Going Retro – Back to paper note taking

After 14 years of electronic note taking I have decided to go back to a paper. The reason for this change is a combination of my job at Yahoo, the office layout and living in a global metropolis,

London

. One way to describe my life is NeoNomadism. I go from meeting to meeting constantly on the move.

I have used different a myriad of electronic devices for note taking from the first Apple Powerbooks, to the

Newton

and later all the different Psion’s and the Nokia Communicators. I was a huge Psion Jotter fan; it was one of the best mobile apps ever created. Lately I have used MindManager X5 which is fantastic mindmaping application, Lifeblog solves many note taking problems as I make notes with the camera phone. A key problem is that my Transformer (Nokia N90) does not give me idle text input and does not allow for mind mapping, web clipping, nor sketching.

I have lots of unstructured data that comes my way, I need to record it and be able to tag it and find it later. I know this is a need lots of people have. I know there are hundreds of products created to fill this demand. If the PC could be a bit smaller, have longer batterylife and wake up in 2 sec. I would use it more for unstructured data collection. 

For my Retro solution I opted for the Moleskin Japanese NotePad in A6 which I modified by cutting out pages which I complemented with a thin notepad A6, where paper is thinner and some can be teared away. For input I acquired a Muji pen with multiple pens, it has black ink, red ink and a 0.5mm pencil. This allows me to make small mind maps with some highlight colour.

So if anyone knows of some great solutions to solve my problems electronically let me know. If you want to build it let me know.

Going Retro is such a great endorsement of falling technology, but also a clear indication that there are problems to solve.

This week is the annual bash at 3GSM in Barcelona.

I am not sure if I think the move to Barcelona was a great one.

Palace of shows.

I am looking forward to the week in Barcelona, a city dear to me. People say that 3GSM is all about the people. Since the people are here we will be able to see what location does. What I am hoping to see is good Java based client server solutions. It is finally possible to make them. Furthermore I hope to see some interesting transformers. The first impression is more like Cebit. The stands are bigger. More air, and many halls. . .

The conclusion of the show is that Cannes is a better location. I did not like the "Mini Cebit" feel that several people coined. The lack of casual cafes, restaurants dropped a couple points of my score.

Since i heard that the GSMA has made a several year comitment to Barcelona, I guess I will be back.