“My Obsession with…” is a new blog category I am starting to share a bit of personal side of me. Some will be related to business, productivity, and self-improvement; some are probably completely unrelated to my professional life. Either way, I want to keep this category informational for you so that you might find it useful in some way!
To kick it off, I am going to share my obsession with notebooks. At the moment, I use 2 different types of notebooks. Here, I am going to show you the one I carry around in my bag.
As I was growing up, I was always obsessed and extremely picky with stationary. If I like what I was using, I found myself being very productive. I got this from my father whose career was in the art direction and design. He had all sorts of pens, erasers for different uses, sketchbooks, notebooks, weird shaped rulers, and a variety of Xacto knives.
I loved trying whatever he had on his desk. Now looking back, functionality was more important to my father. Those were tools for him just to do his job. He didn’t have anything with leather or gold. Today, I am the same way; I don’t care much for fancy stationary.
It has taken me years to find the one that I like using purely by trial & error. Finally, I am extremely happy with Muji PP Cover Double Ring Note A6. So far, I went through 3 of them. Below is the quick list of criteria I had in order to find my ultimate, carry-around notebook:
1. Mechanics: It had to be a wire binding one so that I can tear pages off. I also wanted to be able to stick a pen in.
2. Size: It needed to be small enough to carry around but not too small to write down ideas, thoughts, charts & diagrams.
3. Shell: Cover needed to be very durable as it gets knocked around inside of my bag.
4. Style: Absolutely no lines. I much prefer blank pages, but this one has light-colored dots which are not too distracting. I can live with it.
The purpose of my carry-around notebooks is to capture anything & everything that comes to my mind when I am on the go. For this reason, it is very important that I can easily tear pages off and transfer them to another location to be organized at a later time.
There are 2 things that I absolutely love.
One is the plastic cover. Many notebooks with this style come with bulky cardboard covers, and they add unnecessary weight. The last thing I want to do is to carry around a big, heavy hobo bag filled with a lot of things. No matter how much it gets bounced around in my bag, it maintains the shape. It is also light enough not to burden me.
The other thing is there are no lines, just dots. I stopped using any notebooks with lines. Lines limit my thinking as if I need to write along those lines and cannot stray. Finding notebooks with no lines wasn’t easy.
If you are interested in giving this a try, you can purchase them online. Here is the link that takes directly to this notebook: http://muji.lu/2lUte5R
I would love to hear what your favorite notebooks and other stationary items to keep your ideas flowing. Feel free to comment below with your suggestions. I am always up for trying new things. I hope this post was useful, and if you ever give this notebook a try, I also want to hear what you thought of it.