The mail on March 18 arrived with two packages: contact lenses for Kelly and my latest Field Notes quarterly edition, “Signs of Spring.” The timing was just about perfect since this year, the vernal equinox is March 20 (tomorrow, as I write this). This edition is something of a milestone for me. By my count it is my 25th conesecutive quarterly special edition. I began buying annual subscriptions beginning with the Summer 2016 “Byline” edition.
The most current edition comes with a yellow, textured cover and dot-grid pages. In addition, the package came with an extra standard Field Notes notebook, with a back cover matching that cover the subscription box, itself something of a work of art. Also in the box: a Field Notes “band of rubber” and a pen. These pens usually go to the family, since I use Pilot G-2s. Field Notes pens are scattered around every room of the house.
Front and back of the special edition with the artwork on the back cover.
I always look forward to the begining of spring. It is the best season. It is hard to appreciate the spring without having preceeded it with a winter that includes cold weather and snow. It is those winters that make spring all the better. Spring used to mark the new year, and I like that. My birthday falls toward the beginning of spring and one’s birthday seems the most logical way to mark a new year, since it is quite literally the beginning of a new year for you.
The name “Signs of Spring” is fitting for an edition released in conjunction with the vernal equinox. We tend to think of spring as a time of beginnings. Flowers beging to bloom again, leaves reappear on trees. Spring cleaning is a kind of renewals too. It was at the beginning of spring that for many years, I reread Isaac Asimov’s 3-volume memoir.
Ideally, the beginning of spring marks a perfect time to start a new Field Notes notebook. But I started one not too long ago, lost it, found it, and still have not filled it up yet. I like filling a notebook before moving onto a new one, so this spring, the timing isn’t quite right. In the meantime, my “Signs of Spring” notesbooks have been added to my Field Notes collection. I’ll fill one eventually, and probably give one or two away as little gifts along the way.
Written on March 19, 2022.
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I have been a dedicated user of Field Notes brand notebooks since 2015. Since then, I have rarely been without a Field Notes notebook in my back pocket. These Field Notes notebooks represent my short-term memory. They contain fleeting notes, lists, ideas, names of people (if I don’t write them down I am liable to forget them), and just about anything else I need to remember. Here are 2 annotated pages from a notebook from 2016.
Capturing my Field Notes in Obsidian
My process for capturing my notes in Obsidian is straight-forward. At the end of each day, I open my Daily Notes file for the day and do the following:
Flip through notes in my Field Notes notebook looking for anything worth saving.
Tranfer those items worth saving into my daily notes.
Elaborate on these as necessary
Most of what I jot in these notebooks stays in the notebooks. The most common things to go into Obsidian are:
blog post ideas
notes jotted about things I read or listed to
notes from experiences, like tours, museum visits, etc1.
I will frequently elaborate on notes as I enter them. For instance, if I entered a post idea for “capturing field notes in obsidian” in my notebook, when I add that note to my daily notes, I might expand it, add some sub-bullets, flesh it out a bit, or clarify it so that it is more useful than what I scribbled in the notebook.
For a while, I prefaced these items in my daily notes with an “FN” to indicate that they came from a Field Notes notebook, but I gave that up as completely unnecessary.
I do try to fit the notes into the rhythm of the day in my daily notes. If I jot down a blog post idea on my morning walk, that will go into the earlier part of my daily notes for that day. If I wanted to note a particularly good restaurant where we ate dinner, that will go in the latter part of the day
Usually, I don’t add a whole lot and probably spent less than 5 minutes each day transferring notes from my notebook into Obsidian.
Below is a page from my current Field Notes notebook from March 6, 2022, followed by my daily notes for the same day. I’ve highlighted the notes in the notebook page that I moved into Obsidian, and highlighted them in Obsidian so you can see the end result.
Page from my Field Notes notebook. Items highlighted in the red boxes were transferred to my Obsidian daily notes
And below, here are the my Obsidian daily notes for the same day:
My daily notes from March 6 — items in the red boxes came from my Field Notes notebook.
Why not just capture these notes directly in Obsidian?
People who see me with my Field Notes notebook frequently ask why I don’t use a note-taking app for these notes. “Aren’t you the paperless guy?” they’d ask back when I was Evernote’s paperless ambassador. Plenty of people do capture their notes directly in Obsidian and it works perfectly fine for them, there are 5 reasons why I use a notebook for these fleeting notes instead of an app.
