6 ms·
I remember buying my first Moleskine notebook in college. It was my first exposure to "fashionable office supplies", a foreign concept to me growing up. It was
by karaterobot 5y ago
I remember buying my first Moleskine notebook in college. It was my first exposure to "fashionable office supplies", a foreign concept to me growing up. It was a super nice object. In fact it was so nice, I didn't want to use it to just take notes in class, because what a waste. I also didn't want to use it to just scribble personal notes and todo lists in, because what a waste. In the end, I never wrote anything in that notebook at all: what a waste.
Now I tend to view fashionable office supplies as productivity fetish items. It's easy to geek out on that stuff, but does a better notebook make me more productive? Seems to make me less productive, if history is an indicator.
Yeah, I will occasionally find myself reading reviews of immaculately designed mechanical pencils, or minutely engineered Japanese scissors. But I try not to lose sight of the advantages cheap, lousy stuff has too: disposable, easy to replace, low barrier to use. These qualities are also valuable.
- 99_00 5y ago>but does a better notebook make me more productive? Seems to make me less productive, if history is an indicator. The choice of notebook impacts your productivity. As you yourself admit. The notebook that works best for someone depends on the person. Your reaction to Moleskine notebooks is particular to you. "Better" is what is better for the individual.
- adamm255 5y agoI still have my first college Moleskine which also was something way “too good” to waste so has about 20 pages used, the rest are blank! I now use free vendor notebooks from events and random pens. And a £2 flip notebook for daily to-dos.
- sanderjd 5y agoI think the biggest advantage to buying my own stuff is standardization. Nothing drives me crazier than a bunch of schwag notebooks of different shapes and sizes all jumbled in a drawer.
- jwdunne 5y agoI’ve done this too. Quite the contrast to my disorganised life. I have two types: lined and square paper. Both hardback and book bound (find ring binds don’t play nice with me and I lose pages). Get the exact same ones each time, apart from a few old ones whilst I was in my discovery phase. The lined ones come in a stack of 5 so always have one ready to go. Also use a single type of pen: a black staedtler fine liner. They in a box of 10.
- sanderjd 5y agoRight! The "exact same ones each time" is way more important to me than which ones. Or rather, the exact same shape; I experiment with dotted vs. lined vs. grid (though I've pretty much entirely decided on dotted at this point).
- spicybright 5y agoIt's funny, I purposely avoid this so each period of my life using it has a memberable notebook style I can look at on the shelf and reference quickly if I need to. I generally get small ones and try to do a new one every 6 months depending on how many notes there are.
- sanderjd 5y agoTo each their own, but that sounds like a mess to me :)
- sph 5y agoI have bought a nice leather bound notebook, the one you sit down with a cup of coffee to write something important. I never use it. I instead just got myself a cheap detective-style notepad I can keep in my pocket to write down all the crap the comes to mind, everywhere I am, even while standing up. That's exactly what I need.
- dijit 5y agoThe trick is to buy a nice leather sleeve for a standard size of notebook, then buy cheaper inserts. You might find that you enjoy the quality of paper of other notebooks, but it gets you over that "this notebook is too nice for my random thought"-block.
- hatmatrix 5y agoDoesn't have to be leather - just saying - but also the cheaper notebooks tend to fall apart and I've lost pages this way. One thing about more expensive ones like moleskines is that they are more robust, in my experience. I hardly "splurge" on anything but I realized there is some value to good writing tools.
- maskerade 5y agoHahaha, it's good to read this and see its not just me. I also have an unused Moleskine notebook and numerous other 'Nice' looking notebooks that I never write in as I feel it would just be a waste. I just go for a cheap and cheerful one that I am happy to write any old nonsense in
- egypturnash 5y agoIt really varies with the person. Personally I like using nice notebooks with ornate covers based on old books, with metallic ink accents. Like this: https://www.paperblanks.com/en/product/journals/viola/pb8116-6 https://www.paperblanks.com/en/product/journals/viola/pb8116... It makes me feel like a freakin' wizard to pull them out and write in them. It's great. Bonus wizard points for using a nice fountain pen.
