Last month, I tried using a pocket notebook to organize my time and my life, inspired by the productivity blog 43 Folders. They obsessively post about things to help keep life organized, heavily inspired by David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity book. Some of them are obsessed with a particular notebook, called the Moleskine notebook (illustrated here), useful for not only keeping track of life, but as a haven for creative ideas, an exercise log, engineering ideas, storyboards for animations or even storyboards for one's personal day in lieu of a more formal task list. I thought I would give this a try too.

I had a beautiful set-up: a black bound notebook with ...

• an elastic band to keep it together,
• sticky tabs (index card dividers from the local office supply store, trimmed to fit the small notebook),
• small envelope pasted in the back to serve as a "pocket" to hold unfiled things, containing a set of my business cards,
• sticky notes and sticky fluorescent-green, yellow, and red tags (to mark pages),
• numbered pages (written in by me, to keep track of which page ideas are on),
• and dated pages (written in by me, to keep track of when ideas were written).

I tried to see if such a pocket notebook would work for me, just for fun. Through middle school, I had carried around a little makeshift notebook (notebook paper bound together with a twisty tie) to write my ideas and plans down. My father had carried such a little notebook around to hold random tidbits of information. And, in cell lab, we've been indoctrinated in the art of maintaining a useful, complete lab notebook with data, results, time stamps, and ink. This is especially useful if you accidentally discover the next big antibiotic in biochemistry lab, and you want to claim that discovery. Stevenchanomycin has a nice ring to it!

It was a great, low-tech concept that, I believe, is in some ways more more effective at organization than even a PDA, such as the Palm. Consider the following.

• It's user interface is dead easy: you can write anything in it immediately without having to fudge with opening an application, waiting, and pressing the right buttons. Plus, it's far easier to make sketches in it. Palm OS doesn't even include sketching software, so you'd have to pay for decent sketching software to begin with.
• It feels more intimate: Writing on actual paper bound in a cute little book feels traditional yet not old-fashioned, and provides a welcome break from ubiquitous computers: the desktop, the cell phone ... heck, nearly everything these days.
• It costs less: $10 for a high-quality little notebook, versus the $100 PDA? For those on strict budgets, notebooks are the way to go.

Here's a picture if you wonder what the notebook looks like. See those little calendars sticking out? Those are my printed weekly and monthly schedules.

As luck would have it, this pocket notebook experiment didn't last long. I longed to be able to carry all my calendars, a to-do list, my bus schedules and maps in my pocket, plus a dictionary, plus games, plus movies, music, and the ability to "back up" my notebook. What can do all this?

A Palm PDA! Yes, it's back to the expensive gadgets. (but oh so cool!)

So I reverted back to using my trusty Tapwave Zodiac to keeping organized. I'll describe my Palm set-up in my next post.

What do you use to keep organized?