1. A notebook is faster for me
In my experience, nothing is faster or more convenient than a pen and a notebook. Believe me, I have tried. I’ve measured the time it takes me on paper and in a dozen or more note-taking apps over the years. A notebook is always faster. I think there are few reasons for this:
In the time it takes to pull out my phone, unlock it, open the app I want, and create a new note, I’ve already jotted the note in my Field Notes notebook and moved on to other things.
Over the years I’ve developed a kind of shorthand that makes jotting notes even faster.
2. I enjoy using a notebook
I like using a notebook. There is a tactile difference to jotting notes with pen and paper that I enjoy and that I probably wouldn’t give up even if an app was developed that was more convenient than paper.
3. A notebook doesn’t run out of battery life
I don’t have to worry about a dead or dying battery with a notebook. I may run out of pages, but when I am down to the last few blank pages in a notebook, I always have a second with me. I may run out of ink, but I always carry two pens.
4. A notebook gets me off screens, for at least some of the day
I try to avoid screens for everything. When I walk in the morning and have an idea for a post, or want to jot a note on the book I am listening to, I don’t want to look at a screen. My notebook provides a convenient way to capture fleeting thoughts without depending on my phone.
5. A notebook acts as a good filter for fleeting information
As I said earlier, not everything that goes into my notebook needs to be kept. I don’t need to put shopping lists into Obsidian. I don’t need to record the name of our server in the restaurant we’re eating at in Obsidian. For those things that are worth keeping, the shorthand in my notebook reminds me of them and I when they do go into Obsidian, I can elaborate on them as needed.
What about the notes I don’t capture in Obsidian?
For a while, I considered scanning the pages of my notebooks and storing them as PDFs in Obsidian, but that seemed like too much work for too little gain. Put another way, it seemed impractical to do that. Instead, I’ve found that capturing just those things that I find useful in the future is enough.
As for all of the other notes: when I fill up a notebook, it goes into a box with all of the other Field Notes notebooks I’ve filled up over the years. Any time I want, I can flip through them and see the stuff that I needed to remember on a given day. It is difficult to search the notebooks this way. I once spent quite a bit of time searching for a beer brand in my notebooks. But that’s why I lean toward keeping notes in Obsidian that I think will be useful in the future. In Obsidian, I could easily locate what I am looking for.
A box of my Field Notes notebooks
In next week’s episode, I’ll talk about how I use Obsidian to manage my writing, illustrated through 5 use cases
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Well, it finally happened. I lost a Field Notes notebook today. I don’t know exactly when it happened. Maybe on my early monrning walk. Maybe sometime later. But I can’t find my notebook anywhere. The good news: I’d just started this notebook a few days ago, so there wasn’t much in it. Also, I’ve gotten into the habit of transcribing important stuff into my daily notes in Obsidian each day. The bad news: it was a brand new “Heavy Duty” edition, which is one of my favorites.
This was bound to happen. Since June 2015, virtually no day has passed without a Field Notes notebook in my back pocket. That’s nearly 7 years. I’ve filled 33 Field Notes notebooks during that time without losing a single one. Until today.
Inside the cover of every Field Notes notebook is a place to record your name, address, dates, and contact information in case the notebook is lost. Maybe someone will find my notebook and try to get it back to me.
The inside cover a Field Notes “Heavy Duty” notebook.
Even though I didn’t really lose anything critical, I was disturbed when I noticed the notebook was missing and I couldn’t find it anywhere. My notebooks is never more than a few feet from me at the most. If it is missing, it must be truly gone, and there was something both frustrating and disappointing about that.
The Heavy Duty editions had sold out for a while, but when Field Notes announced new production of the notebooks, I ordered a bunch of them (I did say they were my favorite) and so I have quite a few in my collection. I have since resigned myself to the fact that the one that I had this morning is gone. A brand new one is in my back pocket as I write this ready for its first ink.
I haven’t written in it yet, though. I keep telling myself that as soon as I write in it, I’ll hear Kelly’s voice from the other side of the house call out and say, “I found your notebook.” Eventually, though, I’ll have to give in, if for no other reason than to jot down the fact that this notebook is a replacement of the first Field Notes notebook I ever lost.
