Archive for ‘Office Supplies’ Category
Organize Your Writing Right — With Left-Handed Notebooks
Are you a righty or a lefty? Of course, we’re not talking politics, but handedness. Paper Doll is a righty, but I’m always on the lookout for solutions that make it easier for my left-handed clients to live in a right-handed world.
With file folders, it’s easy enough — it’s just a matter of turning the papers upside down (from my perspective) so that when my clients open their folders (book-style), the tabbed side of the folder is on the left rather than on the right. However, notebooks present a particularly smudgy, and occasionally painful, problem.
Lefties may use their left hands, but assuming they aren’t writing in Hebrew (aha! a clue to a possible solution?), they are still writing from left to right like the rest of us. With typical sheets of paper or notebooks, this means that the left hand often slides or drags over the most recently written material, causing smudges.
Moreover, when writing in a three-ring binder, we righties are can generally keep our bodies entirely to the right of the rings; for a lefty, writing on paper while it’s ring-bound means keeping the wrist tightly bent to keep the forearm away from the rings. (The Handedness Research Institute warns that this is a no-no.) The problem is pretty much the same for spiral notebooks, earning wiry indentations in the hand and arm. How exhausting must this be for our friends on the left?
TOP-BOUND ALTERNATIVES
The easiest solution for left-handers is to use spiral (and other) notebooks wire-bound at the top rather than on the side. Steno pads are fairly good solutions for casual use, provided you’re not distracted by the vertical line down the center (used to guide shorthand).
Mead even promotes their top-bound spiral notebooks for academic and business use as “left handed notebooks.” While these, as well as legal pads and reporter’s notebooks on the low end of the price/quality spectrum, are easy to find, this often condemns left-handed writers to a sort of second-class status.
That said, there are a few upscale top-bound, non-spiral notebooks, including the Moleskine Reporter notebooks (available in black, only). They come in two sizes, Pocket (3 1/2″ x 5 1/2″, 192 pages), suitable for students and others on-the-go, and Large (5″ x 8 1/4″, 240 pages), which work well for professionals.
The Reporter notebooks come in hard and soft (lay-flat) cover options, with acid-free paper choices including ruled, graph (“squared”) or plain pages, and top-stitched bindings. Each have 24 detachable (perforated) pages at the back for quick, removable notes, and all of the Reporter-style notebooks can be used both horizontally and/or vertically (though obviously this works better with graph and plain pages than ruled). Reporter notebooks also have expandable accordion pockets inside the back cover and the traditional Moleskine elastic bands to keep things private. The notebooks range from about $11 to $16 at Amazon, Moleskine, LoveNotebooks.com and fine stationers.
NO STUDENT LEFT BEHIND
Flip-top covers aren’t to everyone’s tastes, however.
Certainly, the left-handed writer can simply flip every spiral-bound notebook to the back and choose to write only on the left (reverse) page of each sheet, but this generally subjects users to being greeted repeatedly by a “plain” cardboard or chip-board backing (uh…fronting?). While righties get their pick of the pretty notebooks out there, lefties are left showing their backsides, as it were, price tags and barcodes and all.
Here, at least, the open market for student notebooks has been responsive. I’ve found a number of right-side spiral notebooks designed specifically for left-handed users.
Ampad makes a cheery (OK, perhaps garish), yellow, 80-sheet, 8 1/2″ x 11″ Left Handed Subject Notebook with the spiral on the right side. Find one for around $3.49 through specialty stores like Gonzaga University’s Zag Shop.
Less well-known stationers are also entering the arena. Roaring Spring makes a 9″ x 11″, 100-sheet, 1-Subject Wirebound Notebook that runs upward from $2.89 at Shoplet and (at an inexplicably higher price) Amazon. The Lefty logo is a cute touch, and the notebook comes in maroon, cobalt, dark green and grey.
TOPS similarly makes a 9″ x 11″ narrow-ruled 80-sheet spiral-bound notebook with cover colors in red, blue, yellow and green. Available from Amazon and office supply stores, prices range from $3.35 to over $9.
All of these notebooks are suitable for students, but wouldn’t exactly be the right fit for a lefty with style.
