I’m now a full two years into using my variation of the Memindex/Bullet Journal on index cards and starting a third. I still find 4 x 6 inch index cards more freeing and flexible than using the more common notebook format. One big difference since a year ago: I’ve moved into using a significantly bigger box for increased storage which also includes lots of space for project notes, my zettelkasten / commonplace book practice, and an index for all of it.
I sometimes use one of the four typewriters behind my desk for logging. (Another benefit of using cards.) I put in a new card in the morning and add/cross out as I go throughout the day. I often use one of the other typewriters to write out slightly longer mini-diary entries about particular things as I go. This helps me get away from computer screens, even if it’s only for short breaks throughout the day.
Happy to answer any questions people have about the practice. (Prior AMA here.)
Continuing on with my bullet journal-like Memindex practice using 4 x 6 inch index cards for 2024. Happy to continue answering questions about it for the curious.
I’m just wrapping up a year of maintaining my bullet journal practice using index cards instead of the more popular notebook form factor. It’s heavily inspired by the century+ old Memindex method.
It was fascinating to run across the Memindex, a productivity tool from the Wilson Memindex Co., advertised in a December 1906 issue of System: The Magazine of Business. Memindex seems to be an obvious portmanteau of the words memory and index.
Let YOUR MIND GO FREE
Do not tax your brain trying to remember. Get the MEMINDEX HABIT and you can FORGET WITH IMPUNITY. An ideal reminder and handy system for keeping all memoranda where they will appear at the right time. Saves time, money, opportunity. A brain saver. No other device answers its purpose. A Great Help for Busy Men, Used and recommended by Bankers, Manufacturers, Salesmen, Lawyers, Doctors, Merchants, Insurance Men, Architects, Educators, Contractors, Railway Managers Engineers, Ministers, etc., all over the world. Order now and get ready to Begin the New Year Right. Rest of ’06 free with each outfit. Express prepaid on receipt of price. Personal checks accepted.
Also a valuable card index for desk use. Dated cards from tray are carried in the handy pocket case, 2 to 4 weeks at a time. To-day’s card always at the front. No leaves to turn. Helps you to PLAN YOUR WORK WORK YOUR PLAN ACCOMPLISH MORE You need it. Three years’ sales show that most all business and professional men need it. GET IT NOW. WILSON MEMINDEX CO. 93 Mills St., Rochester, N. Y.
Early Computer Science Influence?
The Memindex product appears several decades prior to Vannevar Bush’s “coinage” of memex in As We May Think (The Atlantic, July 1945). While many credit Bush for an early instantiation of the internet using the model of a desk, microfiche, and a filing system, almost all of these moving parts had already existed in late 19th century networked office furniture and were just waiting for automation and computerization. The primary difference in this Memindex card system and Bush’s Memex is the higher information density made available through the use of microfiche. Now it turns out his coinage of memex appears to have been in the zeitgeist decades prior as well. I’ve got evidence that the Wilson Memindex was sold well into the early 1950s. (My current dating is to 1952, though later examples may exist.) Below I’ve pictured some cards from the same year as Bush’s now famous piece in the Atlantic.
Most people are more familiar with the popular 20th century magazine System than they realize. Created and published by A. W Shaw, one of the partners of Shaw-Walker, a major manufacturer of office furniture in the early 20th century, the popular magazine was sold to McGraw-Hill Company in 1927/8 and renamed Businessweek which was later sold again and renamed Bloomberg Businessweek.
Relationship to other modern productivity methods
Some will certainly see close ties of this early product to the idea of the “hipster PDA” or Hawk Sugano’s Pile of Index Cards which appeared in 2006. It also doesn’t take much imagination for one to look at the back of a Wilson Memindex envelope from 1909 or an ad from the 1930s to see the similarity to the 43 folders system, bits of Getting Things Done (GTD), or the Bullet Journal methods in common use today. The 1909 envelope also appears to combine a predecessor to the 43 folders idea mixed with the hipster PDA in a coherent pocket and desk-based system.
With alphabetic tabs for the desktop version, one could easily have used this for “Building a Second Brain” as described by modern productivity gurus who almost exclusively suggest digital tools for maintaining their systems now. The 1909 envelop specifically recommends using the system as “comprehensive card index” which is essentially what most second brain or zettelkasten systems are, though there is a broad disconnect between some of this and the reimagining of the zettelkasten in current craze for using Niklas Luhmann-esque organization methods which have some different aims.