Assuming I lose one out of 34 notebooks, and assuming it takes me nearly 7 years to fill 33 notesbooks, I should expect to lose the next one on about November 6, 2028. If you are still following this blog then, ask me about it and I’ll tell you how things are going.
Written on March 1, 2022.
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I filled four Field Notes notebooks in 2021, which is about average for me. Some years I’ve filled more, some less. I started the year with a National Parks edition (Acadia). One of the first notes I have for 2021 was a list of my favorite books from 2020. It is interesting to see the order I jotted them (from memory) and the order that I finally put them in when I wrote about them. There is also a note reminding me to watch the Cobra Kai series, which I really enjoyed. (And I just finished watching the newly released season.) There are lots of shopping lists and notes for post ideas. There are also things I jotted down that might have been for posts but which I never ended up using (at least so far). One of these is a note that reads: “Autocorrects are the bloopers of texting.” I think there’s something in that.
Next up was a United States of Letterpress edition. That notebook begins with notes related to migrating this blog to WordPress.com (from a self-managed installation of WordPress). There are also lots of notes in that notebook from our summer road trip through upstate New York to Cooperstown, Seneca Falls, Niagara Falls, and places in Pennsylvania and Ohio. There is a page with a list of rides we rode when we took the Littlest Miss to Dutch Wonderland for her birthday. And there our notes from our long weekend in Rehoboth Beach, where a waiter in one of the restaurants we ate at saw my Field Notes notebook and referred to me as a C.I.A. guy because I was jotting things down on paper.
Then there is a Trailhead Edition (Appalachian), which continues with notes from our time in Rehoboth Beach. Lots of notes in this one recording scores for fall soccer games as well as notes from parent-teacher conferences. Also is a note with the names of our new neighbors. I always try to jot down the names of people when I meet them. Jotting them down almost guarantees I will remember them later.
I wrapped up the last part of the year with a Workshop Companion edition (Wood Working version). Lots of notes on this one on vacation planning, and especially, planning out the 21 blog posts I wrote in advance of heading off on our recent 3-week vacation. This one contains a rare sketch I made (sitting in church on Christmas Eve, waiting for the service to begin) as well as my score for a round of mini golf I played with the family (2 over par). This one spills into 2022, but three-quarters full already and I suspect I’ll be starting a brand new notebook in a week or so.
Sketch I made waiting for church to begin
I still have a large supply (probably around 100) blank Field Notes notebooks to choose from. And I get more each quarter as part of their annual subscription. I gave away quite a few notebooks as gifts to friends and family. I haven’t decided which one I’ll go with next, but the Heavy Duty edition is a personal favorite so that one is a possibility. Stay-tuned.
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I was doing some holiday shopping and decided to add myself to the list. I bought myself an early present: a home for my Field Notes notebooks: their archival wooden box. Here is what the home looks like, inside and out:
I’ve organized the notebooks inside the box by date, which is convenient for me. The box came with enough dividers to get me through 2026. I put a few unused notebooks in here to fill up the space in the meantime. Those are just a handful off all of the unused notebooks I have on hand. Likely, I already have enough to last me a lifetime. Even so, I just renewed my annual subscription to Field Notes for the 7th year in a row. My shelf of notebooks now looks like this (left side and right–I couldn’t get both in a single image. You can see my note Field Notes box in the center between my reference books and my old typewriter.
I also ordered myself a couple of Field Notes t-shirts, as well as their 2022 Work Station calendar (which I had a search for elsewhere last year because they’d already sold out). Those should be arriving sometime next week. Among these things, I also picked up some gifts for friends and family. Notebooks, like book, often make great gifts for people.
It’s nice to have a home for these notebooks, at least for the ones that I have already filled up. At the rate I use them, that home should last a few more years before it become full and I have to seek out another one.
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Yesterday, I received as part of my Field Notes annual subscription, the 52nd quarterly release: The Harvest Edition! Just in time for fall! Here is what came in my shipment:
As always, I am looking forward to trying out one of the new notebooks just as soon as I fill up the one I am currently have in my pocket. Once nice thing about the current edition: the pages are perforated making them easy to tear out, if you need to be able to do that.
