Like most of us, I am require us to keep a fixed-leaf notebook to document .. 'stuff', in the event that my University need the evidence to take away my Nobel worthy IP.

I have never been good at sequential thinking, in the past my thoughts emerged iteratively on loose leaf pages, collected into a folder and re-organised in a fairly organic way. So this fixed-leaf notebook has really been a problem over the years, in terms of creativity and organising myself. Now entering my third year I thought I'd ask your advice, better late than never.

How do you seperate the dull admin supervisor-related notes from your genius scientific outpourings? My notebook is a mixture of underlined dates and the same three names of those who attended my meetings, scribblings explaining pythagoras to MSc students, and random bursts of thought repeated over and over again because I forgot I had that thought before or fell alseep before realising an indexing system would be useful.

Do you have a virtual 3D mind-controlled environment you keep attached to your keyring or .. lots of spare time?

I have several notebooks, random bits of paper and... well the other day I wrote something on the back of a lightbulb packet. Mostly I write when I can't be bothered to log on to the computer and my creative juices are flowing. One of the reasons I utilised the lightbulb packet the other day was because I left my primary notebook in my parents' house. The other reason was that I couldn't be bothered to get out of bed.

I would have thought that over the life of a PhD more than one notebook woudl be needed - I only registered (P-t) in December and have filled on book and am well into another - I decided that thematic note books are what is needed. I pity anyone who woudl have to look through them though as they use a fairly random (but to me totally sensible) system of layout...:-)

Thematic notebooks could be tricky if the theme changes. Or 'when' the theme changes! You might end up with lots of notebooks to carry around. I'm going to resort back to loose leaf pages and a folder, if the University like it or not.