» On notebooks and randomness
Leah from Quo Vadis here, coming to you from Karen’s account to blog about my new favorite product, the so-called “Clic Bloc” mousepad-cum-notebook by Rhodia.
I thought I’d worked out a pretty decent system for keeping track of work-related tasks: my planner holds my appointments, while a Steno pad on the side of my desk houses a running project to-do list. Various other notebooks are dedicated to specific projects or assignments, like interviewing sources or jotting down story ideas.
But as everyone knows, there’s still a lot of stuff that comes up in the course of the day—phone calls I need to return, random details I need to jot down, and so on. Things that are too granular to put on the to-do list, but nonetheless need to be recorded, because if I don’t, I’ll never remember ‘em. Up till now, I’d always relied on a fairly haphazard array of Post-it notes and whatever scraps of paper were handy at the time.
The Clic Bloc changed all that, because it’s always within immediate reach, and the graph paper is the perfect home for my intermittent, non-linear jottings. If one page starts to get too cluttered, I can just tear it off and start again. The ink sometimes smears if I roll the mouse over it before it dries, but I tend to write around the mouse anyway, and tear a new page before that can happen.
Comments
I’ve been using this for about a year now, and have been quite fond of it. I manage to go through a page every month or two.
Two things I’ve notice:
1. Mouse gunk tends to mark up the middle area. I think it’s picking it up from pencil marks on the pad.
2. The grid, while nice, tends to become checkerboard patterns during long conference calls.
I’ve got a stock of these that I bought from Vickerey.com a few months back and love them! They’re especially handy for phone messages, when my carefully provisioned notepad always mysteriously disappears. The most trouble I have is simply keeping my sister’s doodles of Dr. Steve Brule elsewhere, as she seems compelled to fill any enticing blank surface with him. (But I don’t think that’s Rhodia’s fault.)
The edges of mine gets frayed from my hands rubbing over them. I forget to write on them, tho’ since my keyboard and mouse is below my desktop on a shelf.
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