Living with ADHD and OCD means periodically I develop (and get overly-excited over) a new, elaborate organization system that I somehow, foolishly, believe will last forever.
However, this week I've got a tremendous new system that I think may last forever!
The Tremendous Development!
You can now write and preserve data in a physical, human-readable format that's immune to hard drive failures! And it's like, right there in front of you so you're less likely to forget about it!
But the best part is...
These Don't Suck!
Remember these 99 cent bois from grade school?
Garbage.
But TankieTanuki, those are the cheapest ones, which means they're the notebooks of The People!
No. Full stop. Don't even.
You're an adult. Your thoughts are worth preserving. These aren't diamond-encrusted—it's like paying twice as much for the boots that last ten times as long. These were not expensive: The A6 ones were about $3.00 each and the A5 were $5.50.
Do you think Stalin's commissars were recording state grain quotas on those shitty McJournals where the spiral falls out the fourth time you open it and the ink bleeds through three pages at a time?
No.
Stalin would have shot your ass for doing a shitty job and you'd have deserved it.
Cool Features
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Thick Paper
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Hardback
The book is its own clipboard! Vegan leather (aka plastic lol ). Bound securely with string 'n' stuff.
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Adorably Smol
A5 for studying. A6 for writing down bit ideas or memos.
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That's right. Those are mother-fucking DOTS on those pages!
You can draw technical shit like tables better because of the vertical guides, but it's less conspicuous than grid/graph paper.
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PAGE NUMBERS!!? You better believe it. Leverage the power of INDEXING!
Also the red A6 one looks like Quotations from Mao Zedong.
I may start getting into fountain pens now. Lord, help me.
I've been using the Midori A5 notebooks with grid lining since the dot grids are either unavailable or expensive as fuck depending on where I look. I wish the pages were numbered, although I just manually number them and then I make an Index page at the front. With the plastic cover it comes with a pen/cil loop and I can slip a small plastic ruler inside the back cover. Bought a bunch of replacement erasers for the mechanical pencil I have and I'm not afraid to write and erase stuff.
I use LibreCalc/Excel to test out formats for pages since I can easily make a grid in them and then see how best to use a page's grid space.
These were cheap enough that I can just jot my stream of consciousness without guilt. I think it came out to around 2 cents per page.
Of course there is no replacing spreadshits. I have one A5 notebook for Kerbal Space Program that I use in tandem with LibreCalc to aesthetically compare ship ideas and draw blueprints.
Mine weren't expensive. I just did the math.
That's after-tax. They're sold in packs of seven.
Nice. The Midori A4 I'm using works out to about 8.8 cents. Could probably knock that down to 6-7 if I bulk-ordered them from a stationary website here, but that's a hassle and would probably be like $100+ in bulk at least.