What I have been doing for all my notes since I was about 16 years old was adding little bits of data on each page that would allow me to easily find what I’m looking for. I started simply with page numbers, something I’m betting many of us do, but there are so many other ways you can find anything in your Moleskine, here are a few tips.

Positioning your metadata

The most important thing when placing your metadata in your Moleskine is to go inwards. Put the most relevant or most important bit of data on the outermost part, since this is easiest to access. You can then work systematically inwards, placing the less important bits of data as you go.

Another way to go is to put all your data on the outer edge, which would be the right side for most. You can move along the side vertically instead of horizontally, so by just folding up a bit of each page you can see all relevant info. For me it’s hard to write consistently this way, and it would look horrible for me, so I take the horizontal approach, but whichever way you choose id fine.

Use information relevant to you

Just because all of us always put in page numbers and titles at the top, this doesn’t mean you have to too. You may have a book of thoughts where page numbers don’t really mean anything. In this case you may want to add tags, categories, dates, etc, so your data becomes better organized.

Having as much info as possible is good, but you shouldn’t go overboard and cram everything there is onto the top of your page. Choose a set of data that you need, but one that fits well on the page, adding to your experience instead of bogging it down with data not really needed.

Using tags and categories

Tags and categories can be used with Moleskine notebooks, not just blogs and web pages. In the same way you categorize a post, you can do so with an entry in your Moleskine. Once you’ve used one for a while you will get a rough estimate on your methods. You may spend 50% of the notebook on thoughts, 30% on tasks and 20% on misc. When you go out and buy your next notebook you can pre-label a number of pages with categories you will use.

Color coding is also a way of categorizing and tagging entries. Instead of having to label your Moleskine entries, just use some colored markers or highlighters to indicate them. You can create a page which contains the rules for categorizing, using just 3 markers, which you can keep in the Moleskine, you can color code at least 12 categories easily using horizontal and vertical lines, simple colors, the possibilities are endless.

Further customization

As I just said, the possibilities really are endless. You can cut off the corners of some pages to indicate they are no longer in use, you can cut away corners in different ways to indicate different categories.

You can fold them in, attach post it notes, even rip them out. The point it that there is no set rule for marking and organizing your Moleskine, it is yours to develop and tailor to your own specific taste. If you have your own cool ways of organization and productivity with your Moleskine please let us know!