My brilliant idea and how I refined it

Bill Wright · 2014-04-25T01:37:28+00:00

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...

Apr 25, 2014 20 Replies

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Thomas Prufer 12 years ago

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(Monk, changing the IT system from scroll to book, old-but-good)

Thomas Prufer

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My brilliant idea and how I refined it

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