HIPSTER STYLINGS
Hipsters usually like the Moleskine look, but if your “Too Cool for School” lefty prefers a grittier, Old School look, Baltimore-based Write Notepads & Co.Write Notepads & Co.
manufactures a notebook specifically for left-handers that might fit the bill.
The covers are made from a heavy-duty kraft card stock with brass, twin-loop, spiral rings on the right side. The standard righty version is imprinted with Write Notepad’s regular logo, but the lefty line is imprinted with the likeness of Paul South. (Get it? Say it aloud, sort of drawling. Paul South…for South-paws?)
The notebooks come in two sizes, a 3 1/2″ x 5 1/2″ pocket size (just a touch bigger than index cards) and a larger 5 1/2“ x 8 1/2” version. Each notebook has 120 sheets of paper, and the company notes that the paper is “fountain-pen friendly.“ Both include a Write Notepads & Co.-printed, oversized elastic to hold the book closed, for those who want their left-leaning thoughts kept private. Both sizes are available with either blank or ruled paper, and range from $8 for the smaller notebook and $16 for a larger one.
(If you prefer their traditional “righty” version, note that the bands are white rather than red.)
AMBIDEXTROUSLY ELEGANT
Paper Doll‘s diligent research team came up empty-handed (on the right and the left) with regard to executive-quality notebooks for left-handed writers. However, Levenger’s leather Ambi-Folio does offer a nice touch for keeping up with handwritten and digital work, no matter which hand you favor.
The smooth 10 1/4″ x 13″ full-grain leather portfolio comes in black, red and saddle (a rich brown) and has sections for a top-bound writing pad as well as a tablet or e-reader.
A Levenger notepad is included, and there are right-sized pockets for loose papers, business cards, index cards, and pens (on either side, accommodating lefties and rights). A zippered closure keeps everything safe. The whole arrangement can be flipped to reverse the set up and put your writing pad on the left or right, as is preferred.
SPECIALTY STORES
Aside from the products above, another alternative is to shop online at left-handed specialty stores like Lefty’s, which carries college- and wide-ruled academic, art and speciality notebooks.
And what of Hebrew notebooks, to which I alluded earlier? I suspected that I might find quite a few international versions of notebooks designed specifically for languages written right to left. Sadly, I didn’t have a lot of luck besides elementary school notebooks. Thus, the search continues.
Scientific American reports that approximately 15% of people are left-handed. You’d think in a consumer-driven society, more office supply companies would be developing solution-oriented goodies. If you have any great sources for attractive left-friendly notebooks, please share in the comments section.
Paper Doll Post:
5 Key Points for Organizing With Notebooks
A notebook is a notebook is a notebook. Or is it? The truth is, not all notebooks are created equally.
Notebooks seem like they should be pretty simple. At the heart, they are little books (or pads) of paper that allow us to take notes (or draw, or map). Of course, our notes may not be handwritten, so if our notes are digital, our notebooks must live in cyberspace, too. But there’s more to it than that.
Over the next few posts, we’re going to be looking at some new approaches to notebooks, making it a good time to review five noteworthy concepts related to organizing thoughts and information and making notetaking make sense. Bear in mind the following:
1) You can’t remember everything. The space in your brain is finite. It’s a common myth that most of us rarely use more than 10% of our brains. I’m not a neuroscientist, but I do know that our brains can’t maintain an unlimited amount of information and make it all equally accessible when and how we want it.
Simply put, you can’t think about things in-depth and with context if you’re constantly trying to remember to think of them.
Keeping a notebook doesn’t just enhance your memory; it sharpens your focus. When you merely listen to the world (whether the outside world or your own interior world), it’s easy to be passive. However, keeping notes turns listening into an active experience. The mere act of writing something forces you to put effort into comprehension.
Finally, once the general fact of something is written down (and temporarily stored), your brain can focus on analysis, processing and planning.
2) Loose notes don’t work. One of the ultimate, classic Paper Doll posts was Stay Far From Floozies: Avoiding the Loose Paper Trap. In organizing, we often talk about having a landing strip where we unload all the detritus of the day to ensure that phones get charged and keys remain accessible. (In the morning, the process is reversed and the landing strip becomes a launch pad, loaded with whatever essentials are needed to launch you out the door for a successful and organized day.)
