Anyone who knows me will tell you of my love of gadgets: cameras, laptops, mobiles you name it I’m into it. However, there is still one low-tech solution that I could not live without and that is my Moleskine note books.
I have been using notebooks of various sizes all my working life and despite recently making more and more use of Evernote for capturing notes you still cannot beat pen and paper for accessibility and speed.
Moleskines come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours but I favour the classic ruled notebook as used by Hemingway, Picasso and Chatwin. Unfortunately the contents of my notebooks are far more mundane than those of these famous users containing only notes of meetings, to-do lists, expense information from trips and the occasional mind-map of an event I have attended (see below). Despite the content being routine it is essential to me nevertheless.
To me there is something of a barrier that is created in a meeting when you have your laptop open while taking notes – something that is not the case when I discreetly jot my notes into my Moleskine. The only real downside is the lack of an easy search mechanism. You are left thinking that the you know that the meeting you had was some time in March and so you flip the pages back and forwards until the elusive entry is found. But even that is satisfying as the feel of the book is great.
And I am not alone! Moleskines have an army of loyal followers who do fine and creative things with theirs. There are now even online tools that allow you to design and print your own pages to put into your Moleskine.
So my gadget bag will always contain lots of battery powered devices but I will also have the one thing that has instant boot-up time and never runs out of power!
So are you still using pen and paper or are you keeping your notes in Evernote, OneNote or Word? Leave a comment and let me know.
More Moleskine stuff: http://lifehacker.com/tag/moleskine/
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