What’s interesting beyond the similarities of the systems is the means by which they were sold and spread. Older systems like the Memindex or related general office filing and indexing systems (Shaw-Walker), were primarily selling physical products/hardware like boxes, filing cabinets, holders, cards, and dividers as much as they were selling a process or idea. Mid- and late-century companies like Day-Timer or FranklinCovey also sold physical stationery products (calendars, planners, boxes, binders, books, ) but also began more heavily selling ideas like “productivity” and “leadership”. Modern productivity gurus are generally selling the ideas of the systems and making their money not on the physical items, software or programs which implement them, but with consulting fees, class fees, subscriptions, books which describe their systems, or even advertising against page or video views.
The 1906 version of the Memindex was popular enough to already be offered with the following options of materials for the distinguishing tastes of consumers:
Cowhide Seal Leather Case and hardwood tray
Am. Russia Leather Case and plain oak tray
Genuine Morocco Case and quartered oak tray
What options is your current productivity guru or system offering? What are the differentiations and affordances it’s offering compared to similar systems in the early 1900s? Where is the “rich Corinthian leather“?
The Memindex Method
The basic Memindex method consists of using 2 3/4″ x 4 1/2″ (vest pocket sized) or 3 x 5 1/2″ cards depending on one’s size preference to jot down to do lists or tickler items on individually dated cards which are kept in a desk-based wooden card index with tabs for both months as well as alphabetic tabs in some systems. One then keeps a small pocket-sized card holder with the coming three weeks’ worth of cards on their person for active daily use and files them away as the days go by.
Apparently the truism “everything old is new again” is true yet again.
Over the past several weeks I’ve been thinking more and more about productivity solutions, bullet journals, and to do lists. This morning I serendipitously came back across a reply Paul Jacobson made about lab books on a post relating to bullet journals and thought I’d sketch out a few ideas.
I’m honestly a bit surprised that no one has created a bullet journal plugin for WordPress yet. Or maybe someone comes up with a bullet journal stand alone product a bit like Autommatic’s Simple Note? Last week after a talk I attended, someone came up to me who had self-published 400+ copies of a custom made bullet journal that they wanted to sell/market. I’ve also been looking at some bullet journal apps, but my very first thoughts were “Who owns this data? What will they do with it? What happens if the company goes out of business? Is there a useful data export functionality?” For one of the ones I looked at my immediate impression was “This is a really painful and unintuitive UI.”
Naturally my next thought was “how would the IndieWeb build such a thing?”
Perhaps there’s a lot of code to write, though I can imagine that simply creating Archive views of pre-existing data may be a good first start. In fact some good archive views would be particularly helpful if one is using a plugin like David Shanske’s Post Kinds which dramatically extends the idea behind Post Formats. This would make tracking things like eating, drinking, reading, etc. a lot easier to present visually as well as to track/journal. One could easily extend the functionality of Post Kinds to create “to do” items and then have archive views that could be sorted by date, date due, tags/categories for easier daily use. Since it’s all web-based, it’s backed up and available almost everywhere including desktop and mobile.
I know a few people like Jonathan LaCour and Eddie Hinkle have been tinkering around with monthly, weekly, or annual recaps on their websites (see also: https://indieweb.org/monthly_recap). Isn’t this what a lot of bullet journals are doing, but in reverse order? You put in data quickly so you can have an overview to better plan and live in the future? If you’re already using Micropub tools like teacup (for food/drink), OwnYourSwarm (for location), or a variety of others for bookmarking things (which could be added to one’s to-do list), then creating a handful of bullet journal-type views on that data should be fairly easy. I also remember that Beau Lebens had his Keyring project for WordPress that was pulling in a lot of data from various places that could be leveraged in much the same way.
In some sense I’m already using my own WP-based website as a commonplace book (or as Jamie Todd Rubin mentions on Paul’s post a (lab) notebook), so how much nicer/easier would it be if I could (privately) track to do lists as well?
Of course the hard part now is building it all…
Additional notes and ideas
I started thinking about some of this ages ago when I prototyped making “itches” for my own website. And isn’t this just a public-facing to-do list? I don’t immediately see a to-do list entry on the IndieWeb wiki though I know that people have talked about it in the past. There’s also definitely no bullet journal or productivity entries, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t build them.
