Rodent Regatta

At any given time, I may have four or five Moleskine notebooks in use. One tracks changes I want to make to this web site. A second tracks notes for my company and its site. I keep a spiritual journal in a third. The fourth one that I’m using right now tracks new ideas and opportunities. Other people may have as many as seven or eight notebooks going at once.

Glance at a stack of these on a desk or in a brief case and you won’t be able to tell them apart. How do you keep them straight? Here are some ideas:

• Avery’s adhesive dots on the front or back cover; ok, but again difficult or impossible to see if the notebooks are stacked.
• Title page indicator; ok, but requires that you unfasten the elastic closure and open the book.
• Best Idea? Use colored markers to make page-edge indicators. Preferably, use a fine point marker, squeeze the closed notebook tightly shut and make geometric, numeric or alphabetic codes on the top, bottom or side edges of the pages. Cleverly done, the colors and/or a series of letters or numbers will provide an easy-to-see indentifier for as many notebooks as you might have active at once.