Use empty space in your notebooks for to-do lists

I'm a neuroscientist and so I don't do a lot of "work" at work - I go to meetings and read and do experiments. I have 4 field notebooks and about 2 lab notebooks that I use, on top of a little notebook I keep at my desk. <br><br>I always used to keep separate notebooks for to-do lists, meeting notes, etc, but when I did that I would just throw the notebooks away after a while and lose all the information that I had written down. The reason I decided to start keeping everything in one notebook was that I didn't have extra time to write everything down a second time, and I didn't want to have to keep every single notebook I'd ever used. <br><br>Right now I work in academic research so I go through about one notebook every 6-8 weeks. I realized that if I write all my meeting notes and to-do lists together, then at the end of every project I can just flip through all the notebooks I've used and refresh my memory on all the information I wrote. <br><br>A lot of times I'll come back to the same data or the same concept every 6-12 months and it's really useful to be able to go back through and see what I wrote down about it. <br><br>But at the same time I don't want to go through a whole notebook to find everything I wrote about one thing, so I've started using the blank space at the ends of notebooks to make to-do lists - every time I have to do something for a project, I write it down in the "to-do list section" in the back of the appropriate notebook. <br><br>I also put stars next to all the meetings and notes that I wrote for that project, so that I can easily flip back through the notebook and find everything I wrote about it. <br><br>I organize my notebooks chronologically (like the first one I used is #1, the second one is #2, etc) so they're very easy to flip through and compare everything that I've done on a certain topic. <br><br>It's been really really helpful so far!