If we skip the landing strip and just drop things wherever we let go of them, we’re dependent upon our eyes or memories for finding them again, slowing down the retrieval process. Having a notebook, one central location for incoming stimuli, is similarly a safer bet than letting notes “drop” on the backs of envelopes, the corners of napkins and the palm of your hand.
3) It’s not really about the notebook — it’s about you. As a professional organizer, I’ve found that the most significant reason a system works or does not, whether it’s for notetaking or calendaring or task management (or laundry or workflow or meal planning), has far less to do with the system used and far more to do with the user.
If an organizing system, or even the containers for your organizing system, do not fit your personal style, whether in terms of aesthetics, format or method of function, you’re going to find excuses to avoid using your system, and you’ll go back to whatever you used before, even if it failed you miserably.
(If going by gut instinct worked, we’d never seek outside help in the first place. Remember, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got!)
In Notions On Notebooks: Organize Your Paper Picks, we talked about how price and branding, binding, paper quality, lines, and color all determine whether a paper notebook format will be right for you. Reviewing that post will help you think about what notebook features will help you commit to a notetaking system.
4) The platform isn’t the same as the system. When we talk about notebooks, we tend to interchange the two, but they are very different. The platform is the physical (or digital) rendition of what tools we choose for organizing. At your house, you may store items in drawers, cabinets and lidded tubs, but that’s not an organizing system. Notebooks, like drawers, are containers. They serve a function for supporting an organizing system, but they are not the system, per se.
In the past, we’ve talked about a wide variety of notebook platforms, from environmentally-friendly notebooks (Green-Eyed But Not-So-Monstrous) to hybrid digital/paper notebooks (An Organized Hybrid: The Evernote Smart Notebook By Moleskine, From Paper to the Cloud: Ampad Shot Note) to adjustable notebooks (Presto, Change-o! Shape-shifting Organizing Products #2), and even waterproof notebooks (Paper Doll Writes Between the Raindrops: Waterproof Notebooks).
Whatever format or platform you use for a notebook, recognize that while the platform has to inspire your loyalty, it will only get you so far.
5) A notebook is only as good as the system you use for processing the information you put into it. Notebooks tend to exist for three disparate but sometimes interlocking purposes:
- Creating (journaling, sketching, designing) — What you put in these notebooks may not need to be tracked or managed. Just having a place to put your creations is often enough. However, if you are prolific, and retrieval of the product of your brilliance is an issue, you may want or need an indexing system for tracking what you’ve created.
This could be as simple as numbering your pages keeping a blank page at the front of your notebook for listing what you’ve designed or written. You might want to take a page (pardon the pun) out of philosopher John Locke’s approach to indexing commonplace books.
- Capturing (academic notes, business meeting notes, committee notes) — Once you capture essential information, you are generally asked to process it. The notes you take in your European history course may require you to capture fine detail regarding causes of wars or dates of battles so that you can memorize and regurgitate information. Conversely, notes captured in a client meeting might be the jumping off point for creating something new (an ad campaign, a solution to a problem, a product or service).
If you’re a student, to make sure you’ve got command of the subject, consider the Cornell Notetaking System (which is actually a system for learning and studying and not merely taking notes).
I was introduced to this process as a high schooler, long before I actually attended Cornell University, and it’s so useful, it’s really worthy of its own post. (Lifehacker has an excellent classic post on the Cornell system.)
For keeping up with business or other reading, you might prefer charting, outlining or mapping related concepts.
- Productivity (tasks) — If your notebook is designed to help you amass everything you need to do, rather than everything you need to know, you’ll need to find a workflow that makes sense for your life before you try to pick a snazzy notebook. A few systems that have enjoyed popularity in recent years include:
Bullet Journal — This method was covered in detail last year in Lifehacker’s The Bullet Journal Productivity Method Empowers Your Paper Notebook.
The AutoFocus System devised by time management expert Mark Forster. I’ve always thought my colleague Janine Adams, a Forster devotée, has done an excellent job explaining each iteration of the AutoFocus method. (The newest version of this system is called FinalVersion.)
So, I hope we’re clear that depending on memory or a series of fluttering scraps of paper is no way to master the information in your life. Notebooks can be excellent tools for organizing thoughts, but recognize that success depends on knowing yourself and your aesthetic deal-breakers, and employing information capturing and indexing systems that will keep you sticking to your system long into the future.
