Sorry for the recent inactivity on my blog. I had a few days off over Easter and work as well as the baby (or should I say the toddler) have kept me very busy, too. There are a few half finished blog posts I hope to complete soon.
Work wise a new task / project will start soon. It will probably go on indefinitely, so I am just thinking which of my unused Atoma notebooks I should start using for that task.
I want to go with Atoma as I have often regretted using a Red’n’Black notebook for another project, which meant I couldn’t add sheets afterwards, or add printouts in a meaningful way.
The A5 like size has been very useful in the past, but this time there might be benefits to be gained from being able to squeeze more information on a page – to give a better overview of things – but A4 seems a bit big and imposing for meetings etc. There are also the posh Atoma notebooks (including the Alain Berteau version) I got for my birthday in 2013, but I guess at work they would be a bit out of place…
Any advice?
I think A4 is a bit large too, unless you really need large diagrams and charts (we tend to do those on flipchart paper or a white board, which are then photographed and stored separately).
A4 can be good if you need to show a diagram to other people – it’s very difficult to make any but the most simple easily legible at A5!
I have an A4 Atoma notebook but haven’t used it yet – it is just too big for me so I continue using the A5 variant.
If I need some pages in a larger format I prepare some A4 sheets by folding them like an engineering drawing (zigzag), punch them with the Atoma punch and insert them into the A5 Atoma notebook.
Thank you for your extremely useful comments.
John, it’s more than interesting to read that your diagrams and charts are photographed and stored separately. So how do you access them if you have to?
I do find A4 a bit large, too. Atoma’s A5 like page have the advantage that they are wider, but when I use their ruled pages for similar purposes as the one intended I can’t fit much on a page – or not as much as when I use squares, where there are more ‘lines’ per page. So maybe A5 squared is the answer, I need to check my Atoma box. I hope I have something like that.
Gunther, what a great idea. I do have the Staples punch (cheaper) and I used it in the past to shrink printouts with a photocopier to add to the A5 like Atoma book, but I could of course use a zigzag fold. Is there a best practice way of folding you can point me to? I don’t want to fold poorly, just to find out in a few months that I could have folded them in a more clever way.
Folding is easy: Put the A4 sheet (landscape) in front of you. Fold the right edge to the left so that the resulting fold is about 9 cm away from the the left edge. Put the folded sheet on an A5 Atoma sheet and fold the upper layer back to the right so that its edge is flush with the A5 Atoma sheet. Round the upper and lower right corners of the folded A4 sheet (press a coin with a matching radius onto the paper with two fingers and then cut along the edge of the coin with scissors).
Matthias – the photos tend to go in an online document repository, and can then be referred to on the computers, or mobile devices of the meeting participants.
It may help that here, at least, I’m something of an exception in still using pen and paper for my notes! Given the opportunity in meetings or presentations, I quite often copy out diagrams and charts for my own reference, because I find I remember them better that way.
Pingback: Just another pen ?!Blick über den Tellerrand vom 25. April 2015 - Just another pen ?!
Gunther, thank you for this explanation!
John, you are quite advanced. Where I work we only just switched from paper forms to filling in word documents instead – and emailing the word documents around – no working, electronic document management system in sight.
Oh, I find writing things down quite useful, too 8^)