People who dump drive me crazy.

I am fairly certain that many of the people that I deal with on a day to day basis from outside my company are "dumpers". They are people who may themselves be working from lists, but all they are doing (in GTD context) is calling to leave a voicemail or an e-mail, and then move it to their @Waiting for lists.

And it isn't all of them, some of them have good intentions. But really, many are just calling or e-mailing to then foist something back at you. Perhaps I'm tainted right now by reading Scott Adam's funny "The Dilbert Principle", which discusses this sort of "weasel" behaviour and how you can use it to your advantage. However, I'm trying to actually accomplish something, not just dump, and it seems that more and more people are trying to push things off of their own plates and onto the plates of other.

If that wasn't enough, I am noticing that this is becoming a pretty major pre-occupation for most business interactions. It seems ridiculous to me. Just my $0.02, but I'm very tired of it happening all the time.

Myndology Notebook - Hacking Update

About two weeks ago, I posted about how I found a Myndology Junior Notebook and Myndology Index Notebook in my remote part of the earth. I was very happy to have found these, as I was wistful of the shipping cost, and now exchange rate, for the Levenger Circa notebooks. I gave a favourable initial impression of these notebooks, and to date that hasn't changed.

I did mention that I was going to do some hacking on these notebooks, and after a productive 10 minutes with my labeller, I'm happy to say that I've had terrific results for someone as un-crafty as I am. SWMBO, now she's crafty - and I will leave that to you as to how you want to interpret that.

I stayed up very late the first night I had this notebook, essentially reading a novel and doing a brain dump. Any thought and I jotted it down. I enjoyed the feeling of writing in it, and really enjoyed the quality of the paper.

Tabbed Dividers


So then, the next morning, I set out to tab the pages as I had outlined in my initial post. Very simply, I used 3M Post-It Rigid Index Tabs, and added the following "sections":

• Calls - for voicemails to be returned or put into my system when I'm on the road

• Tasks - for capture from meetings, or random thoughts where the notebook is handy.
• File Notes - for notes on my "defined work" from meetings, etc.
• Projects - mind mapping and thinking on paper.
• B.G. - separate tasks for an organization I am involved with.
• WR Ch - my handwritten weekly review checklist (frankly, easier to use than my Splashshopper Checklist).

To get these tabs formatted, I set my label maker to the smallest sized font, and printed them out in a single tape with three spaces between each word. I then printed a second copy, to have one for each side, in case the notebook happened to be upside down. Not so dumb, me.

These tabs have worked famously. Unfortunately, due to operator error, I was often turning to a tab and then writing on the page for the next one, so in the principle of KISS, I slapped a label from my label maker on the front of each page. Works like a charm as a divider now, and it was cheap. This was probably $0.50 that will last for a very long time, if I keep with this notebook system. No hours on the internet searching, no finding the perfect, no spending another $15 at the Levenger store for no reason... this just plain works for me. Yay me for keeping it so simple!


The Advantage over spiral-bound and three-ring

Let me go no further before I say this: yep, I get it, it's just a friggin' notebook. The funny thing about all this is that it showed me how ineffectively I was using my current notebook. Which itselfwas just a friggin' notebook. However, the non-linearity of this one led me to change the way I looked at things. I don't know why it is different than, say, a 3-ring binder, or my old paper planner, but it just is. When I had one of the Franklin Covey planners, it was such wonderful paper that aside from writing appointments in it I was afraid to mark it up. I never used it very well, and certainly not for any note keeping. It was almost an affectation more than it was a planner. All the grand designs I had about keeping notes in the thing all went to pot.

The Myndology products are happy to have you store them in a file folder. Just pull them out. You can write on them and toss them if you need to. There is a feeling of both flexibility and non-permanence about using it that makes my old spiral-bound notebook seem so dated. By the time I stopped using it I was basically using the spiral-bound as a voicemail log - very very inefficient. If I'm going to write, I want it to be efficient and practical for the way I want to work.

The amazing thing is that I fell into a trap with the old Blueline A9. They came with great labels that allowed you to tab the pages, record them in the index, and even archive the notebook itself. However, they are very linear, and even though the pages were perforated, I felt like I was somehow defiling it. Again, I know, it was JUST a friggin' notebook. It was the weirdest feeling, like I wanted to archive all this stuff. In fact, most of it I can just toss, but there the old, used ones sit, on my shelf - the information in them useless and outdated. Somehow, because the pages can be moved, sectioned, more easily removed for filing - somehow this notebook seems better, in every way.

Oh, and it is very comfortable to use if you are a left-hander like me.

Customer Service

I have been speaking with Myndology directly, mostly to let them know about the good success I've had with their products, and to make some suggstions about what I might like to see. They are really quite open and friendly folks, and responded fairly quickly. Because I am a nerd, I did send them to other sites to show what I was suggesting for their product, which they seemed to appreciate. Their products are really quite good, and you owe it to yourself to pick one up and give it a try!