My Moleskine is a thinking tool, something for me to be creative with. My Palm is a reference tool, something for me to store data in, as well as reminders, diary dates etc.

For a while I have felt uncomfortable. Part of me wanted to use my palm in a system that fitted my needs 100%. Another part of me knew that the tactile, free flowing, pen on paper based notebook system just ‘felt’ better and more creative. But I also really appreciated the fact that I could use my favourite software Lifebalance to implement my personal life and project planning system, the palm was much better at handling addresses, phone numbers and all of the other notes I entered into it, yet I just could not enter information into it my way. My way being one that changes constantly - lists, pictures, diagrams, mindmaps.

It was whilst simply sitting down and brainstorming with my new moleskine notebook and Pilot pen that I drew the following:

palm vs moleskine
And then I think I made a breakthrough. Moleskine make great points about how many famous artists and writers used their notebooks. But they didn’t use them for the creation of works of arts, or write books with them. They used them for notes, and then processed the notes elsewhere. I think that using a notebook for dreaming and idea creation is a great idea. Then I can process the work into my palm as data for later retrieval.

Best of both worlds. I can create and dream however I want and enjoy the process.

I can then file the information as action lists, notes, diagrams (I can even scan the pages as images and save them on the Palm’s SD card, for efficient retrieval in my personal data store.

I hope this works, I’ll keep you posted.