Best practice for keeping design notes? 5

[EngDM]

No matter how hard I try to be organized, I find myself having to re-run calcs to make sure I have design notes. What are your strategies for design notes? Sometimes I will punch in some values into my calculator and use the result of that but omit noting down how I got that value; I want to find a solution to this that doesn't add lots of time to design notes over the course of a project.

I've considered getting a tablet to do all my calcs on but I worry that using a stylus is too different, and the tablet screen wouldn't be the size of a paper so there would be a lot of scrolling.

 

[CrabbyT]

If you want to find things, keep it simple.

I recommend this: just put em in a single notebook, sequentially. When you fill a page, flip to the next one. When you run out of pages, get a new notebook. Don't bother trying to organize the pages by project, leave them in the notebook (or stick em in a binder).

Don't try to organize them digitally into different project folders. Don't try to organize them into different sections. If you do concrete calcs, get a concrete notebook. If you do steel calcs, get a steel notebook. If you do load calcs, get a load notebook. That's about as far as it should go in terms of organization IMO.

My logic: it's really easy to flip through a single notebook and find what you need. The difficult part is convincing yourself that this is better. Don't give in to the part of your brain that tells you they need to be neatly filed and orderly -- they don't, you'll be able to find them without some elaborate system.

If you use a calc page every so often for reference, then put a sticky tab on that page so you can get back to it.

If you use a calc sheet more than like... 5 times, turn it into an excel doc.