I have to admit I get interested in a lot of things.  Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason to what I am suddenly interested in.  I might start out the day with a slight interest in soap carving and suddenly around lunchtime I am introduced and obsessed with the Tung shing (Chinese almanacs).  I am only partly responsible for this.  Yeah I am easily distracted but the Internet is MADE to take me from one subject to another.  What’s a guy to do?

Well I take a page (figuratively and literally) from Barbara Sher’s book, Refuse to Choose.  Barbra identifies with so many of us that go through a half a dozen interests a day.  She has coined the term “scanner” for us.  She realizes that for most of these ideas and interests we don’t necessarily want to get a Ph.D. in the subject but feel the need to at least explore it for an indefinite amount of time.  She suggests the use of a journal that she calls a daybook to record these ideas for later and to explore them for as long as we feel compelled to.

The main tool I’ve adopted from this concept is her use of a two-page spread in the daybook.  Basically what it amounts to is opening your journal (this works great with larger format books) and using two facing pages to record everything regarding the subject you are pursuing.  Anytime you are researching this subject, you turn back to this spread and just add to it.  Soon you have a spread that is very dense with lists, names, websites, drawings, mind maps and thoughts.  It’s all neatly contained on the two-page spread for later reference if needed so you don’t have to cull the information from various pages scattered throughout the book.  If you need more than a two page spread, make another.  I generally use the next spreads to explore a detail from the first spread.

A quick 2-page spread planning a hiking trip to Moab this year.

Uses I’ve found for a two-page spread:

Taking a trip to a new city?  Do some research on what you might like to do there.

Buying a camera? List your pros and cons, wish lists and price lists and even glue in some pictures from the web.

A day at the beach? Sketch some shells and then later you can identify them.

Reading a good book?  Keep notes on the mystery or info from the biography.

Joined a new club?  List new friends names, meeting times, buzzwords etc.

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)