, I don’t want the thing I’m writing now to be affected by the thing I wrote earlier.  There’s always time for that later.

Once I’ve written about a subject twice or so, it’s time to put it in the table of contents.  Here is when I go back and find the earlier writings.  Once I find it, I write the topic and the page numbers in the table of contents.  Finally, after looking at both the current and previous entries, I find that sometimes the comparing of the two can lead to new insights.  Obviously, I write those down as well.

Now that the topic is in the table of contents, any time I write about it, I add the page number to the growing list in the table of contents.  Then, if I feel like it, I’ll go back and look over the previous entries because that could yield some interesting insight.

Let’s recap for clarity’s sake:

1. Number pages (maybe leave some empties for a Table of Contents)
2. Write
3. After returning to a topic, add it to your Table of Contents
4. Write
5. Add the page number to your Table of Contents
6. Occasionally look back at previous entries on a topic for new insights

That’s it!  Simple? Yes!  Easy?  You bet!  The best thing ever?  Maybe not, but it’s good enough to work and do so with the least possible effort.

Have you got another way you like to organize your notebooks?  We’d love to hear it!

1. Many notebooks come with numbered pages, not coincidentally, they tend to be high quality notebooks.