- sedawk 5y agoI have been a sucker for nice mechanical pencils for well over 2 decades and gone through tons of books or just bunch of papers stapled together, nothing fancy. Been meaning to get into fountain pens, any good recommendations please?
- goldenkey 5y agoSame feeling here. I have a collection of Lord of The Rings limited edition Moleskin notebooks [1] and they make me feel like I'm writing into some compendium of time. I find it to be worth it, considering that even premium office supplies aren't that expensive compared to other life expenses. [1] https://amzn.to/3F1qdaG https://amzn.to/3F1qdaG
- 5y ago
- rzzzt 5y agoThere is a webcomic that mirrors your experience: https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/nice-notebook/ https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/nice-notebook/
- jl6 5y agoAnd the general trope: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TooAwesomeToUse https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TooAwesomeToUse
- lwkl 5y agoMoleskin Notebooks are overpriced trash. The paper is way too thin and most pens I use bleed through.
- thomas 5y agoYes, but if you use the right pen it helps a lot! Good reference: https://unsharpen.com/what-are-the-best-pens-for-moleskine-notebooks/ https://unsharpen.com/what-are-the-best-pens-for-moleskine-n...
- tom_ 5y agoBlimey. If that isn't Stockholm syndrome, I don't know what is. Wouldn't surprise me if the Moleskine paper is less than 70 gsm - I've got some notebooks that claim to be 70 gsm, and the paper has a bit more heft to it than the very thin, soft paper in the Moleskines. I do quite like how nice the Moleskine paper is to flick through, but the amount of bleed is a bit much, so while I do buy a Moleskine monthly diary each year - useful layout, cover feels nice, price not ridiculous, the per-month notes pages (that I typically don't use) act as an ink bleed buffer - I'd be a bit less confident that their notebooks would work as well. For notes, I buy whatever cheap ringbound A4/A5 squared 70+ gsm paper notebooks I can find on Amazon.
- chevill 5y agoThere are pens that write well on Moleskine but with good paper you can write with nearly any pen and it won't bleed/feather. Moleskine notebooks look and feel like they are high quality but the paper itself is very poor in quality. That being said, If the pens one likes to use work well on Moleskine, there's no reason why a person shouldn't use it. Leuchtterm, Clairefontaine, Rhodia, and Tomoe River are some examples of high quality paper. If you want something that's close but quite a bit cheaper Black and Red has some options that work well even with a flexible fountain pen.
- unethical_ban 5y agoOnce you get over the "don't use them" part, they're exquisite to use. Pens, I tend to agree that I like being cheap on them so I can lose them and replace easily. Notebooks, I don't lose because the value is the data.
- iveqy 5y agoI used to never find my pencil and continue to have to go and fetch a new one at the office. Then I bought a 200 usd Lamy 2000 and now I always have a good pen at hands. I used to have a pile of coffee mugs piling up at my desk at work. Then I bought an expensive designer coffee mug and only used that one, suddenly my work area is clean. It's about knowing how you can trick yourself to without any effort increasing your well being. I've flaws, sometimes I can buy then away by tricking myself.
- cstoner 5y ago> Now I tend to view fashionable office supplies as productivity fetish items. It's easy to geek out on that stuff, but does a better notebook make me more productive? Seems to make me less productive, if history is an indicator. I agree with you 95%. This comment is really just wanting to explain that 5%. I have found that a little extra money goes a long way, and that a lot of money doesn't ever go far enough. My bullet journal "daily caries" are: * Apica CD 5mm grid notebook - $14.00 (one per year) * Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen - $17.00 (one time purchase) * Disposable black refills for the fountain pen - $5.00 per 20 (maybe twice a year) In the realm of fancy pens/notebooks these are pretty cheap, but I really enjoy them. I feel like they are at a very nice sweet spot where they're cheap enough that I could lose them, but not "too good to use". Maybe I'm lying to myself, but I feel like I journal more often because of how much I like them. It's just nice to use nice things.
