Memorandum on Work Notebook Boundary
An internal memorandum addressing the unresolved question of where work notes end and personal notes begin, and what this says about the notebook.
INTERNAL MEMORANDUM TO: All Parties Using the Notebook FROM: The Notebook Review Working Group RE: Boundary Status Update, August 2021
This memorandum reports on the ongoing effort to establish a clear boundary within the notebook between work content and personal content. The effort is now in its seventh month. Progress is limited.
Current Status
The notebook contains, on pages that are physically adjacent to one another, the following: a meeting summary with action items, a partial grocery list, three lines of what may be a poem, a phone number with no accompanying name, and a diagram that could represent either a product roadmap or a preferred furniture arrangement. These entries were made in the same handwriting, with the same pen, on the same day. They cannot be separated.
Work. Has. Not. Stopped. Neither has everything else.
Progress to Date
Early in the notebook's use, a section break was attempted. A horizontal line was drawn across the page. Work content was to appear above. Personal content below. This system lasted approximately four pages, after which a thought that could not be categorized as either was written in the margin, and the system did not recover.
A second attempt involved using different colored pens. This approach was abandoned when it became clear that the problem was not the ink color but the fact that the person using the notebook does not experience a categorical distinction between work thoughts and personal thoughts while the notebook is open.
Three Consequences of Continued Boundary Ambiguity
First, the notebook cannot be loaned to a colleague without review. The review takes longer than simply answering the colleague's question directly would have.
Second, the notebook cannot be cited as a source in a professional context without the risk of encountering, on the same page, content that undermines the professional context.
Third, and most significantly, the notebook is now providing a documentary record of the degree to which work and non-work coexist in a single cognitive space, and this record is more detailed and more honest than any self-assessment would have been.
The Governing Rule
Notebooks sold as "work notebooks" contain lined pages. So do notebooks sold as "personal journals." There is no mechanical difference. The category is assigned by the purchaser at point of sale and is not binding.
Contradiction
The Working Group was established to enforce a boundary. The Working Group's notes are also in the notebook.
This memorandum will be filed in the notebook. Its location within the notebook cannot be guaranteed.