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Recently I wrote about how I like my notebooks battered and ink-stained. I really do. But sometimes, a notebook can get so battered that it begins to fall apart. We spent the long Labor Day weekend at the beach, and while there, the current Field Notes notebook I carried began to come apart at the seams. Below you can see where the cover started to split from the rest of the notebook.
What happens when a notebook comes apart like this? What do I do? It depends on how much of the notebook I have filled. If the notebook still has a lot of blank pages in it, I will repair the notebook with some Scotch tape and continue to use it. If, however, there are only a few blank pages left, I do what any regular notebook user would do, I retire the current notebook and pull out the backup.
I always carry a backup notebook, for just this reason. (Also, because I never know when I will end up filling the one I am carrying.) I don’t mean to say that I have two notebooks on my person at all times, but in my backpack, which goes on trips with me, I carry a spare. In this case, when we returned to our hotel room, I put the damaged notebook (which had about 4 blank pages left) into my backpack and pulled out the spare:
In this case, the spare happened to be one of the new Field Notes Trailhead editions, and this was the first time I’d used one. (I selected the Adirondack trail since I live on the east coast.) This served me well for the rest of our time at the beach. In a way, I think it was something of a lucky break (no pun intended): scanning the first four pages of the new notebooks, I find that I jotted down 9 blog post ideas. Was it the notebook, or my time off at the beach that produced so many ideas in such a short span?
When I returned home, I went through the usual routine of closing out a notebook. First, I repaired the notebook with Scotch tape, a low-tech solution that works fine, considering that now that the notebook in question is no longer a “working” notebook, but a reference document. You can kind of see where I taped it in the images below.
Next, I updated my Index to my Field Notes notebooks. This is just a simple index of notebook number, which I write on the back of a new notebook (see the image above right, for example), and the dates that the notebook spans.
One “feature” I’ve added to my index is that I’ve noted which notebooks I’ve filled during the pandemic. My thought was that when I was much older, or the kids were older, it might be interesting to go back and remind ourselves what life was like during the pandemic. I’m looking forward to drawing the second horizontal blue line that will represent the practical end to the pandemic. It can’t come too soon.
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Sometimes it is hard to remember what I have written here and what I haven’t. Yesterday, for instance, my friend Mike asked how I carry around my notebook and pen. In my reply, I joked that my answer deserved a post of its own. Then I got to thinking it wasn’t really a joke. I could write a post about what I carry around in my pockets every day. I could write about the annoyances of having to pull all of that stuff out, clown-car style, each time I pass through a security checkpoint. I could tell of the amused looks I get when I pull things out of every pocket on my person. I even came up with a perfect title: What’s In Your Pocket.
But you’re ahead of me already. As I am wont to do these days, I did a quick search of the blog for the term “pocket” and almost immediately found a 2016 post titled–wait for it–“What’s in Your Pocket?” in which I wrote about what I carry around in my pockets, the annoyances about having to pull it all out at security check points, the amusing looks, etc., etc.
Instead, I decided I should stick to Mike’s question–and his comment. Mike asked:
how do you carry your notebook and writing implement? As one with ink stains in places they don’t want and who detests rumpled corners and bent pages, I’m always on the hunt for the best way to, well, carry.
Believe it or not, I’ve been asked this question frequently, perhaps because I’ve written about my Field Notes notebooks frequently. The answer is that I carry the notebook in my back left pocket. I’ve been keeping it there for the better part of seven years now. On the rare instances when I discover it isn’t there, I get that unsettled feeling one gets when one realizes keys or phone is missing. Along with the notebook, I slip two pens into the same pocket, one black, and one blue ink Pilot G-2 0.7.
I think Mike might have been looking for a better answer than “in my back pocket along with my pens.” He was looking for a way to protect both this clothes and the integrity of his notebook from the destructive forces a pocket can apply to page corners, covers, and the like. But to me, this is part of the beauty of using a notebook in the first place. I want my notebook to be well-used. It should look battered and ink-stained. I think of that scene from Raider’s of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones pulls out his field notebook and with pencil between teeth, begins flipping pages. His is the notebook of an active field archeologist. My notebooks, battered though they are, reflect how much I use them.
I pulled a random stack of my used notebooks from the shelf and spread them out to illustrate just how battered they get over the course of their lives in the confines of my back pocket. Fanned across the top are a random collection. Below them is my current notebook, about two-thirds of the way filled.