Paper Doll Post:
Pushing the Envelope: Small Solutions that Stick
Paper cuts. Buzzing mosquitos. Wallace Shawn. Sometimes, it’s the smallest things that are the most annoying. But as Nashville singer/musician (and pal) Andra Moran notes, it’s also the small things for which we can often be the most grateful.
If you’ve ever licked an envelope and then sounded like you just had root canal due to the blech-y taste in your mouth, then you know how important it is to have self-adhesive envelopes, one of the greatest envelope-related inventions of the last century. But y’know what? Sometimes even self-stick envelopes lack the sticktoitiveness (it’s a word! honest!) to get the job done and keep your mailings organized and safe.
Enter: Ampad DoubleSeal, bringing the belt-and-suspenders approach to packaging up your mail.
The DoubleSeal delivers exactly what it says. First, there’s a traditional gummed flap. Lick (or moisten with a sponge or wet napkin, as Paper Doll prefers), and then fold down the flap. Next, there’s a bit of adhesive tape built in to the rear of the envelope, below the flap. Peel the tape off and affix it over the seal of the flap as if it were one of those shiny Hallmark Gold Crown stickers you get when you buy a card. If my description wasn’t exciting enough for you, believe it or not, there’s a video:
There’s not much variety to add spice to your mailing life. The DoubleSeal comes only in one style: 24 lb. White “Wove” (but with a nice privacy design on the interior), 100 to a box. The envelopes are 4 1/8″ x 9 7/8″, making them the same height but a little wider than traditional #10 mailing envelopes. DoubleSeal is available from Staples.
The big question to Paper Doll‘s mind: why use a gummed flap at all? Why not just use an adhesive closure for the flap, just like with Ampad’s #10 peel & stick envelopes?
In addition to organizing the contents of your envelopes, sometimes it can be a relief to organize the envelopes themselves. It’s a petty annoyance, but have you ever noted that boxes of envelopes, particularly oft-used #10 envelopes, tend to topple over, inconveniently? And even if you keep the box on its side in the drawer, cheap envelope boxes tend to open, splaying envelopes across the inside of desk drawers. At a NAPO-Georgia meeting last year, one of our colleagues showcased an interesting little product that solves this problem.
Ascend Mailing Products, designed exclusively for Office Max, has created a book of envelopes!
Accordion-bound and perforated at the top of the flap, Ascend binds 36 “Peel-To-Seal” 24 lb. #10 security envelopes in one little book, keeping your envelopes tidy until you’re ready to use them. Is it the cure for the common cold? No, but it might stop some common cursing in offices where orderliness is preferred.
The book of envelopes doesn’t appear to be sold online at this time, but can still be found in some OfficeMax stores.
Paper Doll Post:
House of Doolittle: Doing Much for the Environment & Time Management (A Shoplet Review)
Periodically Paper Doll reviews new and established office supplies and accessories through the Shoplet Product Review Program. This week, we’ll be looking at two products from the House of Doolittle.
I must admit, although I’ve written about recycled products many times before, I was unfamiliar with House of Doolittle, a 95-year-old office supply company that makes 100% post-consumer paper products, including desk pads, appointment planners, wall calendars, laminated planners, non-dated planning supplies, and USA and international maps.
In 1988, House of Doolittle made the commitment to produce all of their products from recycled paper and materials, eventually converting to recycled cover materials and book wire, soy inks, and Processed Chlorine Free (PCF) and FSC-certified paper. All House of Doolittle products are manufactured in the United States.
The House of Doolittle Weekly Expense Log Business Planner harkens back to a pre-app era when most professionals kept track of time and tasks using paper planners. Paper Doll, with one foot in the paper realm and the other in cyberspace, still maintains a paper planner, and can see the appeal of having a small, tangible planner where one can quickly schedule appointments, check information and log expenses without need for Wi-Fi or charged batteries.
