At the Moleskine website is information about the history behind the notebooks:

Moleskine is the heir of the legendary notebook used for the past two centuries by great artists and thinkers, including Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin.

Moleskine has expanded and now has a series of THE MOLESKINE CITY NOTEBOOK. They also have started the Moleskine City Blogs, one of the cities present is London.

Maki at Dosh Dosh writes about The Benefits of Keeping a Private Journal.

A private diary is tremendously powerful. It can help you to greatly improve your business or website. If you want to be a success, you need to think and act strategically. At the very least, you should keep your goals in mind in order to work towards them daily.

And a private journal achieves all this more effectively than a static to-do list, which only lists end goals and results to be achieved. Unlike a to-do list, a well kept journal provokes introspection. It is a liberating and productive outlet for random ideas, thoughts and feelings.

I already had the habit of making notes but it was not as organized as a journal would be. Maki’s post made me decide to use journals as a tool to help me improve and keep track of things. For those who follow this blog it comes as no surprise that I opted for a paper version.

I decided to go for two journals, one for my coaching and one for my blogging. The reason for two journals is that they are two separate projects and I benefit from keeping them apart. Even though I have been writing my journals for a few days only I already see that the journals give me a better way to collect ideas and to follow progress and changes.

Note: Photo by Peter Kaminski.

Putting down plans, notes, ideas, and hunches in a notebook can be a great way to help organize your mind, as well as sharpen it. We tend to remember things jotted down by hand better than words hammered on a keyboard.

Over at Anywired Skellie posted Origami Productivity: Why I Don’t Want a Paperless Life. The start goes like this:

I love paper in all its forms and always have. In fact, if given the choice between a notebook and a web app to fulfill the same function, I’ll choose a notebook every time.

Previous pen and paper related posts at fortyplustwo are Be productive using pen and paper, The back-to-paper movement and Task management my way – pen and paper.

Note: Photo by Chris Campbell.