For the record (or whatever) I used to keep a set of composition notebooks like paper-machine describes. They got to be a really huge number, some of them redundant, most of them mostly empty or only a third full. A few of them got to the point of being all the way full and spread into a second volume. They mostly contained lecture notes from my college classes, sometimes I'd get up the energy to add additional notes from studying into them. I threw them out sadly, a few moves ago, when I was depressed and cutting down on my possessions to try to get more control over fewer of them. That was my rationale at the time, anyways. There wasn't much of a system of organization to them though, except that it would be one subject per notebook, summaries of whatever I was studying on one thick column and notes about it or things that popped into my head while I was listening or reading in the other column.
I'm interested in keeping a notebook to check my ideas / knowledge on subjects. For example, if I wanted to find out whether there were anything in the notion of ESP that was worth merit, I could create a section titled "ESP", where I'd keep copies of research papers, critical commentary on methodology, questions, personal experiments if any, and so on. There might be some appendixes or cheat sheets with common errors in thinking and information about them, notes on the scientific method/philosophy of science, statistics formulae for estimating error and likelihood and doing hypothesis testing, maybe a few inspirational quotes. I'm pretty busy, so it might be a very backburnered project, but I feel like it could be useful. I can already see some benefits and disadvantages, eg it can be on subjects a person might like to keep private, like dating, overcoming psychological issues, sex, and so on, but peer review might not be as readily available.
Any thoughts on the format or arrangement for something like this? Is anybody doing anything similar?