The Basics: This 7″ x 10″ wire-bound planner uses the two-page-per week style, with Monday through Thursday blocks on the left-side page with lines for 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. standard workday appointments. The right-side page offers the same for Friday through Sunday, as well as a chart for keeping expense records for the week, with columns for Sunday through Saturday and rows for standard travel expenses (like meals, hotel, tips and parking) and typical weekly expenses (like postage, phone, entertainment, auto, gas and miscellaneous). The right-side page also has three small insets at the top, showing monthly calendars for the prior, current and next months.
The black leatherette cover is made of 50% recycled materials; the twin-loop wire binding is made from 90% recycled wire.
The Business Planner doesn’t skimp on extras. Trying hard not to be outdone by the whole of the internet, bonus pages include three-year holiday listings, area codes, time zones, toll-free numbers for airlines, car rental companies and hotels, air and driving mileage distances between major cities, weights and measures, metric conversions, recycling information, monthly birthstones/flowers and an annual anniversary gift list. (Whew!)
The Review: This type of planner is ideal for someone who needs to mark appointments and expenses but has relatively few notes to make regarding either. The space for each day is ample for charting the bare essentials (the who/where/why) of appointments, but with only two small rows for each hour, meeting notes are meant to be taken elsewhere.
Thus, it’s well-designed for what it’s meant to do, but professionals needing more robust planning pages would do well to upgrade from the weekly planner to a daily planner; those wanting House of Doolittle’s environmental commitment but seeking to schedule appointments more frequently than hourly might want to examine their Professional Hardcover Weekly Planner, with time frames on the quarter hour.
As a professional organizer, my biggest concern with the planner was the expense record section. Although the two-page spread for the calendar goes from Monday to Sunday, the expense section runs from Sunday to Saturday. Should the Sunday in the expense planner refer to the expenses from the prior page? Why don’t the days line up? It’s a small issue, and as long as the user sticks to the same recording method all the time, it’s not problematic, but it does seem confusing. Also, as with most paper expense planners, there’s only one slot per expense category per day, so you have to do your math first before recording anything, which may not be preferable.
The Business Planner runs about $17 at Shoplet for an individual planner, and is under $10 if you purchase in bulk.
The House of Doolittle 2014 Calendar is what Paper Doll used to call a desk blotter in ye olden days, and lets you view the whole month at one glance.
The Basics: The 18.5″ x 13″ January to December calendar, designed to be posted on a wall or used as a desk blotter, has a dark blue leatherette top-band and bottom corners to hold the pages in place. Each perforated page identifies the month, has squares for each weekday (Sunday through Saturday) with count-up/count down numbers (so you know you’ve got only 337 more days until 2015!) and twelve tiny monthly calendars at the bottom. There’s a wide section at the far right for jotting down notes, phone numbers and other incidentals.
The 2014 Calendar is made from 100% post-consumer paper and soy inks, and is made entirely in the USA.
The Review: When Paper Doll worked in television programming, having a desk pad calendar was indispensable for viewing the month at one shot and noting important events without having to look up from the desk. I’d forgotten how useful that was until I examined the House of Doolittle 2014 Calendar.
I think this calendar, which is smaller than the typical desk blotter by a handful of inches, would be perfect for kitchen desks, which tend to be cramped, and for students/bedroom desks, to maintain an eagle-eye view of when assignments and tests are scheduled. The only flaw I note is that the smaller pad size means that the squares for each day are reduced, and perhaps a bit cramped for those of us with sprawling handwriting. Nonetheless, it’s a spiffy little calendar for under $9 (under $6 if you buy in bulk).
Both the House of Doolittle Business Planner and 2014 Calendar, and many others HoD products, are available directly from Shoplet, which also maintains a colorful and often goofy blog about office supplies. Shoplet is also an excellent source for business promotional products, including promotional shirts. In addition to selling office supplies in North America, Shoplet is a purveyor of office stationery in the UK.
Disclosure: I received these products for review purposes only, and was given no monetary compensation. The opinions, as always, are my own. (Who else would claim them?) The planner and calendar will be donated to a Chattanooga-area non-profit.
Paper Doll Post:
An Organized Hybrid: The Evernote Smart Notebook By Moleskine
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups – “Two great tastes that taste great together.”
Toyota Prius – combines an internal combustion engine with an electric motor
Zedonk – a cross between a zebra and any other equine
A hybrid takes two things that exist perfectly well independently and combines them to make something altogether more fabulous. Today, we’ll look at how two great product brands have united to create something fascinating: The Evernote Smart Notebook By Moleskine.
