What, you may ask, is an everything notebook? It is the reality that my live proceeds these days in a series of bound books, part of which is devoted to research notes and writing scrawls, some of which is notes from meetings (ugh), and the rest to the daily-functioning by way of my somewhat idiosyncratic to-do list in which “sweep hallway” and “interpret unheighted neumes” exist side by side, just as they do in my brain.
An everything notebook SEEMS like it might be similar to a bullet journal, but they are not the same. I think of a bullet journal as a sleek little productivity engine: neat logs, tidy bullets, color-coded habit trackers, and a page for every goal. Everything fits, everything has a home, everything looks nice. (I wish I were that person, but I’m totally not!) An everything notebook, on the other hand, is more like a cozy attic where life lives in glorious disorder. Tasks rub elbows with meeting notes, recipes, hiking plans, manuscript lists, and “must-buy” lists. One page might hold a to-do list scrawled in angled lines; the next, a diagram, a doodle, or a quotation that I loved. Handwriting can range from elegant to exhausted, the layout can go backwards, sideways, or in spirals, and URLs and lists of my digital files sneak in at the back. It’s a system that survives chaos, celebrates variety, and holds memory, action, and creativity all at once. If a bullet journal is the tidy office, an everything notebook is the whole house – and you get to wander through it whenever inspiration strikes.
An everything notebook is the place to track what I’m doing, jog my thinking, capture that recipe for microwave-in-a-mug apple crisp, take notes to figure out helpful routes to thinking about AI usage in the humanities, remind myself what I need at the grocery store.
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Everything notebooks add value in a variety of ways. They reduce mental clutter. Want to remember it? Write it down! They maintain continuity across projects. How did I decide on this set of documents? Oh, that list was something from the black notebook with checks; oh, look: I decided to limit myself to ones using feminine verbiage, right. They create a ritualized review of one’s work, the fits-and-starts of what I’ve read, what questions piqued my interest, what strategies I dreamed up, but also, what friends I’ve written, which hikes I’ve completed, and what restaurants we’ve visited on dates. In short, an everything notebook captures the full texture of a life in motion, where ideas, tasks, and memories all have a place they can be written into existence for later decoding.
But every season, a change must come, and one nearly-full notebook must give way to a new and pristine notebook so the jotting, writing, drafting, and listing has space to expand for another few months.
And that transition is rather fun!
I take the transition time as an opportunity to review just how much work got done over the last season. There’s always the to-do list, and there are guilt-projects to be harvested and made priorities in this new season. (The spiderwebs in the garage are back on the list of things to do this week.)
But I also look over the notes I took, the articles (plural, oh my gosh) submitted for review, grab the list of manuscripts that I’m mid-query on, and copy over the various items that will jump-start this season’s productivity.
I make a new table of contents as I go, so that I can find things again. I also cross reference items so I don’t have to hand-copy old bibliography. It’s not like the old notebook goes away, it just stops going from meeting to meeting to coffeeshop to campground and sits on its shelf with many years of peers. So, “See Purple F25 fol. 23” is enough for future me to track back to where that information is found.
STRATEGIES FOR USE:
If you’re new to Everything Notebooks, I have a few things that work for me. I operate from the disposable model – my notebooks are the cheap 100-page Compsoition Notebooks that go on sale for schoolkids every fall in our neck of the woods. I use a variety of handwriting styles, from the “almost asleep scrawl” to the carefully shaped pretty text I’d be comfortable sharing with peers. I have a few big sections that have worked for me – the front 50 pages are for research, and I drop projects on the 10 page mark – the one at p. 49 works backwards toward the beginning; the one on p. 30 might run pp. 30-39 and then 29, 28, 27, and so on. Personal stuff clusters in pp. 50-70ish, with recipes and trail plans and gift-lists jumbled cheek-by-jowl. Starting on p. 70, I have notes from meetings; this winter notebook has fewer pages set aside for those since we don’t have meetings during the winter holidays, hallelujah, And then, while I keep the back 2 pages for URLs and apps and digital clean-up procedures, I then work backwards from p. 98 and earlier with to-do lists in four columns across the opening, sometimes grouped, and sometimes random, as the mood strikes me. Other people line through their lists, but I make my lines vertically, to the left of each item, so I can see if it’s done but still read it with tired eyes.
There are many new scholars who have started their Zettelkästen – who will spend their careers in the ordered gathering of information in ways that are retrievable. I appreciate that model; the ability to make connections across readings from one year to the next and one topic to the next is the gift of a scholarly system that can pay off in productive mental engagement.
My way is different, though. I keep spreadsheets and documents, nested folders and outlines, and all the good digital materials that reflect a modern scholarly profile requires. URLS are my friends, just as they are yours. And I might just have a spreadsheet of spreadsheets.
But at heart there’s just something comforting about grabbing a pen with your morning cup of coffee and opening up the notebook and taking notes. I like their tangibility; I like the photo-images of arrows and scrawls and reminders-to-self that open up a complex set of intellectual associations in a handy, easy-to-interpret but casual form. These mnemonic jottings are useful -- I went rummaging back through pre-Covid notebooks just three weeks ago to prep for a lecture where I wanted to reference something I’d read back-in-the-day. There it was on the notebook page, and the example that had come to mind then dropped in smoothly into my 2025 lecture outline.
Still, recopying things into an everything notebook isn’t just make-work. It is a reminder to my brain about what is important now, and what I want to be doing over the next two or three months.
And that just might be more research, fewer meetings. But some decisions are beyond my control!
So, if you’ve ever felt your thoughts, tasks, and ideas scattering in a dozen directions, try giving them a home in an everything notebook. Start small, let it be messy, let it be personal, and watch how the simple act of writing things down can make space in your life for productivity AND reflection and, even better, for memory AND action.
An everything noteook is my “get it done” place; I hope yours helps you get it done too!
PREVIOUS EVERYTHING NOTEBOOK POST:
Cynthia J. Cyrus, "My Late Lamented “Everything Notebook," Silences and Sounds, 3/3/25, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/03/my-late-lamented-everything-notebook.html.
