weblog.masukomi.org - entrepreneurs notebook

The Entrepreneur's Notebook (part 1)

2012-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Part 1 of 3

What is an Entrepreneur’s Notebook?

Simply put, it’s a collection of entrepreneurial ideas for businesses you have, or are thinking of creating: products, marketing, sales, strategy, etc. The techniques that follow will help you to massively multiply the quantity of ideas you have, your recall of past ideas, and your ability to create connections between ideas. And the only thing you have to buy, is a notebook.

These three posts will lay out the process, why it works, techniques for making a more useful notebook, backup strategies, and tips for choosing a good notebook, and more.

Step One: Get a good notebook.

(CC photo by thomas@flickr, on Flickr)

First, you need to get a notebook; a real, paper notebook. Lots of you will think “But I love [insert favorite note-taking app here].” Trust me, you want a physical notebook. A physical notebook always exists. It doesn’t disappear when you quit it. It doesn’t need to be launched. It doesn’t get low batteries, or need to be woken up, and you won’t be able to forget about it when you’re constantly carrying it around. It sits there, on the edge of your vision, silently encouraging you to write in it.

It’s easy to ignore, or forget about something you wrote down in an app, especially when it isn’t visible at the moment, but, your notebook is right there, and as you flip through it, looking for the next blank page, you are reminded of all the other ideas you’ve written down in it, and connections begin to form that wouldn’t otherwise.

Now, “Good” is very subjective when it comes to notebooks, but you’ll find my suggestions on what to look for in Part 2.

Step Two: Carry it with you everywhere.

cc mush m.

The act of carrying your notebook with you constantly is far more important than which notebook you choose. Make sure you’ve always got your notebook and a couple spare pens or pencils. While you’re buying your notebook, take a moment to grab yourself some writing instruments that you’ll actually enjoy using, rather than whatever cheapy ball-point you found on your desk.

Don’t leave your notebook in your bag

Pull it out and put it on your desk when you get to work. Set it on the end-table when you relax at home. Make it a constant part of your daily routine.

(CC photo by koalazymonkey, on Flickr)

Step Three: Write every idea down in it immediately.

Time and again you’ve sat at your desk, read an article, and had some little spark of an idea go off, and then kept reading and promptly forgot all about it. Don’t ever do that again. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good idea or not. What matters is the act of capturing and exploring it. Whenever you have one of these ideas, stop your self immediately and write it down in your notebook. The article / video / TV show / boring business meeting will be there when you’re done.

My ideas notebook travels in my backpack, which goes with me just about everywhere, but I also carry a tiny pocket reporters-notebook in my jacket pocket so that, if I have an idea while walking down the street, I can just stop walking, pull the pocket-notebook out, jot down my idea, and keep going. Interesting ideas are not allowed to escape undocumented.

If you can take a few minutes to explore the idea, do so. You don’t have to flesh it out completely, just let the thoughts flow, unjudged, and unimpeded until they come to a natural stopping point.

If you have an idea for a web interface, sketch it out. If you thought of a great way to market something, write it down. If you thought of a gotcha that might send everything swirling down the drain, write it down. Thought of some software that would make creating it easier? Write it down.

It is very important that you do not worry about the quality of the ideas at this point. Just get them down on paper; good, bad, and mediocre.

Repeat.

The more you do this the more ideas you’ll capture, and not just because you’ll be accreting them over time. The act of capturing these ideas helps you to notice them more, and the more you notice, the more you write down. You’re having interesting ideas constantly, everyone is, but they slip through the graps of most people because they simply haven’t trained themselves to capture them.

Don’t use it for grocery lists

You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Doodling doesn’t affect the quality of the content in your notebook because it doesn’t contain information your brain needs to parse, but things like grocery lists contain information that’s irrelevant to your projects and become random noise that pollutes an otherwise useful resource.

With that said, you may find it to be a good place for to-do lists related to the projects in your notebook. I generally avoid this myself. My task-lists are constantly growing and changing.

Step Four: Evaluate

The more you do this the more your brain will start buzzing about all these possible businesses you could be starting or projects you could be working on. Choose whichever one you’re most excited about at the moment and dive into it. With me, I just hit a point every couple days where my brain is so abuzz with ideas for some app I want to create that I have to just stop and write for the next ten to twenty minutes. It’s almost always one that I’ve accreted a page or two of notes on already.

