No plan survives a week entirely intact. The first two weeks of summer break strayed widely from my original plan of reading and commonplacing. Yet, there’s a strong silver lining. Summer months offer me the time and freedom to follow projects as they capture my attention.

And put them into new journals.

Some of my favorite and most useful stationery tools are unexpected discoveries. Lovely little surprises I stumbled into. New tools that were thrust upon me by loved ones and the universe: a sample vial stand and a wood pen tray.

For notes to be searchable, they need an afterlife. The key to creating an afterlife for my notes — which live in both the analog and digital worlds — is keywords. Keywords that I create when revisiting my notes hours or days later. Keywords I attach to portions of notes, rendering them searchable on my computer. Keywords, like bow ties, are cool.

Teaching and research produce hundreds of thousands of annotated documents. We can all use searchable coolness when trying to find what you’ve already noted amidst that ocean of scribbles.

Notes are fantastic. They help in the moment. Writing is thinking after all. Notes especially help to connect ideas to one another, often in messy and complex ways. They’re useful because they’re flexible.

And notes are truly useful when you revisit them, often months or years later. To compare to what you’re doing or thinking in the present to more longstanding ideas you’ve recorded. They’re also useful because they’re searchable.