The Kind of Notebook I Need
Throughout recorded history, people have been taking notes (get it?):
This image depicts a clay tablet from Iraq, estimated to hail from the approximate year 3200 BC. It is known as The Kushim Tablet, and it is special because it is the earliest known example of a signed piece of writing. It translates:
29,086 measures barley
37 months
Kushim
This is a transactional record, cuneiform symbols pressed into soft clay and then baked, acknowledging a certain amount of goods and a certain period of time, recorded by someone named Kushim.
Writing, among its other uses, was and still is the tool of the accountant. We are all accountants. We count things, one-two-three, and we record accounts of things. Here is an account of thoughts that I recorded last night (somewhere around 3am most likely):
I’m still not sure what “cocmic mariom” means. Hopefully it wasn’t important.
I have a lot of ideas. My work life, thus far, has been a smorgasbord of little ideas made manifest. Like a buffet of appetizers and petit-fours: a little journalism, a bit of arts administration, some teaching here and there and there, a smattering of commissioned portrait work, waitressing on occasion, a few unpublished children’s books, a bit of land-ladying, a gluten-free chocolate chip cookie business from my home kitchen… you name it, we got it!
Some of these endeavors have been experimental or half-hearted. Others were started with great enthusiasm and given up with disappointment and resignation. What has been my recipe for non-success, you ask? I think it is a winning combination of poor organizational skills and self-sabotage, but that’s just my theory.
Kushim seemed to have his shit together: 29,086 measures barley, 37 months. A precise accounting in the form of a little note, baked into a clay tablet for posterity. Nice work.
My style of note-keeping echos my work life: lively, scattered, interesting, disorganized and well illustrated. The concepts are all there, but they lack reasonably practicable methods.
What I need is a note-taking system that can transform:
hopes into ideas
ideas into goals
goals into plans
plans into results
And this is precisely what I am in the process of refining. But I’m hoping that this is not a Catch-22: do I need such a system to pre-exist in order to develop the system in the first place?
I guess we are about to find out!