Productination

Greetings interweb,

Those of you who know me know that I think paper is a great medium for note taking and list making.

Thus, I always carry a pen and my trusty Moleskine Cahier (say [kaa yáy]) notebook. I’m currently in the process of fully implementing my own version of the GTD system, which is by far the best organizational and productivity system I’ve read to date. For those of you who are already GTD’ing it up, this notebook acts solely as a “capture” bucket, nothing else. I try to process it every day, so that it doesn’t end up being a storage bucket. Notes go in and I deal with them the same day, so that if I ever lose the notebook I’ll never lose more than 1 day of data.

Out of all the notebooks I could have picked for my personal organizational system, I chose the Moleskine Cahier because:

1. At 64 pages thick, it’s small enough to fit in my pocket (even in my fitted designer jeans)
2. They come in packs of three, which is cheaper per page than the thicker (and more popular) Moleskine Pocket Notebook
3. It’s still a Moleskine, with the craft and quality you’d expect. What good is an organizational system if you never use it? I can appreciate the workmanship that went into a quality notebook, and I actually enjoy opening mine up and writing on its pages.

But, there’s one disadvantage that the Cahier notebook has compared to its thicker cousin: the Cahier is so thin that it has the tendency to get bent up in my back pocket when I sit on it. After a couple months of use, it ended up looking like this:

The spine started to wear, pages started falling out. It was not a pretty sight.

And so, after I lost my most recent one (which had all my notes in it from 1/1/2008 to 4/21/2008, and I’m pretty sure is still somewhere at the gym), I decided that my next one would stay crisp and fresh as the first time I removed it from its cellophane wrapping.

My first design was simply to create a paper cover for the book, much like I did for my textbooks in high school. I took a plain piece of blue printer paper (recycled from some flier I got) and cut out a large enough piece so that it would have about a 1″ margin all around, and folded it up!

This is what it looked like:

Of course, a piece of paper added almost nothing to the sturdiness. So, I took an old box from Amazon, cut out two pieces of cardboard, and stuck them inside the cover for reinforcement. This definitely made it sturdier! But now, the paper cover was taking on the grooves of the corrugated cardboard, which looked pretty gnarly.

I went back to the drawing board. What I needed was a thicker cover. It’d be cool if it looked nice too. That’s when this envelope caught my eye.

So, following the same basic folding diagram, I cut out a cover from this thick cardboard stock. I also removed the top and bottom middle strips so that there would be only one layer of cardboard except at the pockets. I used a bit of packing tape to reinforce the pockets.

Here’s the result:

Pretty hot, if I say so myself. The only problem is that the edges were pretty ragged.

Next time, I’ll leave a little bit and fold it in. Also, I’ll use a proper paper cutter instead of my busted ass scissors. Other than that, I’m totally happy! A lot of sturdiness added with minimal thickness, and all reused materials.

Oh, and I used one of my moo minicards to display my contact info. I was actually pretty disappointed by the print quality of the moo cards, but at least the text on the back is very clear.

I’m thinking about making this into an instructable when I have time.

Hope you enjoyed this and found it useful. As for me, I’m going to keep my eye out for some bright red envelopes…

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