There are a lot of preexisting silos on the web that do to-do lists or which have productivity related personal data (Google notes, Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, etc.), so there are definitely many UI examples of good and bad display. For distributed group task management I could easily see things being marked done or undone and webmentions handling notifications for these. I suspect for this to take off on a wide, distributed scale for company-wide project management however, more work would need to exist on the ideas of audience and private or semi-private posts. The smaller personal side is certainly much more easily handled.
As another useful sub-case for study, I’ll note that several within the IndieWeb are able to post issues on their own websites, syndicate to GitHub’s issue queue, and get replies back, and isn’t this just a simple example workflow of a to-do list as well?
Greg McVerry has also mentioned he’s tinkered around in this area before primarily using pre-existing functionality in WithKnown. In his case, he’s been utilizing the related idea of the Pomodoro Technique which is widely known in productivity circles.
I’d be thrilled to hear ideas, thoughts, additional brainstorming, or even prior art examples of this sort of stuff. Feel free to add your thoughts below.
Leo Laporte and Megan Morrone discuss Capsicum, a new subscription app by Illuminated Bits. It's a bullet journal with digital washy tape and cool fonts, plus a way to visually track good habits, keep your Google or Apple calendar, make to-do lists, keep a gratitude journal, a diary, or more. A great tool for living your best (or your worst) life.
Somewhat entertaining review. I wish they’d talked about data import/export a bit. Entertaining that the app has some of the physical attributes that people put into their physical versions. Sadly no mention here of productivity porn however.
Bookmarked to watch on February 8, 2019 at 12:25PM
I recently began using a Bullet Journal. Longtime readers who recall my going paperless days might find this odd. My going paperless experiment was just that–an experiment to see how far I could go without paper. Eventually, I decided that there were good reasons (for me) to continue to use paper....
Isaacson pointed out that more than 7,000 pages from Da Vinci’s notebooks survived to today–a stretch of 500 years. He asked how many of our tweets and Facebook posts will survive even 50 years. Paper, it turns out, is a durable medium of information storage. ❧
Of course one also needs to think about reach and distribution as well. His notebooks have much more reach and distribution now than they ever did in his own lifetime. Where’s the balance? Blogging about it, syndicating to social media, and then printing paper copies in annual increments?
Looking at some of those bullet journal masterpieces made me wonder, how much of bullet journaling is just...productivity porn? ❧
How many times have I thought this myself?
My bullet journal has to be the most spartan and utilitarian book of lists ever created.
For all the bullet journal related blogs I’ve seen on WordPress, I’m surprised there isn’t a related plugin that allows one to turn their website into an actual digital online Bullet Journal.
Eliza and I have extended the Bullet Journal to include a Weekly Index – a two-page spread showing the entire week in one snapshot. It has been working for us for several months.
From idea to finished manuscript - this is all the ins and outs of how I do my research - it goes quite well with this blog post, which I neglected to mentio...
From idea to finished manuscript – this is all the ins and outs of how I do my research – it goes quite well with this blog post, which I neglected to mention in the video… http://www.elliemackin.net/blog/tech-tools-and-research
My bookshelf! https://ellie.libib.com
Using the Gantt chart in my research planning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKD5hDGfVb8
Research planning in a Bullet Journal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHL9t9e-hjQ
Academic Bullet Journal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ3Aacpelic
Academic Otters: https://lizgloyn.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/the-proper-care-and-feeding-of-academic-otters/
CamScanner: https://www.camscanner.com
In addition to camscanner, and because you use OneNote, you might find Office Lens to be a useful phone app for photographing individual pages and transferring them directly into your OneNote application. It usually does a great job of taking poorly positioned photographs or photos from odd angles and cleaning them up to look as if you’d spent far more time positioning the pages and taking the photos.
For those capturing photographs of primary sources, I’ve recently found Google’s PhotoScan mobile app to be incredibly good, particularly at re-positioning the corners of photos and reducing glare.
In this vlog I talk more specifically about how I use my Bullet Journal for research planning, including how I use my Gantt chart to block out time, and what happens from there.
I’m Ellie, an early career ancient historian working on Greek religion. I make videos about research, being an early career academic, and my work. Printables! Calendex