- mcphage 5y ago> In the end, I never wrote anything in that notebook at all: what a waste. Years ago I took some bookbinding workshops. The guy running the program ended up making tons of books for the lessons which he ended up giving away. One of the thing he did was to scribble on the first page so it wasn’t pristine, so that the recipients wouldn’t want to use it for being “too nice”.
- sedawk 5y agoBook-binding... I have been wanting to do this so I could bind my own books, mostly for fun and "wow" factor, if nothing else. But it either got pushed out due to something (seemingly) more important/immediate or I didn't go that extra mile! Watched several videos on the inter-tubes, but nothing clicked... Didn't ever explore the option of bookbinding-workshop!! Care to share some details about this workshop (location, what to look for, pitfalls, etc.)!!
- mcphage 5y agoSorry, I didn't see this response until today. I took summer workshops at the North Bennet Street School in Boston. It's in the North End, right down the street from the "One if by Land, Two if by Sea" church. The workshops were fantastic, I would recommend them in a heartbeat: https://nbss.edu/ https://nbss.edu/ I took a bunch of them, over I think 2 summers. An intro one, one on leather binding, one on miniatures, one on Japanese binding. This was ~20 years ago, though. It was a very rewarding activity, it feels really good to make your own books. You get to work with your hands, what you make is cool, and it's all beautiful. I'm incredibly glad I did them.
- narayanbs 5y agoAgree with you one hundred percent. I was more concerned about the way i use the fashionable office supplies than what my intention in buying them was in the first place.
- mjrbrennan 5y agoSame, I write fiction and years ago when I was starting out I bought the fancy Moleskine and Field Notes notebooks, among others. Those have never had more than a few pages filled in. I have however filled 11-12 A4 notebooks of various lengths with longhand writing that cost ~$2-5 each. Same with pens, I never want to use fancy pens or notebooks, a 5 pack of basic pens do the job just fine (though I do now have a favorite, UB-120 uni-ball micro rollerball pens). It's fun to read about this fancy and nicely designed stuff as you say, but the less fussiness around writing for me, the better.
- 2b3a51 5y agoCheap and disposable: short hand pads from a high street chain of cheap stationery shops in the UK (The Works). One pound for 150 leaves with top spiral. Pages stuck up on wall for todos &c, discarded when complete. Also a ream of A4 photocopying paper which I use on a clipboard for diagrams sketches and mind maps and drafts. More permanent: generic A5 sketchbooks from artist materials shops. Typically 80 leaves of 100g/m^2 off white plain paper and board covers with sewn signature bindings. Around a fiver each. Recently discovered somewhere in the middle: Muji 'Pocketnote' A5 plain notebooks with paper covers and a lot of leaves (over 100). Flexible, thin shiny pages (no good for sharpies/gel/ink) but cheapish around three pounds and a nice feel. None of these are so expensive to become precious.
- kamaal 5y agoI once bought a Moleskine notebook, it was so precious i never used it. I then gave it to my niece, she didn't use it either, last time I heard she gave to somebody else too. Long story short you buy these things as jewellery and not as tools. Plain old notebook available in any nearby store works for me. And yeah any pen works too.
- notjustanymike 5y agoThis implies you think none of your ideas are worth $20.
- Semiapies 5y agoEh, depends on the product. Moleskin Cahier journals are truly pedestrian-looking things, but they have decent, unlined paper and a good size and shape for quick, project-specific notes on your desk. And they handle wear better than small, cheap notebooks. (Aside from those hard-covered composition books, which is something I've tried in the past. And those have spine/glue problems.) While the Field Notes limited editions are blatantly collectibles, most are similar enough to the standard items to just use. Get one of the fancy leather covers if you worry about damaging them, then stick it in your pocket when you need to take a note. (Given most are the same price as their standard notebooks, it's really more of a fun little decoration for the everyday tool.) And a Fisher AG7 is just handy to clip to the notebook in your pocket, so you always have a normal-feeling ballpoint pen that will always work. It's the only pen I've managed to hold onto long enough to get refills.
- exolymph 5y agoI solve this problem by simply actually using my nice supplies. Nothing more satisfying than a full notebook!