Moleskine Hack

I purchased a soft-cover agenda Moleskine in July. Now that I've begun my Moleskine obsession, I wanted to buy another notebook that was ruled to put more ideas and journal entries etc in. I was going to just keep them side by side but finally figured it'd be much more handy to combine them! So here we go...

I started off with my (slightly worn) soft-cover agenda and one volant ruled notebook.

Some people call the next step a 'hack' - I call it adding tabs to a notebook - these ones are used like post-its, with one sticky part and the part that sticks out to write on. The volant notebooks have 96 pages, so I put a tab on page 33 and 64.

Now comes the real hack (which by the way, I haven't seen done in my researching yet...) You'll need a pair of scissors. Open the volant notebook to the last page and cut about a half inch off the end. Then diagonally cut the top and bottom edges.  The agenda has a back pocket, which will become the 'sleeve' for the cut-volant-back-cover.

You may need to trim more off the volant - but stick the back cover inside the back pocket of the agenda.

Voila!

Here you can see with the soft cover binding it stretches to make room for the volant notebook. I wouldnt try this with a hard-cover Moleskine ;)

Moleskine Madness

So if you've never heard of Moleskine before, they're a brand of notebook.  http://www.moleskine.com/

But they are no ordinary brand - oh no. They are simple, durable, elegant and timeless. The little black dress of notebooks. They come  ruled, plain, with grids, bars for music or plain, durable paper for sketching or even painting. A lot of people add or change them (adding tabs, pockets, etc) these are called 'hacks'.

Here are some links for some great hacks:

http://www.organizeit.co.uk/2009/04/25/definitive-collection-of-moleskine-hacks-tips-and-resources/

http://freelanceswitch.com/productivity/the-monster-collection-of-moleskine-tips-tricks-and-hacks/

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/10-great-moleskine-hacks.html

This is another great resource for Moleskines - simply add your text to the MSK template and you can print out a page that will fit perfectly into your notebook.

http://www.moleskine.com/msk.php?display=wizard

I'll be posting some of my own hacks tomorrow just for fun. If you're not as notebook nutty as I am there are some more before and after pics in the works too ;)