In the beginning

It all began one overcast fall morning as I stood there staring at a nondescript office supply cabinet. There I was, a newly recruited spindle in the corporate machine looking for something to write on, when I spotted them in the back of the cabinet: a sad little stack of lime-green steno pads, yearning for someone - anyone - to pay them attention.

Those little pads became my constant companion for the next few years. They were my second brain, a reliable repository for meeting notes, to-do lists, project ideas, and everything else. Eventually, however, two factors conspired to move me on: our company moved to low-quality pad with craptastic paper, and I became enamored with the idea of keeping everything in my laptop.

Going digital

For a while, I tried one massive Word document,

formatted in landscape mode, with four columns and 8-point Arial text.  It was great: I could get a ton of information on the screen at once, it was searchable, and I could print out a copy for easy backup and reference.  But it quickly grew to several dozen confusing pages.  I wasn’t happy.

Big Palm Fan

And then they announced the Palm Pilot. I ordered one sight-unseen, had it FedExed to work, and became obsessed. Every little scrap of my life - phone numbers, the average caffeine content of 20 beverages, passwords, lists of cities I’ve been in, got poked into that little device.

Man, I went ape sh-t with the whole Palm thing.  I used a Palm Pilot Pro, then the 2mb IR card, a Casio Cassiopeia, Palm IIIc, Palm V, Handspring Visor Deluxe, Palm Vx, Palm m505, Compaq iPaq 64mb, Palm VII, Palm i705, Sony CLIE PEG-NR70V/U, Palm m515, Palm Zire, AlphaSmart Dana, Sony CLIE PEG-SJ30/U, HP iPAQ H1900, Sony CLIE NR70V, and a Sony CLIE NX70V - fortunately many purchased through work.  But frankly, they were feeding a sad little addiction.

An analog recovery

Suddenly one Saturday morning, I woke up, fingers cramped from tiny little styli and eyes bleary from poking around on those miniscule screens, and set out on a mission to get back to paper.  Go analog.  Cold turkey style.

I was tired of shoehorning the texture and complexity of day-to-day life into that little block of electrons, the subtleties of real-time prioritization into a tight 1-5 rank order, the margin notes of life into neat little Datebook, Notepad, and Calendar apps.  I yearned to get back to scribbles, circles, arrows, and BIG FAT underlines when things were REALLY IMPORTANT.

But I had two problems.  First, it had become nearly impossible to find good steno pads any more, with the office supply superstores reducing their selection down to wirebound blocks of uber-recycled craptastic paper, and the specialty shops either dropping them altogether or being constantly out of stock.

Second, I had forgotten how to use a pen.