Over the years in bjj I have tried to keep a notebook chronicling my progress.  It has ranged from a basic pad of paper to an excel spreadsheet, to a word doc.  Each time I ended up stopping for some reason or another.  Excel was great cause you could put in all types of sortable attributes like what type of move it was, where you learned it, etc.  This worked ok until I went back and tried to make sense of all my "opponent puts his left hand on your rt collar and shifts his right hip".  I pretty quickly realized that model was a fail for me.

Word was great because I could put pictures into the file easily.  This was perfect for grabbing techniques off of videos or websites and documenting what I was working on.  The challenge is that I ended up with a monster file that I could never find a good way of organizing.  Plus it was always on the "other" computer. 

Paper of course is nice and there is something magical about writing something down with your hands, but I hated ending up with pages and pages of random notes.  Also, I had lots of duplicate entries, no way to easily figure out everything I knew from a given position, no way to add new ideas to an existing move, and more.

So recently I was inspired by two events to try to tackle this problem once and for all.  The first event was the general realization that I need to know my game more clearly.  Dave always tells me that there is only two things, hubs and transitions.  As I reflected on that I realized I need to understand what I already do and know to a deeper extent.  The second event was at the Paul Schreiner seminar.  Paul mentioned that he keeps a notebook and tracks, for example, when anyone passes his guard.  He then figures out the counter.  This diligence has helped his game, so I figured why not follow a proven path.

Luckily, I think technology may have come to the rescue.  I started using a tool called Evernote.  It is an online notebook with the benefit of having client applications for windows and mac, but all the data is synced to the cloud.  So you can take your notes anywhere and be able to get to them from anywhere.  It also allows you to tag items as well.  So in my Evernote, I have notebooks for each position (Mount, Back, etc) and then moves in each notebook.  I have tagged each move with tags like submissions, escapes, transitions, etc.

This model makes it very, very easy for me to get a complete picture of my game at any time.  It also makes it very clear where I am weak as well.  It seems like a great tool for understanding and developing your game.  Oh, and it's free too.  Check it out at www.evernote.com.

See you on the mat.