4:20PM
Moleskine Revisited
I've now been using the Moleskine for a few months. I wasn't exactly sure how I would incorporate it into my life but knew I wanted an easy way to capture tasks on the run. Of course in the mean time, a few things have changed for me in terms of productivity. First, I bought an iPhone. That has had very little impact on the way I capture tasks. Why ... do you ask? Because the iPhone doesn't have a built in task list!? There is a bit of a hack but I'll discuss that below. This post is supposed to be about Moleskines.
Anyway, I don't keep a "journal" in my Moleskine and rarely draw a diagram. It is, primarily, a list. For instance, I'm on the phone with someone and he says, "Hey Dave ... I got a new job making roadrunner traps. My new email address is Joe@ACME.com". I'll write a line in my Moleskine "Joe@ACME.com" As I go through the day I'll accumulate these small entries and at some point I'll sit down in front of my Mac and input these items. They can be OmniFocus entries, address book entries, or maybe a simple task that I'll just do. Either way, very quickly they get processed and crossed off in the Moleskine. Like I said, nothing fancy but it gets the job done.
While I really like the pocket sized Moleskine it still is kind of bulky in my pocket so that one stays at my desk at work. I picked up a three pack of the thin softcover Moleskines that are perfect for putting in my pocket. I keep one in the car, one on me, and one in the briefcase and that works just fine. So at the end of the day I could have several Moleskine's I am processing. It sounds confusing but actually it works quite well.
I'm thinking I may start taking meeting notes in a bigger one and process them the same way. We'll see.
The iPhone Wrinkle
I have faith that Apple will eventually get around to putting a task list on the iPhone but I'm not all that certain I'd actually use it. If I had OmniFocus on it maybe. The current Omni solution that would require me to turn my laptop into a server is useless to me. But for now, such pipe dreams along with about ten bucks will buy you a cup of coffee. There is one slight hack. I have a "Ta-Da List" account which is great. I mainly keep shopping lists on it. For instance, I have a "Target" , "Grocery List" and a few other. I also put an "OmniFocus" list on it that allows me when not near a Moleskine, to put a task in there for later input.
I'm getting plenty of emails from readers with good ideas. Don't be afraid to place comments with your tricks so everyone can benefit.
Reader Comments (3)
Thanks, I enjoyed the Great Read!
I too have recently began using a Moleskine. Partially due to the fact that I discovered them on Flickr, which piqued my interest. So I just had to go out and buy a few to try them and see what all the excitement was about. I must admit they are extremely well designed and quite nice to use. However like you, I don't particularly like carrying the hardbound version, so I'm going to try out the soft cover versions, which I learned of through your writings here. (thank you).
One of the motivations for me was that my handwriting has deteriorated badly, as I do everything on my ThinkPad and therefore I hardly write anymore. Also I use a BlackBerry which has a perfect interface with Outlook which then makes it very easy to sync the two, thereby avoiding the duplication of effort my manually having to "copy" notes from a Moleskine to the computer.
However that said, I was very eager to recover my hand writing. In addition, I'm getting ready to go back to my beloved roots on the Mac, and purchase a new MacBook Pro. I embrace change, get bored easily and therefore find myself very excited at this backwards compatible move to an analog Moleskine. Then the real excitement of purchasing a new MBP is very high, especially since I've used quite a few PowerBooks in the past and have really loved them. As far as losing a bit of time by having to copy the notes in my Moleskine into my Mac, no worries, I could think of a lot worse things to burn up time doing.
Finally I would like to compliment you, on your superb sense of humor in the tag line below your blog logo: "Drinking the Mac Cool-Aid and it's delicious" I laughed so hard and read it over and over at least five times. Nothing better than good humor and yours is stellar!
Cheers!
Leonard,
Thanks for the compliments@!!
After spending the last 5 or so years syncing my task list on a palm pilot I can attest that using Moleskines does add a bit of time on data input but OmniFocus and iGTD make it so easy it really isn't that much time. The other benefit is you don't have to deal with the occaisional problems that Palm syncing causes like doubling all your task list items or (worse yet) deletion.
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