Help, my notebook is a mess! Combining a bullet journal with a discbound system

how the modubooq idea started – blog series #2

Welcome to this blog series!

I am Marije, product designer at PATboard. In the previous blog I explained why modubooq fits into our Agile philosophy and how this idea translates to a more personal level and minimalistic philosophy. You can read this here. In this blog I will explain my personal journey with note-taking by using a bullet journal, also called a bullet planner. Next to that, I also explain how I managed to solve the first practical challenge I encountered: organizing my notes.

Organizing personal projects with one notebook

The most important function a notebook should have is a way to organize personal projects, work projects, random thoughts and new ideas into one notebook. I personally don’t like having multiple notebooks or bullet journals for every subject I come up with. Because that just leads to loads of unfinished notebooks and losing them all the time. As long as I can remember, this is what I settled on.

How the bullet journal method tries to solve page organization

As time progressed I also wanted to incorporate new ideas and sections into the notebook that I carried with me everywhere. For this to happen I had to break with the organization of the page order. The bullet journal method has a solution for this: the “Index Page”. This is like a table of content for your notebook where you can list the subjects of your notes with the corresponding page numbers on the moment you want to add something.

I tried this but my notebook still did not feel organized. Plus I could not remove pages I did not want anymore. I wished there was a way to bundle the pages for each subject so everything wasn’t so mixed up. So the search for a new solution began.

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The “Index” Page on the left and “Key” Page on the right.

The best solution to organize a bullet journal: a discbound system

So instead of a traditional bullet journal notebook with fixed pages, I started looking for a way I could be more flexible with my notes. One of the things I tried is a ring binder that you can clip open. But I did not like the look of it. And clipping it open was not very easy to do. It felt too much like a school project multimap.

Then I found the discbound system and tried it out. It was easy to remove or remove a page. The discs looked friendly and classy in black and they came in different styles and thickness. The only thing that I didn’t like about it is that paper pages get damaged when you move them often. And I still couldn’t really erase my notes.

Blog continues below images.

Conveniently I work at PATboard & modubooq as the product designer. We specialize in rewritable materials so I thought, let’s try to make an erasable discbound bullet journal notebook with rewritable pages. So that is how the idea for modubooq was born.

– Written by Marije

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