I started doing a little clean up on my office. I didn't feel like it, but I remembered the experts saying just do 15 minutes, so I thought, okay, I can do fifteen minutes. I started by going through my desk drawers.
There are eight of them. I made it through...well, let's call it 5.5 because I'm not happy with the job I did on the sixth drawer.
Discoveries were made.
I didn't realize I had a ton of Christmas postage stamps. Hmm.
Wow. All the pens. So many pens. And markers. And highlighters. Oh, look, more pens. And erasable pens. And midliners. Pencils, too. So many colored pencils. Disposable fountain pens. They even still work.
And then I hit the paper. There were letter size notepads with the perforated pages in every color they make. I'd forgotten about those, but I used to make all my book notes on those and I color coded them by paper color. It's been a long, long time since I used notepads.
Because I switched to steno pads. Which I also found. Two were blank, but four of them were filled with notes and different color Post-it flags because I color coded each project. I didn't look, but I'm assuming they're for ideas/books/series I've started, but never finished. At some point, I need to scan those into PDF and file those electronically so I can toss the books.
I also found two Junque Journals still in their wrappers. This was one of my brilliant ideas that didn't pan out. I was going to use stickers to label a journal for each series and put my notes there. It would be awesome! I was sure of it!
The only problem was these journals were created more for artists or for scrapbooking. I made notes, but it was hard to read what I wrote and I would have needed to use Sharpies or something in order to read it. This idea withered quickly.
Really, the spiral notebooks with the perforated pages are my current favorites for writing notes. I bought a couple of Poppin notebooks which had awesome paper quality and lots of pages, but they stopped making that notebook. I'm using Erin Condren now. That paper is nice and thick, almost too thick, but I've become a paper snob.
And then I hit the index cards. So many index cards. But I was positive--positive--that this time they would work for me and I wouldn't hate every minute of trying to plot with them. Spoiler alert: I did hate every minute of the index cards. It's why I have a drawer full of them.
What's sort of interesting going through the drawers was the revelation of how my note taking process continues to...not really change since it still involves jotting down thoughts on paper, but that the paper I like to use for this keeps changing. Notepads to steno pads to notebooks. I just wish I could ditch the little slips of paper. When I cleaned off the top of my desk, more than 50% of the mess was Post-it notes and mini notepad pages with book notes.
