#paperexobrain

So long as I am wearing pants, I am nearly never without a Field Notes notebook, and have boosted my personal productivity through the roof by always having on hand measurements for projects, new friends’ contact info, and random ideas for projects like this. Can’t do without a paper exobrain.

When I was at Oregon Country Fair a couple months ago, my friend wanted to take notes too, but he didn’t have a pen or paper, so I ended up keeping post-its in the back of my Field Notes for him, and I realized how critical analog note-taking has become to my daily life (be it a stack of post-its in my back pocket or a proper notebook). So I decided to make tiny notebooks to give out as gifts at off-grid events.

You could theoretically buy mini notebooks at the Japanese dollar store, but when something is overtly productized, I find I am more averse to start using it for the first time. Thick notebooks with super fancy printed covers and archival paper are super appealing, but have never started writing in one because they are too nice. The non-committal smallness (48 pages) and kraft paper roughness of Field Notes makes it easy to just start writing, so I heavily emulated them.

I bought some 100lb kraft cardstock, took out my paper cutter and some plain printer paper, and started chopping to see what worked. Field Notes are 3.5″ x 5.5″. I tried scaling down about 60% to 2-1/8″ x 3″, meaning the unfolded cover was 4-1/4″ x 3. I could cut 6 of these from a single sheet. Folded in half, this yields 12 sheets or 24 pages, which sounded like a perfect little pocket-sized amount of writing surface for a 3-day event.

I made one sacrificial notebook with the cardstock and inner paper cut to the same dimensions to see how much the pages would stick out when thickly folded in half (answer: about 1/16″), and then compensated all future inner pages by cutting them (unfolded) at 4-1/8″ x 2-15/16″. Field Notes probably has some kind of fancy machine that cuts everything flush once it’s bound, but I was just using a plastic cutter and wanted to keep it simple.

I stapled & folded them in the center and used my Kadomaru corner cutter to round off all the corners, doing the cover separately and about 3 inner sheets at a time. Then a quick "property of” inscription and done -- it was a super gratifying 2 hour hackathon. I really love turning simple, featureless materials into utilitarian nuggets.

Gonna go find some mini pens before leaving to give out with these :) ### EDIT ###

After excessively extensive research, the writing utensils I ended up getting to give out with these: Paper Mate InkJoy mini retractable ballpoints (4.5″L), and this ultracheap pack of mini mechanical pencils (3.75″L).