I have a little notebook with 100 pages. I write things in it. Shopping lists, appointments, phone numbers, all sorts of things. For years I've had the problem that I can't find things in the little book. I used to flick through it for ages sometimes, with the queue behind me in the butcher's getting longer and longer, before finally I'd say, "Oh yes! Bacon!" I had the idea of sticking bits of paper to the first page of each section, with the edge sticking out a bit. On the sticking out bit I wrote headings, such as 'butcher'. But these bits of paper got ripped off in my pocket, so I did them again and reinforced them with Sellotape. The ink ran under the Sellotape and the headers became illegible. I abandoned the sticking-out bits of paper. It occurred to me that if I drew a different symbol on each and every page, I would be able to find each section by looking for the symbol. I made up 100 different symbols, which was surprisingly hard, and in practice this idea wasn't much better than looking at the actual contents of each page, one after the other. What's more I was having difficulty in remembering which symbol represented which section. It then occurred to me that if I numbered the symbols I might be able to remember them more easily. I did this, then in a real brainwave I transferred the numbers as well as the symbols to the actual pages. I then realised that I should have chosen numbers that were in actual numerical order, instead of having them in random order. I started again. I crossed out all the numbers and symbols (which I'd realised were redundant, really) and wrote in new numbers. The first page I numbered '1', the second page I numbered '2', and so on, all the way to the last page, which I numbered '100'. After a few weeks I had a sudden flash of inspiration. I wrote down all the numbers from 1 to 100 in a row down the left side of a piece of paper and then went through the whole book. I wrote down the name of each section on the piece of paper, next to the number on the page it occupied in the book. Hard to grasp at first, but if for instance the butcher list was on the page with the number 25 on it, I wrote 'butcher' next to the '25' on the piece of paper. Now I could see at a glance, just by running my eye down the sheet of A4, where to look in the book for each section. And because the numbers were in numerical order I could find each page quite quickly. For instance, if I wanted 'butcher' the list would tell me to look for number 25. If I opened the book at, say, the page that had 21 on it, a moment's thought would tell me to look a few pages further on. If however I chanced to open the book at the page with 53 on it I would be able to figure out quite quickly that the best thing to do was close the book and try again. You see, 53 comes nowhere near 25 when the numbers are in order. You just need to be able to remember the order of the numbers. After a while I got pretty good at this. I'm one of those people whose brains work best when I'm unconscious. So it was that I suddenly jumped out of the bath, where I had been snoozing, and shouted 'Eureka!' I'd had not one but two brilliant ideas. The first was that instead of putting the numbers down the left side of the A4 sheet I could put the section names down that side. The other was that I could alter the order of the sections, as shown on the sheet of A4, at will. They didn't have to be in the same order as they appeared in the book. This was a breakthrough. In the end I decided to put them in an order determined by their first few letters, with the first letter carrying the most weight, and so on. So I had Addresses, Baker, Butcher, Chicken notes, Dog notes, Egg record (see chicken notes), and so on. This meant that with a knowledge of the alphabet I could find each section almost instantly. I then realised (you see how this idea evolved by a series of logical steps?) that there was no need to cram in the numbers associated with pages that had nothing on them. This meant that the whole list of sections and numbers was so small that I was able to cut round it with scissors and glue it into the notebook. But what if I couldn't find it? I put it in the book on the last page, then just to make sure I wrote on the book's cover in large letters 'Index: 100'. Rather than patent this idea I have decided to make it freely available to the whole world, as my contribution to the happiness and well-being of future humanity.
Bill