After the post I published last week I got an e-mail from a reader that tipped me about Dingbats Wildelife notebooks. All the pages are perforated. I’ll start playing around with it as soon as I get the one I ordered in the mail.

If this doesn’t work out I’ll probably try using the top ring bond dot grid notebooks from Rhodia.

Not long after I published the last posts I just found a knife and started to mess around with cutting out pages from my Leuchtturm1917 A5 notebooks, and it works, kind of. But I’m not fund of the results.

So that will not be a thing I’ll continue doing.

When I use a notebook that is either lined or dotted, I almost always would prefer to be able to just tear off pages as I’m done with them.

Like now I’m looking at a A5 Leuchtturm1917 dot grid notebook at page 114 and 115; it is my bullet journal. I would have removed most of the pages before that, if it was easy to do so. First and foremost because there are a lot of pages in there that are completed or irrelevant and I think it is much easier to deal with things when you just remove all the cruft.

I could just kind of tear them out or cut them out. And it is something I have considered, but never actually attempted to do.

For me most of my notebooks are not something I keep, but rather just something I use as a tool right now. And I just throw them out when I’m done with them. And I’d really like to just kind of do that as I’m working my way through them. This is the reason I always use Rhoda pads for everything where I don’t want to be able to look at both A5 pages at the same time.

As I’ve been more and more needing to do more and more preparation work when ever I have the time to do it and not relying to have the time to do it as the day starts I’ve gradually migrated my bullet journaling setup to more fit within that.

At the moment I usually keep the same setup for a week before migrating it.

I still use the first two pages as a status thing for goals and such. Then I do daily pages, where I reserve 4 pages for each day, and then non day specific projects in a projects section at the end. Some of them are plain projects, while others are things I want to do each week, month etc.

Currently I like it, and it works well enough. And makes me focus on the daily. The way I use it is that I review the status page each day, then I do the checklist stuff I have pre populated each day with. And then I add more stuff to it after that as needed. And move on to projects when all the Day-page related stuff are done.

The setup entails more page waste than I prefer. But I haven’t really found anything analog that could fix that issue.

I have looked for this so many times. Why aren’t there packing cubes for notebooks? I’d love to just have a few of them for bringing all my notebooks and gears between home and the office. A few because I’d like to layer it, one with the most important and a few additional for the stuff I sometimes bring.

I can’t be the only crazy ass weirdo who brings a bunch of notebooks, some pens, some other related accessories to the office every single day.

I’m a huge fan of having everything digital, but mostly working from analog. What I mean by working from analog is that I copy my agenda from digital calendars to my Hobonichi, I move tasks from my task manager to my bullet journal usually 2-3 A5 pages at a time, and use that plus a super short list of next 5-10 actions to work from.

Why does this work? The reason it works for me is that my hit list is usually what I intend to spend the next 15-30 minutes on. And my bullet journal is just the selection that I decided was the most important to deal with right now.

It makes what I work on intentional, plus it makes it really focused because I usually only look at my task manager every 1-3 hours. It makes it much easier for me to work focused on closing projects. Plus it also makes it obvious when I don’t complete projects and have to move them to the next day.

It doesn’t hurt that my notebooks don’t have social media apps.

I go back and forth on this so often it’s not even funny.

The two gel pens I like the most in general is:

• Signo DX 0.38mm
• Zebra Sarasa 0.4mm

I like writing with the DX more, but I find the Zebra to be more comfortable to write with, plus being capless makes it much quicker to get started.

At the moment my favorite is the Zebra, but that probably will change at least twice before the summer is over.

Note: went back a forth a bunch of times if these belong on my more tech and everything else focused personal site or here, and decided to put it here because desks and stationery seems very related

I’ve been looking for a laptop stand for using my laptops open for years, but never got one because they never went high enough for me.

Then I found this thing.

It seems like it shouldn’t work, and be stable or be able to keep your laptop up. But it totally works. I had to tighten the screws to make it work properly but other than that it is perfect.

I have mine at the highest angle, and it for the most part lines up with the top of the screen in the office. And I have the laptop at a comfortable viewing angle, plus it makes less space on the desk.

The only thing I miss from it is a way to deal with dongles that are chunky, and don’t have a long enough cable to reach all the way down.

Note: went back a forth a bunch of times if these belong on my more tech and everything else focused personal site or here, and decided to put it here because desks and stationery seems very related

I remember during the iPad 2 days I used to have this compass thingy for my iPad. That just led me prop it up at two different heights, one comfortable for typing on it like it was a keyboard and one for looking at it like a regular display. The great thing about it is that unlike most cases that do this, you can prop it up in both landscape and portrait.

A while back I kind of wanted the same for my much bigger iPad. Plus I lost or got rid of the old compass years ago. So I looked at found out that Twelve South have a new one for bigger iPads.

It is really awesome, and I all day in the office, because there is always I thing I want to have visible on the side.