Essentially, this was spurred just a few days back when I went through my closet and found a box of all my old notebooks. I was writing down ideas and tracking habits in them well before I was ever aware the bullet journal was really a “thing.” It was only early 2022 when I actually adopted the system as Ryder Carroll conceived it, but that still left me with so many notebooks I filled in some capacity in one way or another.
I filled up only a small handful of “true” bullet journals since then, and I occasionally do want to go back and reference things in previous notebooks. While this isn’t too big of a deal or frequent of an occurrence for me due to my Second Brain on Obsidian, I have explored a few of my older notebooks and found some valuable information I would otherwise like to recall or re-reference again at one point or another.
So this leaves me thinking that perhaps a notebook naming system I can apply to all of my notebooks, old and new, would enable me to always go back and find something no matter what. I know this concept isn’t perfect for what I have, as I hadn’t used numbered pages in a good amount of my notebooks for years, but this should still enable me to at least have a general idea of what notebook was part of what particular period of time, which could help me narrow down events or things I had written down at particular points.
Of course, I decided to search on this first, but didn’t really find anything solid out there outside of people who generally wrote the months and years plainly on the spine or cover. Still, while I could have done that, I wanted a system that did just a bit more.
In the end, I decided to create my own.
What Do I Need My Naming System to Do?
I thought establishing a good criteria would have helped me create an ideal nomenclature. In other words, I had to ask myself what I expected to get out of a naming system for my notebooks.
After thinking about it for a several solid minutes, here’s what I conceived:
- I would prefer shorter names so I can easily tell right away what notebook I’m looking at. That’s why I wanted to eschew full-on words in favor of more concise numbering, though I was still open to the idea of perhaps single letters here and there.
- My system would need flexibility when it comes to documenting periods of time. For instance, if I wanted to have the year in the name, there’s always the chance that the notebook in question got used in the following year. I wanted something that could be used consistently while taking this into account.
- I need to be able to see them in a consistent order based on time period, especially if I applied the naming system to each notebook and put them all side-by-side.
- While I’m at it, I also wanted to forego exact calendar days. Since I typically use notebooks for months at a time, it didn’t really make sense for me to wonder if I started a given notebook on November 3rd or November 4th, for instance. The month is enough. Besides, I think trying to incorporate days would make things a tad less streamlined for my purposes.
- If some information is unavailable for one reason or another (read: my own poor or inexact documentation in the past), I can have something in the system that can indicate this.
- Modifiers of some sort are a must. I had all kinds of differently sized notebooks that I dabbled with or filled up entirely, and I thought a modifier would really help me tell at a glance what the notebook was used for, especially if it saved me from having to open it up and figure out what I originally wrote in it. While my other criteria seemed best with numbers, this is the place where I thought lettering would be helpful.
What Would It Look Like?
I sat down and brainstormed for a bit, and I eventually came up with something that looked like this:
# Notebook Naming Nomenclature
YYYY.XX:MM-MM:M
# year.(s):monthA-monthB:modifierIt may look complicated at first glance, but it’s quite simple once understood. Here’s a quick breakdown along with what this is supposed to mean.
The first YYYY part should be the year the notebook was originally started in. If the notebook was used in that year through December and into January of the following year, it would need the XX part added with the period in between. Otherwise, a colon would be fine to move to the next part.
# Year Examples
# Notebook Only Used in 2022, or Within One Calendar Year
2022:
# Notebook Used During both 2022 and 2023, or Through Two Calendar Years
2022.23:I then stick a colon afterward just so I can visually tell that this is the end of the part with the year indicated.
After this first colon, I’ll put the two-digit indicator for the month I started the notebook in (January through September include the leading zero just to make everything easier to read). In other words, the only possible values are 01 through 12.
To indicate the month I discontinued using this notebook, I’ll use a dash to indicate the span of time. Sometimes I fill up the notebook and can easily tell because I was usually good with dating pages, but in case that isn’t possible (maybe a notebook I found has no clear dates and was just full of scratch notes?), I’ll just fill in ??. Here it is with the year variable attached to it.
# Year and Month Indicators
# A Bullet Journal Used in 2022 only from January through July
2022:01-07:
# A much older notebook I had lying around in 2016 that I used through 2017 from November to March
2016.17:11-03:
# An old scratch pocket notebook that I only found 2015 written inside of, but was unsure of when I actually stopped using it
2015:??:
# Another old notebook where I see a clear start time in April 2018, but no clear end time
2018:04-??:Lastly, I wanted to plug in my modifiers after the final colons. I set up a small legend of single-letter modifiers so I can always label any of my notebooks:
- F for full-sized bullet journal
- P for pocket-sized bullet journal
- M for memo, a small notebook for quick scratch notes on the go. These notebooks are a little more loose with structure and may also be a notebook I would just have on my office desk several years ago. Most of them also happen to be pocket-sized.
- O for older, classic, pre-bujo notebooks entirely. These may also be full-sized, but likely have no page numbering or lots of longhand notes.
I simply put one of these letters after the final colon to indicate what kind of notebook I had. Using the handful of examples from above one more time with just enough added detail:
# A full-sized Bullet Journal used in 2022 from January through July
2022:01-07:F
# A much older notebook from 2016 used through some of 2017 from November through March
2016.17:11-03:O
# An old memo scratch notebook I know was from 2015, but I was unsure when I stopped using it
2015:??:M
# A pocket-sized notebook (not used as a bujo; filled with detailed, longhand notes) with a clear start time in April 2018, but no clear end time
2018:04-??:OThankfully, I’m much better at dealing with the time of when I started and ended notebooks these days, especially now that I follow the bujo system.
As an added bonus, I feel like the concept of threading will become much more useful between notebooks thanks to this. I can thread notebooks with references using these shortened, concise names in order to always know where a particular piece of information is in a previous notebook.
Now What?
Now that I have this in place, here’s what I have planned.
First: I’ll be using this nomenclature for every future bullet journal and notebook I use or fill up. For instance, the latest notebook I’ve finished using has the following characteristics:
- It was started this year, 2023, in April and I stopped using it on exactly August 31st.
- It’s an A5 (or “standard” or full) size notebook.
- It was used as a dedicated bullet journal.
Therefore, I would name this notebook 2023:04-09:F and that’s it! As an added bonus, I can thread it using this reference name in my current (or any future) bullet journals much more easily.
Secondly: I can start combing through my older notebooks (stretching back as far as 2014) and applying this system. Most of them will likely have the pre-bujo modifier, but having the dates on them will still be useful for future reference.
Now, whenever I want to go back through my notebooks, I’ll always know what I’m going to expect in terms of date and purpose with a concise, helpful naming system.
As another bonus, I can start going through the older notebooks more easily over time to extract the useful information I want to save from them in order to save that in my Second Brain.
What About You?
How do you name your notebooks? Do you do something different from this? Maybe you have a much simpler system in mind. Or maybe you want a system that my naming scheme doesn’t quite account for. Is there something else I could have possibly added to this? Feel free to let me know.
Sudo Science 