Notebooks

• Record in your notebook ideas as they come up. Nobody except you is going to read it, so you can be random. Put in
  • speculations
  • current problems in your work
  • possible solutions. Work through possible solutions there.
  • summarize for future reference interesting things you read.
     
• Read back over your notebook periodically. Some people make a monthly summary for easy reference.
   
• What you put in your notebook can often serve as the backbone of a paper. This makes life a lot easier. Conversely, you may find that writing skeletal papers-title, abstract, section headings, fragments of text-is a useful way of documenting what you are up to, even when you have no intention of ever making it into a real paper. (And you may change your mind later.)