P.S. I Indexed 70 Notebooks. Here's What I Learned.

There comes a point when one’s trail of notes exceeds one’s ability to remember them. I am well past that point. I’ve amassed more than seventy notebooks over the past two decades. But I’ve never sat down to make them searchable…until now.

Ever since I wrote about Emerson’s tips for finding notes two years ago, I’ve wanted to try his indexing system. So I set myself the task of going through my notebooks from graduate school onward (about 21 years’ worth of notes).

Most note-takers struggle to find past notes. Unless you have a Niklas Luhmann kind of mastery, it’s part of the process. Even so, it’s worth trying to salvage notes from the past—to “keep on nodding terms” with the selves you used to be, to borrow Joan Didion’s phrase.

I am still growing my index, still working on cultivating connections among my notes—it feels a bit like discovering roots undergirding my intellectual development. (Someday, I’d like to index my diaries and personal notes.)

I should say that this kind of large-scale indexing is still quite new to me. But I found it surprisingly pleasant—soothing, even.

There was something mesmerizing about watching my note-taking style and thinking patterns develop over decades. It’s sort of like going through old photos—except I was watching my intellectual development unfold as I revisited foundational quotations and ideas for how I think about writing, reading, and teaching.

In what follows, I share the method I used to index my notebooks, along with 7 things I learned along the way.