Thursday, February 21, 2008

Custom Moleskine datebook

Don't like any of the preprinted datebooks? Make your own. I did. Here's why:

1) I like the blank creamy pages of the Moleskine

2) I want my week to start on a Monday

3) I want lots of blank pages in the back for notes

4) I like the size of the Moleskine small plain notebook. It can fit in a suit jacket pocket or in a shirt pocket (if you must). They also fit perfectly in a Land's End Square Rigger external side pocket.

5) I like the DIY (do it yourself) hand drawn look.

But that's just me. Your mileage may vary.

In the first 24 pages of a plain pocket Moleskine I drew all the months on a two page spread. I used a light gray pen so that it wouldn't bleed through.

On the next 104 pages I drew the week views. Note that I just drew the dates, no days of the week. Monday always starts at the upper left and Sunday ends on the second to the last box on the page. This format leaves an empty box for overflow of any one day. If a day overflows because the box is too small, I use an arrow to point to the extra box in the lower right.

A small 0.5 or 0.38 pen works fine for the limited page real estate. I use my Pilot Vanishing Point with fine nib, Uniball Vision Micro, or Uniball RT .038.

Stiff bookmark post-it tabs are used for the current month and week.

After the full month views (24 pages) and the week views (104 pages) I still have about 80 blank pages left for notes at the end of the Moleskine. (There are 196 pages in a plain Moleskine.)

There you have it. A customized datebook in your pocket.

...dave
A diet joke is humor without the punchline.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm curious about how much time has taken this drawing task

daveterry said...

@wintermute: It took about two hours or so. Once I drew one calendar I could follow the lines on the reverse side for the next month.

The weekly was even easier. They were just simple lines across the page.


After all the boxes and lines were drawn, I filled in the numbers and months.

You can even do this while you watch TV. Those commercials are such a bore anyway.

...dave

Jon Carl Lewis said...

Thanks so much for the ideas and instructions!