When you find one that you really think might be worth starting as a business, take some time to try and figure out every possible way you could monetize it. How would you have to market it? Where would you have to market it? How bad is the competition? If there isn’t any, take a minute to figure out why. Do a little research and see if there are actually enough people interested in this type of thing.

Draw circles and arrows. Make connections. Read Dan Roam’s: Back Of The Napkin. It is an incredible resource that is guaranteed to quickly, and easily improve the quality of your notes.

Why this works

At the start of this post I promised this technique would “…help you to massively multiply the quantity of ideas you have, your recall of past ideas, and your ability to create connections between ideas.” Here’s why:

Physically writing creates links between the spacial and verbal parts of the brain, and studies have shown that by some strange quirk of biology, the brain thinks that writing something is the same as if we were actually doing it. This is similar to how the practice of actively visualizing something can trick the brain into thinking it’s actually doing it.

Conversely, the more time you spend trying to recall something, the more likely you are to forget it in the future. It is better to look something up directly, than attempt to dredge it from your hazy recollection of a half-remembered thought stream.

Studies have shown that writing things down longhand improves recall. In part this is due to the fact that it increases blood flow to the parts of the brain that handle memory. If I remember correctly your recall is typically improved by 10%. Alas, I can’t find the study to quote for you.

“…a psych professor at Dominican University of California found that people who wrote down their goals, shared them with others, and maintained accountability for their goals were 33% more likely to achieve them, versus those who just formulated goals…* and a survey of note-taking studies found several examples where [longhand note-taking] helped students with recall and academic performance.” - LifeHacker

Now, there haven’t been any studies I’m aware of that address my claim as to quantity of ideas, but I find that entrepreneurial thinking is a skill that improves with practice, just like any other. Carrying an Entrepreneur’s notebook is just as much about having a central place to capture and connect ideas as it is about having a process that encourages you to think entrepreneurially on a regular basis. As I mentioned above, by getting in the habit of writing down every entrepreneurial idea the moment you have it you become more aware of them.

As to my final claim of creating connections to ideas, that should be obvious. You’ll have a book of them that you’ll be regularly flipping through. How can you not make connections in that situation?

What next?

Go get yourself a blank notebook!

If you want some helpful suggestions that will improve the usability of that notebook, continue on to Part 2.

The Entrepreneur's Notebook (part 2)

2012-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Tips for more productive note-taking

Part 2 of 3

One notebook for everything

While there are some good arguments to be made for per-project notebooks, I’m going to strongly recommend you avoid this approach until you find yourself with a project that is starting to overwhelm your main notebook and is likely to consume many more pages.

The problem with multiple notebooks is that two things will keep happening if you take this approach: 1) you won’t have the “correct” notebook with you when an idea strikes 2) you’ll end up with a lot of notebooks with almost nothing in them, which isn’t just wasteful, but leaves you feeling like you’ve let the ball drop on an idea.

Title every page with the project name

Don’t worry about getting a good name for it at the start. Just write down something that describes it well enough for you to know what you were talking about like “Chihuahua Jackets”. I typically write my title over a thick black line that extends to the edge of the page and is always at the same place on the page so that as I’m flipping through pages I can easily find the ones pertaining to the idea I’m looking for.

When I eventually do figure out a domain name for the site (and have bought it) I’ll go back and write the new name above the old titles, so that the new name is on all the pertinent pages.

Only one project per page

Sometimes you’ll just have one wee idea to write down. Don’t be tempted to use that empty space on the bottom of the last page. If you do you’ll end up with a notebook where everything is mixed together on every page and hard to find.

Just flip to the next blank page, give it a title and start writing. Don’t worry about wasting paper, because you will have more thoughts on the topic later. When you do, use your Table of Contents (see below) or flip back until you find its page and add the new thoughts to it.

Doing this, you’ll wind up with one project’s notes interspersed with pages of notes from other projects. This isn’t a bad thing. When you’ve got an A5 sized notebook (or larger) you’ll have a decent amount of text (or drawings) on each page, and seeing the titles from your other projects as you’re looking for something will help keep those projects fresh in your mind.

