I have fallen in love with index cards. I only use one side because then you can lay them flat and see all of the information you have collected. It is like having a screen that you can resize at will. (I wonder what that use of a computer metaphor means, not the metahphor itself but the fact that I used it.)
I look forward to grocery shopping now just so I can take out an index card, make my list, then mark each item off one by one as I go down the aisles. It is so much more efficient now. Before I used to go down each aisle at least twice, going back to get things I rememebered once I was on the other side of the store.
I would never have used my Moleskine for something such as a grocery list. I already had it in mind that it is meant for archival information. But the barrier to input is still slightly higher than using index cards and index cards have a pretty big advantage in terms of output. I will have to reassess my input/output schemes (as I am always in the process of doing) (my PDA is included in this process somewhere) and figure out where my Moleskine fits in. But for the time being it may very well be dead.
Buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz… Yep. Dead. Hark. A new era.
huh. did you take notes or journal with your moleskin? are you able to do that with your notecards. one of my faculty memebers from grad school was always trying some new method to organize and utilize information, instructions, notes and the like. after years of searching, she too settled on the simple elegance of the notecard.
i still have peeps that swear by their moleskins, but i can’t seem to schlep mine around.
Well. In the past I had intended to take notes for my journal and then write them up, but that never happened, so I have a large chunk of journaling that exists in physical space. I’ve been trying to take notes throughout the day because the part that takes me the longest when blogging is remembering what happened. Or at least at the end of the day.
I wouldn’t want to take these notes in my Moleskine (like I used to) because they are ephemeral and I’d prefer to toss them once they’ve been processed. I was doing them on my PDA but there is still this issue of bringing up the file and the larger issue of actually entering the information, which is usually quite slow. I’d been looking at this nice thumb keyboard for the Axim, but I still don’t think that would fix everything. So, index cards it is. It all began with this article I read about the ‘hipster pda’.
I don’t have a problem carrying my Moleskine around with me. It’s just an issue of how efficient a tool it is for the type of data processing I am doing. One of the things I did start to do was make a table of contents on the first few pages and an index on the last ones. But that takes a lot of work. And it’s a dubious enterprise because the value of the information that is being referenced is of questionable value. I haven’t looked at my old Moleskine in quite some time. Of course, I don’t expect most of this stuff to really have value until I am old and great, though it does serve other valuable purposes now, which is, of course, the reason I do it.