A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

As you likely know, to say I’m a “circa enthusiast” is a bit of a dramatic understatement. (Circa, for those of you who don’t know, is a ring based paper binding system that allows you to remove and replace pages in a notebook at will. The rings themselves are free-floating, allowing for creative notebook sizes and permutations.)

Anyway, Levenger offers a “Circa PDA” which is admittedly (and confessedly) a spinoff of the “hipster PDA” idea of using a deck of 3×5 cards as a pocket planner of sorts.

Last week I bought a few things from the circa section of the Levenger website because I was really in need of a treat.

I picked up:

• The Pocket PDA itself
• A sampler deck of cards for it.
• 22 0.25″ rings (I have their heavy duty desk punch so I can bind anything that strikes my crazy little mind.)
• a package of tabbed dividers for the pocket pda.

Total cost was nominal for all this great stuff.

Now, it’s important to note here that the quality of everything I’ve ever gotten from Levenger has been beyond reproach. Yes, they cost a little more. But in the grand scheme of things, everything I’ve ever bought from them I still own, use, and is going strong.

On the subway back from the fedex place (long story) I tore into the box. It was like a Christmas present from one of my other personalities.

I sighed a little bit at the pocket pda. It just wasn’t going to work. But I’d forseen that in my planning and ended up carrying out my evil plan.

First, the problems with the pocket pda:

- For a normal notebook it makes perfect sense for the cover to have an additional 1/4″ beyond the edge of the paper. It helps keep the paper from scuffing badly around the edges. It’s aesthetically pleasing, and it allows you to put tabbed dividers inside the notebook without the tabs catching on everything.

But for a pocket pda I need to squeeze it in to as small a space as possible. This thing is going to go in to my front pocket, so that much overhang was unacceptable. The covers just weren’t going to work. So they had to go.

I took the plastic tabbed dividers and put one on each side and one in the middle of the deck, to keep sections easily accessible. My plan was to slice the actual tabs off so the cover was perfectly flush with the deck on all sides. But after a few days of use I’m finding it’s unnecessary. They simply aren’t as obtrusive as I’d feared and expected.

The other thing I like about these tabbed dividers is that they’re lightly tinted and thoroughly transparent. So I can take the thing out of my pocket and read my todo list without even having to open it. Then I can flip it over and look at my schedule for the day. That’s going to matter.

They are a little satiny in their finish, so I’m not sure i could actually use a dry-erase marker on the cover. But that only just occurred to me. I’m not sure it would be a good idea as it’d get wiped off the next time it went in to my pocket anyway.

- The other issue with front-pocket notebooks is the thickness of the binding. The pocket pda ships with 1/2″ binding rings. Again, that’s fine if you’re going to keep it in your bag. But they were just too big. I (to the bizarre entertainment of my fellow R Train passengers) put the notebook in my pocket and took it out a few times. It was minimally obtrusive but I still knew it was there.

Yeah, 1/2″ rings hold an awful lot of pages. But frankly I’m not sure how important that is with this. So I swapped out most of the paper (some from each section) and replaced the rings with my 1/4″ ones. Then I filled it back up so that the thickness of the pad was just a little shy of being flush with the width of the rings.

Fortunately I was able to do this without cramping the binding.

So now I’ve got this 3×5 size notebook with a few good sections in it (writing, task list, minimal weekly schedule.) It’s small enough that I really forget it’s there.

In A Perfect World:

I’d have this notebook (yes, I think it’s good enough to carry me through) PLUS, a “pocket briefcase” with an opening on the top, a little off the edge. That way I’d be able to:

- Insert one of the covers of my notebook into the slot and secure the two things together.

- Get to contents of the pocket briefcase without taking it out of my pocket. This to me is a big flaw of the units that don’t have openings on the top, but only on the side. Sure, when you’re holding it in your hand it makes sense. But if you keep your metro card or train ticket in there, I don’t want to pull the thing out of my pocket then fish around in it. I want to reach in to the thing while it’s in my front pocket and pull out what I need.

But we’ll see. These things are both small enough that I’m likely to use them in parallel for a while. But I fully expect my new mini-pda to replace most of the functions of my pocket briefcase.

The best part is that all the pieces I didn’t use (the few 1/2″ rings and the covers) I just put in my “circa parts” shoebox so I can use them on something else.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 10:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.