I use paper a lot. I think on paper. I fill up multiple notebooks per year with notes, planning, clarifying and working things out on paper.
It dawns on me that few people talk explicitly about how they use their notebooks, and fewer still write about it to share advantages.
I'm not going to write a treatise on notebook usage -- but I've got three tips I've adopted that I think are uncommon.
1. Blank Line At The Very Top
I always skip the first line of a piece of paper. This might sound small, but I find it makes notebooks much easier to skim rapidly for topics and have the headlines stand out. I'll also often write notes and comments later in a different color pen, and having the top line free means I can write a summary line or an update in red or blue. This is the least radical idea here, but maybe the most useful.
2. When turning the page of the notebook, start on the right and leave the left blank.
Same idea and reasoning as above. This means that the majority of "skim this for important stuff" looking for headlines are on the right page only. It also means that, after a notebook is well-used, I still have open space to make additions and addendums.
This does lead to wasted pages if something isn't updated (like in the image above), but who cares? It's minor, paper is cheap, and this makes notebooks more useful. This does present the (seeming) problem that the left pages of my notebooks usually come after the immediately-to-the-right page notes, but I'm used to it at this point. To make things explicitly clear, I draw arrows at the top and bottom of pages when I move from right to left.
3. Sometimes work from both the back and front of a notebook.
Sometimes I'll have two radically different kinds of work. I'll be outlining writing, science, and planning from the start of the notebook -- and I'll also need to be making checklists and crossing off rote mundane to-do items.
In the past, I did two things which don't work so well -- the first was carrying multiple notebooks, which is a bummer. Weight, space, and just having a lot of barely-started-not-used-much notebooks meant this wasn't good.
The second way I did it was mixing in high concept notes and to-do lists to check off... but my rapid-use checklists tend to be messy, chaotic, lots of crossing off and amending, etc, whereas my notes and planning tend to be more coherent and clean to read. It's disruptive and makes skimming take longer when they're mixed together.
So now, when I need to do a very different kind of work in a single notebook, I start working from both the back and the front at the same time. Sounds odd, but it works. I almost always start with the front of the notebook (so I know it's used) regardless of if it's high-concept or nitty-gritty, but if I know I'm going to be segmenting it, I'll put the high concept stuff in the front and the nitty-gritty in the back to work backwards from.
When a notebook is finished that's used like that, I'll fold or rip one or two pages in the middle prominently as a reminder to myself that I can stop skimming/reviewing, because the back of the notebook is just completed checklists.
In the comments -- How do you use your papers and notebooks more effectively? Found anything fascinating or fantastic for little effort?