To see just how well-worn these notebooks get, here are some close, more detailed shots. In the first two images, you can see how battered the notebooks get. I love this about them. They start out almost pristine, and there is nothing quite like starting a new notebook. But as I use them, it shows. The third image shows some extremes, as in where I have to take the cover of the notebook so that it stays on.
My pockets get ink-stained as well. Not huge stains of ink, but small, black and blue stains where the points of the pens touch the fabric when they are exposed. This is the cost of doing business. This is like Indiana Jones’s dusty hat and outfit showing the rigors of his labor. Kelly and the kids have come to accept these ink stains and no one else asks about them, although I’d be happy to explain them if they did.
This is probably a long answer than what Mike was looking for, and maybe not the answer he was looking for either. If there are readers out there who, like Mike, prefer to keep their notebooks wrinkle-free and clothes ink-free while carrying around your notebook, please drop your suggestions for how you do this in the comments. And meanwhile, if you are looking for some more good stuff to read, you can check out Mike’s blog.
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My morning routine was a little out of whack yesterday. On Saturday, we made a long day trip to Lancaster, PA, about a 2-1/2 hour drive north. We spent the day at an amusement park for the Littlest Miss’s birthday. We left the house at 8 am on Saturday and were home just before 10 pm Saturday night. It was 300 miles of driving and 7 hours on my feet at the park. I was tired. So I slept in later than normal, and didn’t head out for my morning walk until 7:30 am, an hour and a half later than usual.
When routines go sideways, that’s when things get missed. I left my Field Notes notebook and pens back at the house. I realized this on my walk. I was listening to Episode 528 of the Tim Ferriss Podcast, listing to Tim interview Jimmy Wales. Something was said and I pulled out my notebook to write it down–and my notebook wasn’t there!
So rare is it that I am without my notebook that the feeling I had was the same feeling I get when I feel for my keys and suddenly realize they are not in my pocket. It is that sinking, uh-oh feeling. It latest for a millisecond but it was there. I was annoyed that I’d forgotten my notebook. I pulled out my phone and emailed myself the note I was going to take and continued walked.
My walks are often punctuated with stops like these. Something I am listening to will trigger a thought, or I’ll get an idea for a blog post, or remember something that I have to do later in the day. Over the years, I’ve trained myself to always stop what I am doing and write down the thought. If there is even a question of whether or not it is worth writing down, I err on the side of caution. I have never regretted jotting a note in my notebook, but I have often regretted not writing down some idea that popped into my head, thinking I’ll remember it later. I never remember it later. Often, this means stopping half a dozen times on a morning walk to jot notes. This is true at any time of the day or night. If I wake up in the dark with an idea, I’ll grab my notebook, which is always on the nightstand beside me, and jot the note. Sometimes I’ll turn on the light, other times I’ll do my best in the dark.
My Field Notes notebooks are filled with things that would otherwise have disappeared from my short term memory forever. They are the way I remember things for later. Thus, the importance of writing it down. Sometimes, I feel silly. When meeting new people, I am terrible with names. I’ve tried the trick of saying the person’s name and that never seems to work for me. What I do instead, is casually pull out my notebook and jot down the names as soon as I can. That helps immensely. But people sometimes look at me funny when I pull out a notebook. I’ve gotten over it. I’ve had to, if I want to remember these things.
When I go to the store to get, say, milk, and ask Kelly if there is anything else we need, if she gives me more than 2 things, I write them down. At the amusement park yesterday, I jotted a list of all of the rides we went on, so that I could write in more detail about them later. Just seeing the list helps to trigger memories of the events.
The page from my notebook, describing the rides we went on Saturday.
Being without my Field Notes notebook was much more uncomfortable than those rare occasions when I forget to take my phone with me. Being able to write things down in the moment helps me continue with my day, and come back to those things later, when I am ready. Whenever I hear myself saying, “I’ll remember this,” alarm bells go off in my head and I’ll write it down. The worst come when those alarm bells go off while driving. Then, I’ll lean on Kelly, and ask her to jot something down for me.
Stephen King has said he doesn’t write down ideas because the good ones will keep coming back and the bad ones will disappear. I see value in that, but jotting down notes and ideas, for me, is quick and easy, and takes up little space in a notebook. So why not write them down, even if I never come back to it?
