I decided to go computer-less during the talks at VueConf 2018, opting instead for a small Rhodia notebook and my TWSBI ECO-T fountain pen for taking notes about talks, vendors, people I met, and all the awesome things I found in New Orleans. I had been introduced to Bullet Journaling recently and liked the flexibility of the system, so I tried one part of it – the Index with page numbers – to wrangle my normally-unsearchable paper notes.
However, those little Rhodia books have a lot of pages, and half of those pages are more awkward to write on than others, specifically the pages at the “top” of the notebook when it’s open and cradled in my left hand. I did not want to number both the “top” and “bottom” pages sequentially, so I ended up only numbering the “bottom” pages. When I used a “top” page, I gave it the “bottom” page’s number with an up arrow. This worked out really well for being able to jump around in this small notebook and keep track of what was where.
I decided to not stop there. I did not want to number all of the pages of this little book, not knowing if I’d use it all, but I did want some things in the back. If I wanted to move an item to the back to the book, I started numbering from the bottom pages at the back of the book with the last page being 1, but marked with a down arrow. And if I wanted to write on the top page, the top page got both an up and down arrow:
This lets me use the whole book from both directions without having to number the whole book, and while letting me throw in whatever I want at any spot in the book and find it quickly.