THE CLASSIC
It was the original little black book, made of moleskin (a thick, cotton fabric with a shaved pile surface). In the 19th and 20th centuries, artists like Matisse, van Gogh and Picasso sketched and painted in them, and authors who couldn’t have been more disparate in writing style or personality, from Oscar Wilde to Ernest Hemingway, scribbled their stories in them. Back then, the notebooks were black, handmade by French bookbinders, and, while utilitarian, represented a kind of artistic chic. The notebooks were for creative geniuses on-the-go.
In the 1980s, it was reported that, “Le vrai Moleskine n’est plus” (“The real Moleskine is no more”) and bookbinders had ceased fashioning them, but in 1997 the product was reborn via a Milanese parent company under the Moleskine brand. A strong marketing campaign and a passion for the ever-expanding line of notebooks made, and makes, Moleskine cool for hipsters and soccer moms, alike.
The features are basic, but beloved: luxurious covers, high-quality acid-free paper, narrow grosgrain ribbon bookmarks and color-matching elastics to keep everything together. Moleskine has followers every bit as passionate and devoted as Apple’s fanboys (and fangirls). Bloggers show off their notebooks and creative doodlings, as at SkineArt, and share their secrets, such as Freelance Switch’s noted The Monster Collection of Moleskine Tips, Tricks and Hacks post.
The collections include the original notebooks — ruled and unruled, with interior pockets and without, with squared or rounded edges — diary-like journals, tabbed “Passion” journals (to log one’s favorite books, films, restaurants, recipes, wines, travel locales, etc.), memo books and address books.
For creative types whose muses delight with other than words, there are sketchbooks, watercolor notebooks, music notebooks, and storyboard books.
There are even limited-edition collections, with design themes including Peanuts, The Little Prince, LEGO and Star Wars.
Moleskine feeds the addiction for a sensory experience only paper can provide.
THE MODERNIST
Evernote: It’s a service. It’s an app. (It’s two mints in one!) It’s almost an independent nation of global citizens, given that it has ambassadors (including friend of Paper Doll, Brandie Kajino). You probably either use it, or you wonder, “What’s the big deal?”
For the uninitiated, at its most basic, Evernote allows you to take digital things, collect them, and organize them. Anything you save, like a Paper Doll blog post, can be a note. Notes combine into notebooks (like how you have Excel worksheets within workbooks), and all are kept safely within your account, synced across all of your computers and digital devices.
You may wonder why you need Evernote — can’t you just use a bookmark in your browser? Ah, but have you ever clicked on an old bookmark or favorite to find the link you’d preserved yields a disappointing 404 Error message, meaning the page you wanted no longer exists? Evernote doesn’t just preserve the link — it preserves the entire page or document, along with comments, tags and anything else you wish to keep.
The Basics
Install Evernote, create your account and put a little “clipper” in your browser bar — it works much like Pinterest’s “Pin” bookmarklet to speedily grab what you want and tuck it away. Any time you want to save something digital, you can just click on the clipper bookmarklet and up pops a window to walk you through your options.
For example, at some point in the not-too-distant past, I went to Evernote’s page for getting started, and clicked on the clipper, bringing up a little window, as you see below.
Evernote selects a default title for your note; adjust it as you see fit. Add your tags, select in which notebook (for any of your various themes or projects) you wish the note saved, and add comments or stray thoughts. You can save an entire page, or highlight just one section for faster and more accurate “clipping” of web material (to skip ads and extraneous text or photos). And, of course, you can opt to save the original URL.
Beyond Baby Steps
Evernote saves much more than web sites and text. Instead of using your clipper, log in to your Evernote account and click “New Note” from the main page or within any of your already-created notebooks.
Above, the left column represents my various notebooks and tags; the center column shows previews of various clippings (i.e., notes) and the right column provides a place to create a more complex note, with formatting. Let’s say you have a brilliant idea for a blog post, or a wedding toast, or your packing list for an upcoming trip. Instead of scribbling it down on a random floozy, lock it up on Evernote.
