paper graffiti

My name is Jess, and I’m a paper junkie. I have Moleskine journals and cahiers stashed around the house for recording a moment of brilliance. I have stacks of spirals in my office at work waiting to be indexed and filed. I’ve tried Mead, Moleskines, high-end spiral notebooks, binders, smaller format notebooks, index cards…but nothing really worked for me in the workplace. But I finally pulled the trigger on my holy grail today. I bought a letter-size Circa bookcloth notebook.

I love paper goods, I always have. You’d think someone as tech-oriented as I am would turn her nose up at anything paper-based. It’s SO 1.0. But the way I take notes doesn’t translate well to the computer. Sometimes I like writing the old-fashioned way, with a pen and a notebook and music drowning out the rest of the world. So, I’m always buying new journals, notebooks, pens…anything to feed that 1.0 beast inside me.

I have always been a copious note-taker. Friends always wanted to borrow my notes in school because they knew they’d be thorough and complete, and I always felt ever so slightly smug when test time came around and I was incredibly prepared while my fellow students were not. I am probably too thorough, if we’re being honest here, but that overattention to detail has saved my butt more often than not.

In my line of work, I take a lot of notes, just like I did in high school and college. My job requires me to pay attention to every nuance of a client’s wants and needs–both from a project managerial point of view, and from a project content point of view. Even if I’m not writing a project that I’m managing, I still have to know the content almost as well as the instructional designer. During the process of bringing a course to life, there are a lot of meetings that require me to take lots of notes to capture the content and those client wants and needs. As you can imagine, I burn through spiral notebooks like nobody’s business. My notes also get really jumbled and mixed up, because I hate having to carry around separate notebooks and I have a bad habit of breaking 3-ring binders.

Being a paper aficionado has led me through many Google searches to find my paper-obsessed brethren (Moleskinerie, The Fountain Pen Network, and DIY Planner merit frequent visits!) and drool over the office supply porn that I find. Many people on DIY Planner are hooked on the Circa notebooks, but I could never bring myself to buy one since they are pretty costly, despite the fact that my finger itched to click “Add to Cart” every time I surfed Levenger.com.

I realized, however, that my particular mode of notetaking in the workplace would lend itself well to the Circa setup, and I’m sick of feeling unorganized. So I bit the bullet and ordered one, complete with a set of plastic tab dividers. I plan on dividing up the notebook according to clients and then having a section for to-do lists and also blank paper. Everything will be in order and organized, because Circa supposedly makes it easy.

We’ll see if I’m still drinking the Levenger kool-aid when I get my package from them…hopefully by Friday or Monday, since I hear their shipping goes pretty fast. But I can’t wait to add yet another brand of notebook into my list of obsessions…I guess it comes with the territory of being a writer. There’s just something about pen and paper that even the most glorious tech set up can’t touch.

Next up, trying out a fountain pen! That’s REALLY kicking it old skool.

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