Reading Monocle magazine this week reminded me of something I've long wanted. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to have your own printable daybook? Scenario:
You have a day (or week) of travelling and meetings - a mixture of personal and work time - with no guarantee of an always-on internet connection.
You use an application to select a bunch of webpages that you want to read that day, and some work documents (or if you don't explicitly make a choice it just gets stories according to your preference: today's top 5 mobile enterprise stories, top 3 sports stories, top 3 Arsenal stories and 3 surprise-me stories from various websites, and the last 5 documents you had open).
The application restyles the stories so that there's a nice wide margin for notes and sends them to your printer, makes it print two-sided with a bunch of pages at the front or back for your meeting notes or drawings, binds it up nicely with the date and your weekly calendar on the front. It would also permanently "print" to an online archive for you.
If you could pick it up from a print shop at the tube station, then the shop could print the reading stuff on different paper stock to the drawing paper.
When your day is done, you drop it into a scanner-shredder that eats the daybooks and scans the notes and drawings you did. It then marks - in the same permanent online archive - your printed version of it as safely shredded.
But given that we basically have much of that functionality in Word already, or in "printing pages off the internet and stapling them together", what I'm probably asking for is a printer that also binds nicely, and the time in the morning to collate the material.
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Alternatively, it would be nice if a magazine did something like that for me, adding notepages to their regular output (this idea is similar in form to the new Moleskine City notebooks, but their frequency isn't right: it needs to be weekly or monthly rather than a one-off called "Berlin"). I mentioned this idea whilst writing about Monocle yesterday:
Actually, it makes me wish that they would bind in about 20 blank pages of that stock three-quarters of the way through - or wherever the ad yield is lowest - so I could use it as my work notebook for the week or so I'll be reading it. I wouldn't mind if the pages were branded up like posh hotel notepaper, as long as they had loads of space for the actual notes.
I've seen branded jotting spaces next to Sudoku puzzles in newspapers before, but has anyone done full pages for notes with a logo in the corner? If Monocle's readership is mostly creative, internationalist, travelling, heavy-hitting alphas, then could such branded, 95%-empty pages be the most valuable real estate in the magazine for an advertiser? Who wouldn't want their logo next to the napkin ideas, working notes and creative sketches of the masters of the universe?
Never mind stapling - folding is the answer. An A1 sheet folded cunningly to fit in your pocket and unfold as the day progresses. Leaving you with an A1 tablecloth at the end of the day to eat your dinner on.
As for notes space in mags, your twittering at the weekend had me thinking exactly the same thing. I imagine spending money on blank space would be tough though.
Posted by: Rob | February 19, 2007 at 08:40 AM
I came across this the other day:
http://www.pocketmod.com/
the sites not great but the single A4 sheet folded into a consecutively paged minibook is nice. It get's more useful when it's combined with Stikkit (http://www.valuesofn.com/blog/2007/02/stikkit-in-your-pocket.html)
Not exactly a solution, but small enough to be a bookmark.
Posted by: Murray | February 19, 2007 at 11:03 AM
check out PocketMod (www.pocketmod.com) it's a flash program which lets you make a paper folded diary/planner.
Posted by: adam | February 19, 2007 at 11:51 AM