…is just a fancy term for: “how do I write and organize things in my little overpriced but very cool notebook.” So buckle up, here is what I do with mine.

I use my moleskine only at work. It’s a journal for all my meetings, ideas, concepts, etc. My goal was to have an easy accessible long term memory for those things and be able to track the related actions or issues.

Here is my set of “guidelines”:

• One page per meeting! If you need more pages, fine but don’t put two on one. Actually I rarely write down more than one page per meeting. Usually the really important stuff fits on a single one.
• Fill your moleskine after the meeting, not during. I take notes on scratch paper during the meeting. Afterwards I read through them and only transfer the important stuff. This also helps you to rethink the whole meeting again.
• If you feel something is very important or structures your notes, underline it. Then you’ll find it back a week or a month from now without having to reread the whole page.
  
• Now on to the page itself. Each page has four mandatory items: A subject and a date (top right), participants (top left), a page number (bottom outside) and a reference (bottom inside).

  

• My day to day work only deals with a hand full of topics, like a certain project, a reoccurring meeting, etc. To be able to find all the meetings related to a topic I keep a (reverse) inventory on the back of the moleskine. So each topic is listed there with all page entries, and not vice versa.
• To be able to navigate back and forth from a certain entry I use a reference on the bottom of the page.
  

  [17|23] means that the previous related entry is on page 17 and the next one on 23. After writing down my notes I’ll update the inventory in the back and then go to the last entry mentioned there and update the references.

• In addition to underlining I use three (or four) additional markers for highlighting the content. On the right hand side of the page I might put an exclamation mark, a question mark or a box. They mean there is something to remember, an open issue or a thing to do.

  
  (The forth marker is a ∑ sign I occasionally use to sum up the content of whole page somewhere on the page.)

• To be able to find all the things back I (or someone else) needs to do, I put a green post it marker on the page. Oh, if it someone else’s job I’ll write down his or her initials next to the box.
  
  Later, completed to-do’s will get a checkmark and things that are not needed anymore get crossed out.
• I don’t use the moleskine for any “do as soon as possible” requests. I keep those and things others need to do for me on single sheets of paper. I use the brilliant D.I.Y. Planner “To Do” and “Waiting For” Templates. If I put a to-do item from my moleskine on this list I will check if off in there.

That’s it. This works like a charm for me and maybe some of you will find this helpful.

Of course I didn’t come up with all of this by myself. You might want to hop over to moleskinerie or Mike Shea for moleskine hacking.