Best Results Organizing

Each year at the National Association of Professional Organizers annual Conference and Expo, one of our favorite booths to visit is Esselte’s. The Esselte family, famous for Pendaflex and Oxford filing and office products, has added Ampad to the brood. Oh, but this is not your fourth grade teacher’s Ampad, with the same old boring notepads. Ampad has come a long way, Baby!

The Collating Conundrum

Longtime Paper Doll readers at the old site know that I’m a fan of legal pads. My preference is purple, because it’s easy to spot amid any cluttered client environment, but pink or blue pads work just as well.

Everyone else has yellow or white notepads, so by keeping to the rich pastels, I’m more likely to spot my pad quickly, and in twelve years haven’t (yet) left a client site without it safely tucked in my bag.

The key to making perforated-at-the-top legal pads work for you is to make sure you keep similar items together. You can try to select different pads for different tasks (home improvement, individual work projects, party planning), and label the front page so you don’t mix up the pads, but it’s easy to be thrown off the mark. For example, one day last week, I was taking notes on a live teleclass when I got interrupted by a telephone call from a prospective client. Weighing the value of finishing the teleclass vs. taking the prospect call and later listening to the recording of the teleclass, I opted for the latter. Quickly, I flipped to the next page to take notes on my conversation. Later that night, when the teleclass recording was available, I started with a fresh page, but that still meant my papers — on the pad — were jumbled.

Eventually, I will tear off the pages for the teleclass and stack them with my Continuing Education Unit documentation for my next BCPO recertification. And the prospect’s page will either go in his client folder, if I’m hired, or a mass prospect folder, if not. But until I know, it’ll stay on the pad, sandwiched between unrelated items, and not exactly easily located. (Yes, even professional organizers may grab the wrong notepad sometimes.)

There are suitable alternatives to perforated legal pads, like three-ring binders, such as the Staples Better Binder we discussed yesterday. With a binder, you use loose-leaf paper, and sorting is as simple as opening the rings and moving any given sheet behind an appropriate divider. Just sort all your papers by (sub)category and group similar items together.

But binders are bulky. They’re great for storage, but it’s hard to take notes in a binder when you are in a classroom or lecture setting and don’t have a desk on which to spread out your notetaking paraphernalia. Experience has taught me that my left-handed clients can’t take notes in ringed binders at all. Sure, you can take notes on loose-leaf papers and only insert them in binders when you’re done with the course or session, but then you need to carry a clipboard or other hard surface, since there’s no cardboard or other type of backing to create a writing surface.

You can use spiral notebooks, of course, but then you’re faced with the same problem as with perforated pads — no way to collate the papers until you remove them from the notebook. Worse, you’re left with raggedy pages and the detritus from edges torn away from the spiral wire…unless you get the spiral notebooks that also have perforations. A spiral in a spiral, this is.

Introducing The Ampad SimpleSort Crossover Writing Pad.

At the top, instead of holding the papers together with glue above a perforation, as you usually see with legal pads, there’s a hard plastic shell (Ampad calls it a “binder clip”) that flips upward to reveal little nubs. The shell snaps down over the nubs, holding the individual sheets in place. The two-hole-punched papers are perforated, so you can tear them off whenever you like, but for use on the pad, you can play musical chairs.

If, over the course of a day, you take notes on chemistry, math and literature (or are writing pages on your marketing plan, budget and To Do list), just flip-up the plastic shell, lift out the papers and enclosed section dividers, 

shuffle everything to your preference, and insert the individual paper pages wherever they belong. Simple. Sorted.

For you visual learners, here’s a video direct from Ampad to get a sense of how the SimpleSort Crossover works.

The Ampad SimpleSort Crossover comes with a reusable plastic “binder clip,” 80 individual, re-positionable sheets of 8 1/2″ x 11″ wide-ruled, perforated, two-hole-punched notebook paper, and three re-positionable tabbed dividers (in blue, red, and yellow).

The SimpleSort Crossover is sold in office supply stores and retails for about $7.99, with replacement pads (also 80 sheets) running $3.99 and replacement divider 3-packs selling for $2.99.

Paper Doll is a touch frugal, so this seems a tad pricey to me. I’d also be bored using white paper all the time, so I hope the line expands to colored replacement sheets. I think it’s definitely worth checking out, but if you’d prefer budget options, you can always clip loose-leaf paper to a clipboard and carry a few manila folders behind the loose paper for keeping related notes together. (Or use a three-hole punch once you get home to store your notes in a binder.)

The SimpleSort is just one of Ampad’s whole new line of innovative products. Keep watching this space, as in coming days, we’ll be looking at other high- and low-tech paper maintenance options that let the user shift from one mode to another in order to stay productive.