11.06My Moleskine Hacks
My PDA is dead… and I don’t care. I’ve been a long time user of PDAs, my PDA family tree looks something like this:
- 32k Wizard
- 128k Wizard
- DayRunner with Wizard page
- TI Avigo
- PalmPilot II
- HandSpring Visor (Orange baby)
- Sony Clie SJ22 (Best PalmOS PDA I’ve had)
- ViewSonic V35 (PocketPC)
- Back to a Sony Clie SJ22
- Treo 650 Smartphone
- Motorola Q Smartphone
It could be said I’m a connoisseur of PDAs. After all of that… I’ve gone analog. I watched the flash of ‘Hippster PDAs’ and Moleskine GTD prophets that happened a couple years ago with little interest. The only thing I took from it is a simple way to use index cards to keep track of my projects and such.
In my ongoing quest to tone down the Fried part of being FriedGeek I decided to buy myself a Moleskine notebook. Now I’m hooked. One of the things that I hated about Franklin planners or DayPlanners was their size! Even the smaller ones are the size of a ladies clutch purse. I really don’t want to be toting around a ‘man-bag’. So why are they so big? It’s the ring binders and that oh-so-executive leather(ish) jacket. But really, why would your planner need a ring binder? I looked back on my usage and the only time I opened the rings was to dump my old pages and fill it with new ones. If it didn’t have that It could have been made small enough to fit into my pocket. The problem was that the only other notebook bindings I could find were either spiral (snags) or glue (falls apart).
So why did the Moleskine win me over? For starters it’s pages are stitched in, like a hard cover book. You can easily lay it open, press down on the pages and it will stay open. The stitched binding also means it’s strong as hell and holds up to lots of use. It’s also a great size. Just thick enough, just wide and tall enough to fit easily into a pocket. It’s about 1.5 inches taller and wider than my Motorola Q phone and just as thin. The cover is also strong, hard, and has an ‘oil skin’ finish so if the note book is spotted with rain it just shrugs it off. Oh and the little elastic strap keeps it shut tight and sure beats the RRRRRIIIPPP heard by using some Velcro style closures. There is even a little pocket built into the back cover to carry things around like business cards, index cards, dollar bills, or receipts.
So in the spirit of other Moleskine hackers over time I’ve tweaked mine out by going to JustOneCard.com and putting my shopper card barcodes into the front cover. I added sticky tabs for quick access to my action list, projects pages, and random notes areas. There is also a sticky tab dispenser hooked into the page before the back cover. To bring some digital into this analog mix I made a small pocket from index card to hold a one gig SD card.
I highly recomend a Moleskine to any Geek out there. You can get them with grid pages (my favorite), lined, blank, or archival quality sketch pages. Check out Moleskine.com or your local Barns n’ Noble. They cost about $10 which may seem pricey for a little notebook but I promise you, if you give it a try you will see that it’s worth every penny.
