Document Everything

Your notebooks are yours alone. You decide what gets disclosed, what remains hidden, and how it’s interpreted.

‘Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.’
William Faulkner

For a while, I worked for a food processing company. As a very junior engineer, I looked up to more experienced folks for guidance about managing projects involving plant operators, tradespeople, contractors, suppliers, and equipment shutdowns.

The best thing I learned

The advice I got during that time was ‘document everything.’

That engineer lived his words. He had a page-to-a-day A4 diary and each workday, he wrote down the day’s events, promises, purchase orders and problems. He forgot nothing and he got things done – that diary was his system and it worked great. His system saved him time after time because anything he needed to confirm – there it was, written day by day.

Hard to argue with that.

I took his advice. Years later, I still do. Best decision ever. As technology developed, my system morphed from diaries to Day-Timers, to notebooks, to Evernote, and back to notebooks.

So, why?

Over the years, I figured 95% of what I wrote I never looked at again. But that last 5%? Oh boy. It was career-enhancing.

Without it, I faced career annihilation.

So here’s the issue.

I didn’t know - nobody knows - what that 5% is ahead of time.

So, I document everything. Because then the high-value 5% is captured for sure, whatever it turns out to be.

When it’s safe and secure in a system that I alone control, I get to choose when to keep facts hidden and when to roll them out.

When it suits my purposes.

This is superman, all the way.

There’s power in this concept

Your notebooks are yours alone. You decide what gets disclosed, what remains hidden, and how it’s interpreted.

Management is one interruption after another, all day every day. It’s an environment where simple, tedious things get skipped and forgotten.

You are the only one in the office who documents each day with intent. When an action or decision was questioned, it is your records that rule.

Your records win the day, every time.

Simple, comprehensive, cccessible

Just three easy principles:

1. Make it simple

Use one notebook at a time for everything except the formal notes you are obliged to keep, like ministerial diaries and laboratory notebooks.

2. Make it comprehensive

Record everything you experience throughout the day, at work, home, and anywhere in between. When it happens, or as soon as you can afterwards.

3. Make it accessible

When your notebook is full, file it somewhere safe yet easy to access. You’ll be surprised how often you go back to an earlier notebook for some snippet or another.

Nuts and bolts

This is my process. It’s date-based and analogue (because I prefer the physical act of writing instead of typing), and it fits in neatly with my digital life (email, calendar, to-do lists).

One thing before I go further. I don’t work for the bureaucracy and I’m not affected by any statutory requirement to keep a formal diary. If that’s you – check the rules and don’t make yourself a target. Okay? Here we go:

1. Use a paper notebook. Paper notebooks don’t use batteries, they don’t need the Internet, and they boot instantly. I prefer a simple 96-page A4 stapled notebook with 5 mm grid rulings. These puppies cost less than a dollar from Officeworks, and they stay flat when open. I tried Moleskine for a bit, but their paper is abysmal for fountain pens and they’re expensive.

2. Buy your own notebooks and be sure they’re visually different from what’s in the stationery cupboard. Expensive is better. That way, if there are questions about who owns what, you can legitimately claim them as your property and the contents as your own musings.

3. Use one notebook at a time, and everything is written chronologically from the first to the last page. One notebook, okay? Not one for each project or area of responsibility (I tried that, and it didn’t work). Each year I use five or six notebooks on average.

4. Don’t use loose sheets of paper except for temporary notes when you’re away from your notebook. An A4 sheet of paper folded in half three times fits a shirt pocket perfectly.

5. Start a new entry daily and fill it in as the day progresses. The first line is always the date, nice and obvious.

6. Everything that affects you through the day, into the notebook it goes. Phone calls, meeting notes, admonishments given and received, sketches, golf scores, reminders, shopping lists, Wordle, thoughts and musings, calculations, letter and email drafts, doodles – everything.

7. From time to time, time-stamp your notes. Not every one, just whenever you think of it. These are enough to draw a fence around when something happened. For example, if a prior note contains “2.33P” written in and a later note contains “3.29P,” then I have a pretty good idea that whatever I wrote about happened around 3.00 pm. That’s good enough for me and probably good enough for a courtroom.

8. Take as much space as you need. Some notes go for half a page, and others may be eight pages long. Whatever. Paper is cheap.

9. When the day is done, rule a big thick red line below the last entry. Tomorrow’s entry starts below it. That red line is an obvious visual indicator that breaks the days up. It’s very handy.

10. Keep the last-filled notebook in the office, because it’s the one you refer back to over the next few weeks or so. Earlier ones, from two back, take them home and store safely. I have boxes of them.

This system works

For me, my system is stable, and it’s been that way for years. It works well for me, and it suits my temperament and training.

I tried going all digital, with Evernote, but it just complicated things to the point of being unusable. It was always much faster and easier to jot notes down during meetings or phone calls. Evernote is a great tool and I use it every day, but it wasn’t a match for this purpose.

Maybe something else will come up that’s more suitable, like Roam, Notion, Obsidian, Bear, IaWriter, etc. These and others are all candidates, and they’re all pretty good.

But what I have is good, and I plan to stick with what I have and incrementally improve as required. Your mileage, as always, may differ.