Once in your account, you can drag-and-drop images from your desktop, files, and web pages. For convenience, you can also drag images directly onto any specific notebook (without having created a detailed note) or, for Mac users, directly onto the Evernote icon in your Dock. And it’s not just text and pictures. Record audio and move the .MP3 file to a notebook. Save videos, too. And tweets! Then combine them all in the way that works best for you.
Bing, bang, boom. Your “stuff” is saved to the cloud and synced across all of your devices. Better yet, it’s searchable, so between the native text of what you’ve saved and the keywords you create, you have your own private search engine to find what you want, when you want it, no matter how long ago you clipped or created it, accessible from anywhere in the world.
Now What?
Evernote has myriad uses. I save product reviews, news stories and articles that may be useful for Paper Doll posts and my Best Results for Busy People newsletter, as well as for current and future articles and books I’m writing. A recent discussion on the NAPO email chat found that my colleagues are using Evernote for various professional and personal solutions, including:
- Notes, statistics and ideas for presentations and workshops
- Titles of books, movies and other entertainment to check out later
- Household data, like battery sizes, light bulb wattages and air filter dimensions
- Organizing solutions for particular clients or situations
- Grocery lists (shared across devices with family members who can access them while shopping)
- Collated travel information and directions to use while on vacation or attending conferences
- Party planning and menu ideas, including recipes, organized by meal or ethnicity of cuisine
This is just a smattering of options — Evernote has a video library of tutorials and suggestions for ways to maximize its use. Evernote continues to expand its interactivity with other apps. Draw or hand-write with a stylus on your iPad or tablet in Skitch and Evernote saves it (and even translates handwriting to text). Save news and articles to read later via Pocket (formerly Read It Later) or InstaPaper. Study for exams (or your Jeopardy audition) by creating study notebooks with Peek, and record (with permission) phone calls with CallTrunk.
Evernote is free at the basic level. For $5/month or $45/year, the Premium level grants the ability to upload up to 1 GB each month (handy for photos and lots of files) and have individual files of up to 50 MB. You can also view historical versions of files, take notebooks offline for when you lack web access, collaborate across accounts, hide promotional language, and more.
THE HYBRID: PAPER + DIGITAL = EVERNOTE SMART NOTEBOOK BY MOLESKINE
The Evernote Smart Notebook By Moleskine combines the advanced technology of Evernote with the sensory delight of a Moleskine notebook.
Paper notebooks are tangible and concrete. Digitizing provides accessibility, navigation, searchability and a different kind of permanence. What if you could combine the two? What if you could scribble down your thoughts on paper in your own quirky handwriting, then record, modify, and preserve them forever? Now, you can.
The Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine lets you create naturally, then use Evernote’s handwriting recognition and search capability to turn your scribbles and scratches into symbols of your brilliance. (Haven’t you always wanted a way to digitally search through piles of handwritten notes to find the paragraph or phrase you needed?)
Affix Smart Stickers to automatically add digital tags to your notes — kind of like built-in QR codes, to take information from paper to the cloud.
Just write in your notebook, and when you’re done, the Page Camera feature inside Evernote on iOS (on your iPhone or iPad — Android access is still-to-come) recognizes the tiny, square stickers, adds tags to the digital note, optimizes it and files it into a selected folder in your Evernote Digital memory.
Getting Started
Pick one of two sizes: the 240-page Large (5″ x 8 1/4″) notebook for $24.95 or the 195-page Pocket (3 1/2″ x 5 1/2″) notebook for $29.95. Both come with black hardcovers, green elastic bands and four sheets of Smart Stickers (tucked in the back pocket).
Then select your paper preference: a gridded pattern (like graph paper) or (dotted) ruled paper. You can use pencil or pen, though dark pens will yield the clearest digital results.
Each Evernote Smart Notebook purchase includes a complimentary subscription to Evernote Premium for three months, so your next step is to sign up for your Premium Digital account…and start creating.
This isn’t the first nifty blending of paper and technology. There’s the LiveScribe Echo and Pulse smart pens, which digitally record text written on special notepads and contemporaneous audio. But the Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine combines two products you either already use (or would enjoy using) in a stylish, magical and far more affordable manner. It’s prettier than a Zedonk and less expensive than a Prius.
Of course, it’s no Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup…but then, what is?
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