Re: [emacs-humanities] How do you keep engaged with your writings?

[Oliver Taylor]

Seems like I’m not alone in struggling to figure out how to best use computers 
and paper notebooks to organize my life!

For paper notebooks I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from 2 systems: Bullet 
Journaling (seems I’m not alone), and Pile of Index Cards (which had a wiki[1] 
and an informative photo album[2] whose example photos are not in English, but 
all the comments and descriptions are).

1: 
https://web.archive.org/web/20180227170527/http://pileofindexcards.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
2: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594200490122>

Numbering the pages of a notebook and reserving a few pages at the beginning 
for an index have had the biggest impact on getting the most out of my 
notebooks. Basically, any time you write something you might want to read later 
you name it in the index and write the page number. I also periodically go back 
through pages and add things to the index. You don’t want it to be so detailed 
that it becomes difficult to manage, but I’ve organized hundreds of pages of 
notes this way.

But, that said, I don’t organize my life with paper. Organizing my life with 
software (org mode) is just easier and more powerful. But I do have a general 
rule for the distinction: computers are for organizing, paper is for thinking.