I find that a typical pocket-sized Moleskine is detrimental to this kind of note-taking because you simply can’t fit much on a page. The extra portability just isn’t worth it in the end.

No spare pages

Sooner or later you’ll have an idea where you’ll be tempted to leave a few blank pages at the end of your note for the thoughts you plan on adding later. Don’t do this.

You will never guess the right number and you’ll end up with notebook filled with swaths of blank pages, which leaves you feeling that you’ve failed to flush out an idea, and that you’ve been wasteful to boot. Plus, good notebooks aren’t cheap.

Number each page

This will be important in the next step, but don’t bother numbering them all in advance. That’s just annoying. Number them as you go. Maybe pre-numbering a dozen or so pages ahead if you really feel like it.

Create an Table of Contents

It’s easier to do than you might think, especially if you’ve followed the two steps above. First, set aside the first 3-5 pages of your notebook, and write “Table of Contents” on the first one. This is the only exception to the “No Spare Pages” rule.

Since you’ve only got one project per page, each page has a page number, and you’re titling each page by project, it becomes much easier to reference where things live in your notebook.

When a new project / topic gets entered flip back to the table of contents and add a new line. I recommend skipping one line between projects, because it’s hard to predict which ones your brain will get all excited about in the long run, and the ones that do will end up with a lot of associated pages. Write down the name of the project and follow it with the page number of the page you just added about it. Just write in the new numbers as you add pages. For example:

Entrepreneurs Notebook: 11, 27, 29-32, 44

I find it easiest to add to, or update the table of context when I’m flipping through the book later. Trying to remember to write down the page number in the index when I’m having the both risks distracting yourself (“oh yeah, I forgot about that other project…”) and feels a bit too much like work. My table of contents frequently languishes until I am reviewing or need to find something specific, then I’ll go through and add the new entries that hadn’t been noted since the last time. Usually it’s just a handful.

If you’ve got a page that really important to the project, and you’re likely to need to reference repeatedly, then circle (or similarly highlight) the page number here.

Doodle in it

Seriously. Even if it’s just silly swirly things to alleviate the boredom of a meeting. The act of using your notebook for something as inconsequential as doodling lowers the barrier to writing in it. If you just use it for “serious” stuff then you’ll be more hesitant to open it up to note those half-formed ideas that are still just tickling the edges of your brain.

A new notebook can be somewhat daunting. I recommend that the first thing you do with a new notebook is to give it a title page, and doodle on it. Once you’ve done that it’s no longer perfect, and pristine. It’s no longer limited to pretty or good things. Now, you don’t have to worry about the quality of the stuff that comes next.

Emphasize the Important

Wrote something down that’s particularly important? Draw a box around it. Circle it. Underline it. Use big arrows. Use red ink. Do whatever it takes to emphasize the things that are important to you. It’ll make them stick out when flipping through, make them easier to find when searching, and just make your notebook more interesting looking.

Save non-business ideas too

While I wouldn’t recommend using your Entrepreneur’s Journal for diary style journaling, or throw-away things like grocery lists, you are going to have some interesting thoughts that aren’t necessarily related to business. Maybe you’ll encounter a great quote. Maybe you’ll watch a a great talk and think of some new goal to work towards. This will help reinforce the idea that this is where to go when you have a neat idea.

Accept the rough edges of life

Doodling, especially if you doodle in margins, has the side-effect of making it easier to accept the times when you’ll need to cross out a misspelled word, or scratch out an “incorrect” thought.

Accept that you will make mistakes and scratch things out. It’s ok. This isn’t a notebook of perfect things. It’s a notebook of thoughts, and ideas.

Making things readable.

(CC INK photo by anroKath on Flickr)

Most people I know are convinced that their handwriting is crap. Some of them are correct in that belief. Improving it really isn’t that hard though. All it takes is a little practice, and a little mindfulness. Austin Kleon has improved his by finding examples of beautiful handwriting he admires and working to emulate it. My recommendation, if you want to improve yours, is to write the alphabet once a day, and be mindful as you write. If you create a particularly egregious piece of handwriting, scratch it out and redo it, or endeavor to make the words that follow it as readable as possible.

