Two of my favorite bloggers got me thinking about Moleskine. Moleskine, for the unitiated, is an Italian line of notebooks and planners,

“used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin.” (Product literature)

First, Kathy Sierra showed us how she turned an off the shelf Moleskine into a high powered PDA.

Then, Tony Clark endorsed the Moleskine in a recent post about personal productivity.

If the Moleskine is good enough for these two (to say nothing of Picasso), I figured it was good enough for me. I started with the basic Pocket Ruled Notebook. Minimalistic in the extreme–nothing but 192 pages of ruled paper. I’m finding it an excellent replacement for the spiral notebooks I’ve used for years to record client notes, follow-up tasks, ideas, and any other day-to-day information I need to remember.

What’s unique about Moleskine is the binding. Other bound notebooks don’t want to stay open, making them awkward to use compared to spiral notebooks. But the Moleskine magically stays open and flat, making it easy to write on both sides of the sheet. The paper’s high quality, thick yet soft; a pleasure to write on. Hemingway used Moleskines. While I can’t say I’m writing like Hemingway thanks to my Moleskine, I am starting to feel more like him, and judging by the encroaching whiteness of my beard, I’m starting to look more like him as well.

The second Moleskine product that is changing my life is the Large Soft Cover Weekly Planner. On the left is a seven-day week on a grid; on the right, a blank narrow-lined page. Simple, elegant, efficient. The left side is perfect for penciling in meetings and other time-specific tasks, while the right side gives me a place to make note of other tasks that need to be completed that week (such as writing assignments), driving directions, and notes relating to meetings scheduled for that week. Far more versatile than the At-A-Glance Weekly Planners I’ve used in the past.

It’s so liberating to be rid of those nasty spirals. How many shirt cuffs and pants pockets have I snagged and shredded on the business end of a spiral metal wire? Too many to count. No more. Moleskines for me!

Further reading.

The Moleskine Blog.

In-depth Moleskineia from Interesting Thing of the Day.

Dan the Echo Boomer really likes Moleskine.

Zonageek turned his Moleskine into a hard drive, naturally.