It reminds me of that old piloting adage: I’d rather be down here wishing I was up there, than up there wishing I was down here. When it comes to writing notes, I’d rather write it down and never use it, than not write it down and lose it forever.
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Packing for our recent road trip vacation, I grabbed a blank Field Notes notebook and tossed it into my backpack. I had only halfway filled my current Field Notes notebook, but I tend to jot down a lot more random stuff on the road than when I am at home and I don’t want to be without a spare.
There is something so pleasant about a new notebook. It is pristine, clean. By the time I fill a notebook, it looks well-worn, and I like that look. But there is something so appealing about a brand new notebook. I put it in the same category as freshly mown lawns, and new haircuts.
Flipping through a bunch of my old Field Notes notebooks, I noticed a trend: the first page of the notebook is always much neater than the pages that follow. I’d never noticed this before, but it’s true. It is as if I want to maintain the pristine quality of the pages by writing as neatly as I can on that first page. After the first page, things go rapidly downhill. Especially when I am on trips–in the field, so to speak. I often jot things down while I am walking, which is not an easy task.
A messy page from my current notebook, with scribblings from our time at Niagara Falls
This phenomenon seems to hold true regardless of the type of notebook I am using. When I start a new Moleskine Art Collection notebook for my journal, I love the clean look of the notebook, and always write extra-neatly on that first page. The phenomenon carries through to the Leuchtterm 1917 notebooks that I have as well. (I keep my master reading list in one of these notebooks, and this is the one exception to the above rule: all the pages in this notebook are usually neat.)
In the past, I’ve mentioned how the final pages of a notebook are often blank. I suspect this is in part because I am eagerly awaiting the new notebook, and the chance to write neatly, at least on one page. Indeed, just knowing that I have a blank notebook sitting in my backpack is a temptation. But it is one that I try to live with stoically. After all, I’d rather have a blank notebook waiting to be used than no notebook at all.
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As part of my Field Notes annual subscription, I get a quarterly shipment of the newest Field Notes notebooks. Yesterday’s mail brought their 51st quarterly edition, “Trailhead.” This edition’s theme, as you might guess from the title, are the great trails of the United States. Each 3-pack of notebooks comes with a different trail printed on the back, and facts about the trail on the inside back flap of the notebook.
My new Field Notes “Trailhead” notebooks
These editions contain lined pages. I prefer squares or dotted squares, but I like that these pages are an off-white. As with most of the subscription packs, this one came with an extra goodie: a Field Notes “Blaze Your Trail” patch.
This quarterly shipment is the 17th consecutive quarterly shipment I’ve received from Field Notes since I began subscribing back in 2016. I began my subscription with their 34th quarterly edition and the Trailhead edition marks Field Notes 51st quarterly edition. Despite having filled more than 30 notebooks at this point, I still have more coming in than I can fill at any moment. I have a section of shelf in my office dedicated to a wide variety of fresh notebooks to choose from once I fill one up:
My collection of Field Notes notebooks ready for use when I need a fresh one.
I have a tendency to use whatever the latest notebook is as the next notebook, so chances are good I’ll pull out one of the Trailhead notebooks when I finish with my current notebook–which happens to be a United States of Letterpress edition.
It’s fun to occasionally go back and flip through the old notebooks. There is all kinds interesting stuff in them, like when I had to locate the name of a beer I liked. I recently began an experiment of scanning in the old notebooks to make them easier to search no matter where I was. I scanned in one as an experiment. Now I have to go back and scan in the other 29 that I have already filled. I’ll get to that eventually. Filling a notebook is much more fun than scanning one.
It occurred to me that while I know of friends and a few other people online who have told me that they also use Field Notes notebooks, I’ve never run into anyone at the grocery store, or a conference, or anywhere else I can think of that has a Field Notes notebook in their pocket, and is pulling out the notebook frequently enough for me to notice that they are using one two. I see people with Yankees hats all the time. How come I don’t see more people with Field Notes notebooks (or any notebook) for that matter, jotting things down? Does everyone use their phone for this stuff these day? I still find taking notes on my phone way too cumbersome and time-consuming.
