I remember, it was a Sunday morning. I was six, eating my breakfast. My father was reading the Sunday Times newspaper bundle he had just brought home. In the middle of his read, he went to his shelf, picked up a grey LIC branded diary and started copying the lines from the newspaper into it. I was intrigued by this, as I had never once made a conscious effort to take notes - but hey, I was six.
So I did what any curious 6 year old would do - I decided I wanted to see what was written in it. Getting my hands on it was not something difficult - my father had himself, on many occasions asked me to fetch his diary for him. And I started reading. There were many things written in the book, many newspaper cut-outs from years ago, lyrics from old songs, quotes from novels. I asked him about it. He told me it was his hobby, noting down stuff he came across and then reading it later. It was so anti-climactic for 6 year old me.
I inadvertently started maintaining a similar diary about cool things I read, which I now know has a name - A Commonplace Book. It had quotes, lines I had read in novels, but mainly about research papers I had read in my undergrad engineering program.
In the beginning, I couldn’t figure out how to structure it. It was a new LIC diary from our LIC agent (the same guy who gave my father the first diary lol) and I did not want to mess it up. So, I came up with a plan - using black ink for research papers and green for lyrics and excerpts. This system worked well for me, as I could just tune out the green when I needed to focus on work and vice-versa.
I like to think this habit has helped me retain information for a much longer period (of course along with spaced repetition, which I will talk about in another post). I have to have complete understanding of something to explain in my note in a simple way, and I cannot do this with a semi-comprehension. One way to have full comprehension (and probably the best for everyone) is to explain the topic to yourself / someone. I then recall these notes at regular intervals, either with friends who are discussing a topic or if I need to explain it to someone. I also usually just sketch out the idea into a mind-map to get the general flow of the idea.
Of late, the frequency of my entries has increased significantly (from 2 entries a week → >1 entry a day, and this is just for the research papers and background reading for classes). Especially since the start of the 2nd semester. Preparing for and keeping up with classes is a challenge - the material is intensive and exciting. This is one thing I love about German universities - you need to prepare for seminars where you present / discuss a research paper and in the end, possibly write a term paper for extra credits. It’s exhausting as well as exciting, and because of the number of papers, it’s easy to forget the details. The notebook has kept me sane. Imagine reading 2 papers per seminar * 2 seminars a week, which is 4 papers. This may not sound hard, but doing this for 10 weeks straight, I found myself forgetting a lot of things.
I wondered if there was a way to structure it in a way I could group topics together. The only way I found that worked for me was using tear-away books with pre-punched holes. I could tear the pages after jotting down notes and file them. I have now started using Obsidian with a rough notebook instead. I compile my markdown files to pdf with pandoc and read them on my tablet. It is much easier now, but I still prefer to maintain a notebook to map out ideas.