The one thing I took away from it was how useful it was to have your own index for a book that can be filled with random stuff from all sorts of topics. All my years of going to school and having different notebooks for each class, and I never once realized this obvious technique for keeping everything in organized in one notebook.
You leave blank space for the index or table of contents and add page numbers as you write the content.
So algebra notes might be on pages 2-10, 20-23,43-47; shopping lists on 11 and 19; Christmas ideas on 17-18.
You can of course leave blank pages after a shopping list for the next one, but with an updated index and page numbers you can easily find the next shopping list page (you can also write "continued on page ..." at the bottom).
Another very different system would be to use binders (or digital notebooks) where you can easily add pages. However, then page numbers become tricky and you lose the chronological information of what was written in which order.
Back when we were programming in BASIC, the 'solution' to the equivalent problem (line numbering) was to start by incrementing in tens rather than ones.
Though I'm relatively new to it, for me the first things that went into my notebook were an index of indices (to allow grouping of common content), a general index for everything else, a page for each month of the year as a simple calendar, then two pages allocated to the current week. New pages are simply allocated as needed, which minimizes wasted pages but increases fragmentation.
I've actually found it quite interesting to think about it all in very software-engineery ways. Indices contain pointers to linked lists of pages, pages are allocated and never freed, and the linked lists are append only. Thinking about it this way makes certain issues obvious. For example, it is a pain for me to keep looking up common items in the index, so I have a small 'floating index' on an index card that lives with my current week's calendar/action items to save time on common lookups (sort of a cache). Similarly, lists that are appended to less frequently than others become highly fragmented, and it can be slow to search for things in those lists, so there is some kind of limit/balance in there regarding the usefulness of these structures depending on the rate that lists are appended to.
Using a standard lined notebook, I just counted out lines and number of pages. So, if I had a notebook with a hundred sheets (200 pages) and 26 lines per page, I need to set aside four pages at the start of the notebook to have a different page entry on each line.
The one thing I took away from it was how useful it was to have your own index for a book that can be filled with random stuff from all sorts of topics. All my years of going to school and having different notebooks for each class, and I never once realized this obvious technique for keeping everything in organized in one notebook.