[laurowyn]

Commonplace books, reading reflection, daily log, zettelkasten are all alternative techniques that achieve much the same as a log book, with various pros and cons to each. Building a Second Brain is also an interesting technique, but is more focused on knowledge documentation rather than logging and benefits massively from being digitised.

I'm a believer that logbooks, journals, diaries, notes, or whatever else you want to call it, are a personal thing and so it's about finding your own way of achieving what you want to achieve with those things. I've not found a single technique that works for me as it's described. That may be an issue with the author, the article, the concept or (more likely) me. But I try to adopt the ideas that I found work well and drop those that didn't.

I keep a bullet journal, although it's kind of somewhere between a bullet journal, commonplace book and daily log. Similar to the article, I tend to take lists of tasks each day; not as a todo list, but as a list of things I want to achieve. As I achieve them, they get ticked off. As I progress them, I write notes about what I'm doing or have done towards them, perhaps splitting them down into smaller tasks, etc.

There's also some personal tracker things from bujo I use, but they are generally just metadata around each daily log. Things like mental health, meal tracking, etc. But the most important thing is separating daily logs from single and double page spreads, and labeling them in a contents page for easy navigation.

If I come across something of interest, I treat it like a commonplace book to capture that interesting thing; recipes, project ideas, reference materials, arbitrary thoughts, and more. Similar to zettelkasten's fleeting notes concept, anything I want to revisit later I write down.

In my opinion, the power of this technique comes from how to link these things together - just writing them down isn't all that useful to me. So maintaining an accurate contents page to be able to quickly jump to a project or tracker spread makes navigation easier, while also maintaining an index for collating specific ideas mentioned sporadically across the entire logbook means I can trace an idea through the logbook (or multiple logbooks). These both mean I can actually go back and look at something specific, or quickly scan for topics that may relate to a new idea and leverage the work I put in when originally writing it.

But, this is just what works for me and doesn't necessarily mean anybody else would benefit from it. And I think this is the key thing naturally omitted by many note taking tutorials, blogs, etc. They're trying to sell you on the solution to end all your problems, when there's no guarantees that the technique even works let alone will work for you.

[hashtag-til]

That's a great write up, thanks!