Editing The Pen Addict 26/transcript (section)

== Capture Form ==


'''Stephen Hackett:''' Secondly was I stopped – I wrote this thing that kind of got some traction called the capture form. Like how I used to take notes on my computer or an iPad in a meeting. And since posting that, I've stopped doing that. And I just take a field notes and a pen with me into meetings. And unfortunately, a lot of what I do at work is meetings. And there's no barrier to entry with a notebook because people, A, are already used to people writing in meetings. And when you bring technology into a meeting, people always wonder if you're paying attention or – and it can be distracting, especially with things like iMessage. And all of a sudden I'm getting texts on my computer and it's crazy town. And so for me, taking a notebook into a meeting with me to take notes in, A, meant I was filling them up a lot faster because I go to a lot of meetings. But B, it made the notebook more of a part of my workflow than it was before. Before, if I was just quote-unquote journaling in my notebook, that really wasn't part of my workflow, wasn't critical to my day. And now it is. Now I don't go into a meeting without it. It's literally always in my front left pocket. And because they're scanned, I have them in Evernote. If I need to go back and look at a past meeting, I can find those notes pretty quickly and go from there.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So do you keep mostly just work stuff in here or do you mix it up? So that's the thing. That's one of the difficulties that I have. It's like I use field notes or dome paper, the smaller utility-size notebooks. And then I end up getting myself, well, I want to have a project, so I'm going to start it in this notebook. And then I end up finding something else to start another new notebook. And I end up with four notebooks with four pages filled in each. And to me, I go back and look at myself and just tell myself, you're just being ridiculous.

'''Stephen Hackett:''' Yeah, so what I've done is I've started looking at whatever field notes I'm carrying with me as just an extension of me. And so for instance, I just started this one the other day. So I'm only on page 12. So I have some meeting notes. I have information for a dentist appointment because I have a tooth that's acting up. And that's now on my calendar. But I was on the phone with the girl, so I couldn't type on my iPhone, so I wrote it down. I have two pages of Mac addresses and IP addresses. I was helping a friend of mine do some networking and was just jotting down notes. And then I have the rest of it is basically show notes for the podcast this week. So just like link to this, link to this. I now have a page where I'm writing a letter to your fans so you can see my handwriting. And so it really depends. Some of those notebooks are a lot more work-related than others because maybe I was busier at work than others. Or some of them will have four or five pages of one journal entry. It just really depends on what's going on. I really try to view it as just an extension of whatever else is happening.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's awesome. I think that's the key. If you want this to work, like if I really want this to work for me, I have to incorporate it into everything. Not try to segregate it out and try to everything has a, you know, I'm in the, you know, we're both in the IT field. And I tend to be, you know, really, you know, anal and anal retentive about things and, you know, particular on details. And I end up trying to put everything in its own little bucket. And when I'm trying to, you know, just have like a, you know, a capture item, an analog capture item, you know, like a field notes notebook. It's like I still try to use those same strict rules that I use at work or, you know, trying to, you know, figure out something on the job and trying to, you know, slice up my notebooks the same way when it's really, I need to, you know, it's a piece of paper in a notebook. Loosen up, dude. You know, let's like write down your notes and, you know, use it as an inbox and then things that need to transfer out. You know, like you said, you wrote down a calendar entry. Well, when you got off the phone, you transferred into your calendar and you just kind of keep everything rolling through there. I think that's a pretty awesome system.

'''Stephen Hackett:''' Yeah. And, you know, and there's lots of notebooks out there. Sometimes I get asked why I chose field notes. You know, is it because I'm a Mac blogger hipster? Well, sure.

'''Stephen Hackett:''' But I just, I really like the size that, you know, it's not much bigger than an index card. And I like that it's soft. So if I wear my skinny jeans out, I can sit down, which goes back to the Mac hipster blogger thing. That's right. But I don't know. The form factor just works for me. And so I've got a yearly subscription and I keep, I have a gallon size Ziploc bags of empty ones and a gallon size Ziploc bags of full ones. And eventually they make the switch.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Cool. And then you scan them into Evernote, right, when you're done with them?

'''Stephen Hackett:''' I do, yeah. So we've got a big, huge scanner at work. And I scan them in and I name the file with the start date and the end date of the notebook. And so far that's worked pretty well.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's cool. We mentioned at some point in one of our episodes, Myke and I mentioned that about scanning notebooks in Evernote. And I got a ton of questions on that. So maybe that's another episode sometime we can dig into that more. But actually when Myke and I mentioned that, the emails just started pinging me like, wait a minute. People are doing this and how does that work and all that stuff. So yeah, maybe we'll save that topic for another day for another guest hosting spot. Well, cool. I really wanted to hear about that because it was a pretty good change. It's very obvious on how there was such a barrier a year ago. Then all of a sudden, boom, as we say. There's 10 notebooks filled in the past year and I'm impressed. I think I need to loosen up a little bit in my requirements for writing things down in my notebooks. And stick to one notebook, let it all be in there and roll from there. I think you've done something that a lot of us can't do and that's overcome that one little barrier to getting the pen on the page.

'''Stephen Hackett:''' Yeah, definitely a work in progress. Right now they're lasting about five or six weeks, which is pretty good. They're a little pricey, but so far that's worked out.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, cool, cool. Well, now I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of what you're using to write in these field notebooks. But before we get into that, you want to knock out our sponsor for this episode?