Golden Anvil

A Hipster PDA that is (and here)... For those who don't want to bother checking the links. This is essentially a organization tool for those who don't want to spend the excessive amounts of money (or have to worry about batteries, or software, or upgrades, etc) required to get a "real" PDA.

From the first link, the steps to create your own are as follows:

1. get a bunch of 3"x5" file cards
2. clip them together with a binder clip
3. there is no step 3

The second link above even has templates you can print out on cardstock 3x5 cards to give you charts and calendars and checklists and such.

Now, I have indeed tried carrying around a little book with blank pages (they have nice small ones that fit in your pocket). But, I found that the book tends to get seriously thrashed. The binding gets toasted, pages fall out, etc. In addition, at best you have to carry a pen/pencil around clipped to the book (or worse, loose), which means it might fall out and get lost or broken.

So, I got around these problems by taking the steps above and doing some slight modifications.

First, I bought a bunch of 3x5 cards, the blank ones without lines. These are pretty cheap. Then I bought the smallest pen I could find. This turned out to be a Fisher Space Pen. Staples had one of the bullet pens for something like $18 or something. It's just under 4 inches long, and nice and skinny. Then I cut out a rectangular hole in the middle of about 70 cards or so that fit the pen. This didn't actually take that long. Once you cut the first one, you can just keep cutting through the existing hole, pulling 2-4 off the top after each time you cut.

Then I put 5 uncut cards on top and 5 underneath. Then I use two binder clips (one on each of the 3" ends of the stack) to hold the thing together. The pen is stored in the hollow inside the cards. The stack is almost exactly a half inch thick, making it a fairly convenient size to fit in my back pocket.

Things that I want to just keep around very short term I can write on one of the uncut cards and later pull it out and replace with another blank card. If I want to keep the card in the stack (like addresses, appointments, etc) I can write it on one of the cut cards. I'll probably use a colored marker for categorization/indexing so that I can quickly find what I'm looking for.

All in all I'm pretty pleased with it. The most expensive thing was the pen, but it's got a lifetime warranty on it, and the refills are supposed to last 3 times longer than normal pens and only cost about $4. The pen itself does write pretty smoothly, and I can write fairly small print without too much difficulty. If I wasn't concerned about keeping the pen available and safe I could probably have cut all the cards in half for an even more convenient size, but it works out well enough as is.

Special thanks to a co-worker for the idea. He's been using one for a while (although a completely standard version, rather than a souped up version like mine), and he likes it a lot.