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I am rarely without a Field Notes notebook in my back pocket. Several times a day, I pull out my notebook to jot something down: an idea for a post; notes from a podcast; the names of people I meet; items to pick up at the grocery store; the name of the server in the restaurant we ate at; funny lines I hear at a gathering. I do this so that I can remember these things later. Some of them find their way into posts I write, some into stories. Other things are more ephemeral, but even a server’s name in a restaurant can be useful if I am searching for a character name in a story.
I’ve filled more than 30 of these notebooks since 2015. They sit in a nice row on a shelf in my office. Occasionally I go back to them, to look for something, like when I was searching for a particular brand of beer recently. The problem is, I only have access to them when I am sitting here in my office. It would be nice to have access to them no matter where I was.
My 30 completed Field Notes notebooks, with an index notebook on top.
This weekly playbook is a kind of experiment. I began with the idea that I wanted to be able to access these notes anywhere. I had two ideas:
Transcribe the notebooks into Obsidian, where my other notes live, or
Scan them into Evernote
I decide to try both in order to see what worked better for me. The playbook section below has the procedures I followed for each. In each case, I used my most recently completed notebook, book #30. I’ll describe my findings in the commentary.
Playbook
Transcribing notebook into Obsidian
Create a Field Notes folder in Obsidian
Create a new note called “Book 30 – March to June 2021.
Begin typing in the notes using the following guidelines:
Make each “day” a header in the notes
If my handwriting is unintelligible, put question marks and move on.
Wherever I have a dividing line in my notebook, include a divider in the notes file
Use only one file per notebook
Scanning notebook into Evernote
Create a Field Notes notebook in Evernote.
Using the Scannable app by Evernote, scan in all 48 pages of my notebook #30, including the cover and inside cover.
Once scanned, put the note in the Field Notes notebook
Title the note “Book 30 – March to June 2021”
Set the create date of the note to March 1, 2021
A transcribed notebook page in Obsidian
A scanned notebook page in Evernote
Commentary
It probably took me an hour to transcribe the first 15 pages of the Field Notes notebook into Obsidian. After an hour I stopped. It is easy enough to estimate that a full notebook would take me a little over 3 hours to transcribe.
On the other hand, it took about 15 minutes to scan the entire notebook into Evernote using the Scannable app. (I think Evernote’s Scannable app does a slightly better job at scanning than the regular iOS app does.)
For me, the Evernote scan is the better over all option. There are several reasons for this:
It is quick enough to make it worthwhile. Investing 15 minutes to have the contents of the notebook available to me anywhere is a worthwhile investment of time. 3 hours is a little much. I am not likely to invest 3 hours, but 15 minutes is no big deal.
The notebook really is available anywhere. The screenshot above is from my phone. I can flip through the pages just as I can with any PDF.
Scanning preserves everything in my notes, include occasional sketches and diagrams that I make.
Evernote uses its AI to attempt to make the PDF searchable. It is supposed to be able to recognize handwriting. I made several attempt, but I think my handwriting is too messy. Still, for people with very neat writing, the notebook is searchable. I keep the notes in their own notebook in Evernote for this reason: when I want to search for something in a Field Notes notebook, I can limit the search to notes in the Field Notes notebook so that I don’t get results from other sources.
There are a few cons to using Evernote over Obsidian:
The notebook is not as searchable as it would be if I transcribed it into Obsidian. I could probably find things faster in Obsidian.
My notes would be in plain text format and could be manipulated like any plain text.
I could do more dynamic linking of my notes to other notes using Obsidian. (You can link to other notes in Evernote, but there is no practical way to do this in scanned documents.)
Another consideration is that I want to get my entire backlog of notebooks in a format that I can access anywhere. Transcribing 30 notebooks into Obsidian would be an investment of nearly 100 hours of my time. Scanning 30 notebooks into Evernote is an investment of 7-1/2 hours. From a practical standpoint, this is a no-brainer.
Remember, my goal at the outset was to be able to access the notebooks from anywhere. My goal wasn’t to make them as searchable as they could be. I’m fine flipping through a PDF to find what I am looking for. It usually doesn’t take very long, so it seems like the investment in time to manually transcribe all of my notes would be overkill.
Going forward, when I finish a notebook, I’ll follow the procedures for scanning that notebook into Evernote.
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