Finally keeping a Journal?  GREAT! What kind? A daily diary? A sketchbook? Fitness Log?  Writing stories? Random thoughts.  All great ideas!  And while its perfectly wonderful to keep all of these things in on great book, sometimes it works better to keep things separate and a bit organized.

I enjoy keeping a daily record.  It’s an exorcise in consistency I love, but by no means a necessary part of keeping a journal.  I also enjoy doing random research and keeping up with projects and crazy schemes and sometimes this breaks the flow of my day-to-day log.  At one time I kept two books.  One notebook that I kept with me all day to snatch up everything as it happened and a book that stayed by the bed to get a nightly entry of the days activities.   Soon I found that by time to make that daily entry I had only a watered down version of the day’s events.  I started carrying both books with me.  I carried “journal” for catching thoughts and ephemera, and my “diary” for catching events as they happened. With two books in my bag to write in, plus whatever book and magazines I was reading at the time, I had quite a hefty load to carry daily.  In addition, I was never happy with the idea of having more than one book in which to write.  I experimented with allotting sections of the book for subjects (kind of like your notebook from school) only it was IMPOSSIBLE to know how many pages to allot for each section and I found I was having to end one section before I finished the pages in another.  Unfortunately it was my only solution for a long time.

One day I picked up a magazine to read and noticed that this issue had a “special addition” that was a dedicated second magazine that was attached to the back of main magazine only it was flipped upside down.  It was a clear demarcation of where one magazine ended and the other started.  It was, in a sense, two books in one.  I snatched the idea IMMEDIATELY!

Here is how the “Flip-Journal” works:

When you choose a book, choose one that has basically the same back as it does front.  One of those plain black sketch books work great for this.  Then choose one side and make a note of what you are journaling in this side.  Then flip the journal end-over-end and make a note about what you are journaling on this side.  I usually make an adjustment to the two covers to indicate what goes in which end.  For example, I drew the right half of a brain (complete with an ornate letter R) on one end and the left half on the other.  The “left-brained” side was for daily entries and the “right-brained” side was for what ever I felt like exploring or just jotting down.

That’s it.  That’s my simple but powerful technique to get two journals out of one book. All of the entries in one section will be totally upside down when reading from the other end. When the two sections meet (somewhere in the middle) the book is full. Both sections cover the same period in time so it’s easy to file and reference later.

Here is a brief list of some of the subjects of my Flip-Journals in the past.

• Daily Diary / Random Journal
• Random Journal / Sketchbook
• Random Journal /Fitness Log
• Sketchbook / Wine Journal (yeah, a Bohemian phase)
• Random Journal / Blogging drafts and ideas (currently)