As a side-effect improving your handwriting will increase the chances that handwriting recognition software (OCR) will be able to understand it (see Part 3)

The Entrepreneur's Notebook (part 3)

2012-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Notebook choices, and backups

Part 3 of 3

What about backups and searchability?

This is one place where the digital age is unquestionably superior. Dropbox, iCloud, email… there are myriad ways to back up your digital writing, and text is easy to search. On the mac, Spotlight gives you great search across every document you’ve ever written and searching within a document is easy in any text editor. Paper… not so much.

Searchability

In practice though, searchability is not a big deal, especially if you’ve got a Table of Contents (see Part 2), but even without one, you’re just flipping through a notebook’s worth of pages, that are all clearly titled by project. Finding your notes on a given idea turns out to be fast and easy, and as I mentioned in Part 1, the process of flipping through pages helps to keep other ideas fresh, and connect things that wouldn’t otherwise be connected.

Backups

This, is a notable limitation. The best strategy I’ve found is to simply take a picture of it. If you’ve got a smartphone the quality should be plenty good to zoom in on your computer and read whatever’s there. If you don’t have a smartphone any digital camera should have decent enough resolution.

I should call out the Evernote Smart Notebook. “For the Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine, Evernote finds the dot pattern and even corrects the skew of the photo. This means that the images that end up in your account are perfect for Evernote’s handwriting recognition, so that you’ll be able to find you thoughts anytime. “

Having had personal experience with handwriting recognition I can say that it absolutely can work, if you have clean handwriting, but, if you’re scribbling down ideas as fast as they come to you, you’re handwriting is not going to be “clean”, and OCR software is terrible about dealing with the more visual note-taking styles. Imagine you wrote “bigger” in a bubble with an arrow pointing to a diagram? How is the software supposed to know where to put it in a text only version of your page? I wouldn’t even know where to put it. With that said, Evernote is probably the best tool currently available for backing up your notebook pages, and there are very few people trying to tackle this particular problem.

Scanning vs. Photographing

In general scanning a bound book is annoying. You can’t run the pages through an automated scanner, and on a flatbed scanner you have to press down consistently on the spine for the length of the scan or risk having a shadow over everything written close to the spine.

While scanning is always going to take longer, and be more annoying than simply photographing your notebook’s pages, it will always get you better results. But, you have to ask yourself if it really matters enough to bother. In my experience it doesn’t. I almost never reference scans, and if I did manage to loose a notebook I’d previously photographed or scanned I suspect that I’d just print out the relevant pictures and staple them into my current notebook, or just copy the info.

The Boundless Notebook mentioned below sidesteps the major scanning problems by letting you use standard 8 1/2“ x 11“ paper which you fold in half (approximately A5 size). When you’re done you can pull it out, flatten the fold, and put in in a scanner with an automatic feed, or do them one by one on a flatbed scanner, without having to hold down the spine and worrying about shadows. As a bonus, they’re easy to put back together when you’re done.

If having high quality backups is important to you, I can’t think of a better solution than the Boundless Notebook, especially when combined with an automatic feed scanner, which you’ll frequently find on those ginormous copy/scan/fax machines at work.

Scanning Tip

Most scanners have a white surface behind whatever you’re scanning in order to reflect the maximum amount of light back to the scanning head. This is a problem when scanning something with writing on both sides because it can make the back side visible through the paper. To get around this, put a piece of black construction paper behind whatever you’re scanning. The light that passes through your paper won’t be reflected back to the scanning head. You can try scotch-taping the black paper to the top of your scanner but it may cause issues with automatic-feeds.

Notebook suggestions

If I was to recommend a traditional notebook I’d vote for the Rhodia Webnotebook in the A5 size with “Dot Grid” pages. A5 is roughly the same size as an 8 1/2“ x 11“ page folded in half. It’s small enough to carry around but big enough to fit decent sized sketches of your next brilliant ideas. A dot grid is what you’d get if you removed all the lines from grid paper but left a dot where each of the intersections used to be; a literal grid of dots. Grid paper feels like it simply has too much on it for me, and lined paper feels too restricted to writing. Dot grids provide a nice balance. The dots stay out of the way. Your paper isn’t covered with lines. Your writing stays relatively straight, and it’s easy to sketch things with the grid of dots to guide you.

