Oh, I have so been there. I still have paper notes *everywhere,* but breaking this bad habit has been a priority for the last several months, and it's getting better.
Before I got my iPhone, which has required some changes in my system that I'll talk about another time, I had settled on a three-place solution:
1. A Moleskine Weekly Notebook (the kind with the week's calendar on the left side of the spread and a blank page on the right) for keeping my schedule and my to-do list. It's rare for me to have more than one or two appointments scheduled on any given day, so the small space dedicated to each day was fine. Notes relating to a certain event or day could go on the bottom of the to-do page.
2. A small notebook for my purse to capture random notes/reminders that I could then transfer to the calendar or act on later as necessary.
3. A spiral notebook for my desk to capture random jottings, notes from meetings, and so on. Pages can be torn out and recycled as they become obsolete, but because the pages are bound together, they can't wander away otherwise. I have a wacky memory in that I can remember that I wrote a particular note about 1/3 of the way back in the lower outside corner of a left-hand page, so this system isn't too onerous for me.
This worked pretty well, although it did have some drawbacks:
- If I was out somewhere and someone wanted to schedule something with me, I didn't have my calendar with me so I couldn't make firm plans on the spot.
- The purse notebook ended up being a bit of a black hole in that things went in but were rarely seen again. (It was, however, very handy to have something available to write on at all times; sometimes just writing it down is enough to make me remember it.)
- If I had to move appointments or to-dos around (a frequent occurrence in the unpredictable world of publishing), it got very messy.
The iPhone has replaced the calendar/to-do list and the purse notebook (although I'm still struggling with coming up with workable systems for those), but I'm still using the sprial notebook and love it. My current favorite is the Sasquatch Idael Book from Carolina Pad for random jottings that don't have to live on my person. And I've moved all the Post-Its out of arm's reach.