If the dot grid doesn’t seem your style, I’d recommend picking up an A5 (“Large”) Blank Moleskine.

(Look closely to see the dot grid - CC Photo by retro traveler, on Flickr)

Rhodia’s Dot Grid notebooks are somewhat hard to find, but you can get one from JetPens along with some nice writing utensils and free shipping, or pick up a Large Blank Moleskine from Amazon. Moleskine has recently come out with the Evernote Smart Notebook (see the section on this above) which comes in a variety of sizes, in ruled and dot grid variants.

Another interesting option is the Boundless Notebook by Jim Whittle. It’s essentially a large piece of leather with a couple carefully placed slits that allow you to slide your own paper in. What’s cool about this, is that the more creative folks out there can pre-print your pages with whatever structure best suits your needs. Kind of like those pre-printed day-planners, only designed by you to meet your needs perfectly. The downside to this notebook is that you’ll need to find something to do with the pages once you’ve filled them and need to insert new ones. But, maybe that’s a good time to just photograph them or scan them in for backup.

And, of course, there’s the Traveler’s Notebook by Midori:

(CC photo by guccio@文房具社, on Flickr)

This gorgeous soft leather notebook comes in two sizes and has an almost cult-like following, and a good variety of accessories, but the large version’s unique sizing means you can only get refills specifically designed for it, and there are only a handful of vendors in the US. There’s a good review of the Traveler’s Notebook here.

I’ve fallen in love with my Traveler’s Notebook.

Choosing the right instrument

In my opinion, finding a good writing instrument greatly enhances and encourages the continued use of your notebook. It doesn’t matter what pen, or pencil, you use, and it certainly doesn’t have to be anything fancy or expensive. What matters is that you enjoy the one you’ve chosen. Maybe you choose your pens for the looks, maybe for the feel, or the way the ink flows. Whatever makes you happy.

For a while my go-to pen has been the OptiFlow Rollerball from Staples, because I love how smoothly it writes, and how much ink it flows onto the page, and they have them in the supply closet at work ;) But I’m starting to use the Pilot Double-Sided Brush Pen for writing and the Kuretake No. 13 Fountain Brush Pen for drawing. I love pens with thick confident lines. They remind me of the felt-tip pen my father always used to use.

If you’re just “meh” on your current tool, check out the Selection Guides at JetPens. Then buy yourself a sampler of pens that sound interesting to you, and give them all a go.

Interested in getting an Entrepreneur’s Notebook?.

If 150 people express an interest, in an Entrepreneur’s Notebook style refill (supporting the workflow described in part 2) I’ll make one. It would have a section laid out for your Table of contents, a dark line to go below the project name at the top of each page, and a circle in the lower outside corners for the page numbers, probably with a dot-grid body. They’d be designed as refills for the Midori’s Traveler’s Notebook, but could also be used as stand-alone notebooks.

Please, let me know you’re interested so that we can make this happen. ;)

weblog.masukomi.org - entrepreneurs notebook

The Entrepreneur's Notebook (part 1)

Part 1 of 3

What is an Entrepreneur’s Notebook?

Step One: Get a good notebook.

Step Two: Carry it with you everywhere.

Don’t leave your notebook in your bag

Step Three: Write every idea down in it immediately.

Don’t use it for grocery lists

Step Four: Evaluate

Why this works

What next?

See also:

The Entrepreneur's Notebook (part 2)

Tips for more productive note-taking

Part 2 of 3

One notebook for everything

Title every page with the project name

Only one project per page

No spare pages

Number each page

Create an Table of Contents

Doodle in it

Emphasize the Important

Save non-business ideas too

Accept the rough edges of life

Making things readable.

See also:

The Entrepreneur's Notebook (part 3)

Notebook choices, and backups

Part 3 of 3

What about backups and searchability?

Searchability

Backups

Scanning vs. Photographing

Scanning Tip

Notebook suggestions

Choosing the right instrument

Interested in getting an Entrepreneur’s Notebook?.

References:

See also: