Quo Vadis Blog

Quo Vadis Bookmark

All 2011 planners with Club or Soya covers will be sold with an elastic bookmark.  The bookmark also works as a ruler with measurements in inches and cm.  The reverse side has “Quo Vadis” in several different languages.  “Quo Vadis” means “Where are you going?” – a good question for planning your time.

Bookmarks can be sold separately by retailers if they choose to buy them. They are sold in a pack of 10.

I have a few extra in the office I would be happy to send to our QV blog readers.  Please send us a quick note with your mailing address via the Contact Us form on the blog.

You can have a look at photos of them here.

Give and take

Lots of people write in with good suggestions for tweaks to our planning formats, and often those tweaks take the form of supplements or additions. More space for notes is a popular one. Another popular idea, at least for those formats that don’t already have it, is adding a monthly view that would supplement a daily or a weekly planner.

First of all, let me say that we are always grateful for your suggestions, because it helps us understand how people actually use our planners. Also, they do make a difference, as Karen has described. But when it comes to adding pages, we face a problem: if we add pages to our planners, for the most part, then we have to delete other pages. We can’t make the planners larger because the refillable covers would be useless—the planner inserts wouldn’t fit. (Of course, they could stretch a little bit, and as Karen will describe later, we are indeed planning to make notes supplements for the Business and Minister planners.)

So periodically we ask: what would you like to add? And more importantly, in exchange, what would you eliminate? An address book seems quaint to me in this era of Outlook and cell phones, but maybe there are still people who prefer to store that stuff in their planners. Similarly, the maps and reference materials—I like that they exist (though I rarely consult them), and it’s true they come in handy while traveling, but as Marty pointed out, Google can give you the same information with much greater specificity…

So, what do you think? Should we do an annual bound book (i.e., not refillable) with extra pages for notes and calendars? Would you be willing to pay more for that expanded edition? Or should we try to find a way to fit those things into our current planners, or create special supplements for them?

Some notes with that planner?

A reader from Michigan wrote in with a good suggestion for improving the next generation of planners:

Very simply, add more “Notes” pages … each planner, regardless of size, should have at least 10 pages … There is a lot of information that I want in my planner but it is not tied to a specific day, week or month and is best kept in one consolidated place in the Notes pages.

What do you think? Do you want more space for notes at the front or back of your planner? Or a separate supplement with blank pages you could tuck in the cover each year?

Guest post: Pruning my pen collection

This morning’s post, from guest blogger Kate Marshall, reminds me of a quote that’s usually attributed to May West: “Too much of a good thing is wonderful.” Still, sometimes you’ve gotta pare things down…

I first started using fountain pens when I was a child but I didn’t start collecting or using them on a regular basis until about four years ago. Next thing I knew, I had about 20 fountain pens: Lamys, Bexleys, Sailors, Pelikans, etc. Eek. I had too many pens and I didn’t use them often enough to justify keeping them. It’s time to sell some pens. As I do this, I’ve been rethinking the focus of my pen collection. When all is said and done, I expect to have:

• four Pelikan M400s
• three Pelikan M620s
• one Pelikan M205
• two Aurora Optimas
• one Bexley Submariner SE
• one Namiki-Pilot Vanishing Point (also known as the Pilot Capless)
• one Sailor Professional Gear
• two Sailor Sapporos (Professional Gear Slim)
• one Levenger TrueWriter

In four years of pen collecting, I’ve learned that:

I really like Pelikans, especially when they or their nibs come from Richard Binder.

I favor piston-fillers and other filling methods over cartridge-converter filling systems.

Why didn’t I buy a Vanishing Point sooner? Despite the converter’s painfully tiny ink capacity, this is the best pen ever! And it comes in pink!

I’m really hoping that once my pen collection is slimmed down, I won’t snap up every new pen I see. By focusing on pens I really love, I hope to better appreciate their value and quality. I know there are others whose pen collections (or watch collections or misprinted calendar collections or what-have-you) number in the hundreds or even thousands. And that’s cool—Kate’s not here to judge. But I’ve decided that I just have too much darn stuff in my life and it’s time to pare it down.

Granted, the day that Pelikan announces a pink M400, all bets are off.

Guest post: Shlomi Harif on letters and artifacts

Guest blogger Shlomi Harif is a transplanted Austinite, poet, writer, cook, and co-chair of the Austin International Poetry Festival. He also contributes to the the Drashpit.com ‘zine, a weekly odd look at portions of the Bible.

Over the winter break I visited the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin with my eleven year old daughter. It’s a very small museum – a person can browse the entire space in the space of an hour.

What caught her eye, and mine, was the exhibit of Edgar Allan Poe’s writings. There’s a thrill seeing his roll-top writing desk, easily deciphering his script when he wrote out a stanza of “The Raven” for a fan. He used a stick pen; India ink stained parts here and there. Little splotches of ink on the pages pulled his ghostly hand into my field of vision: I could see where he stopped, dipped, blotted. Where he paused, then resumed writing. There were numerous letters to and from friends, memos to publishers, cryptic messages to lovers.

In today’s digital world we’ve lost these physical scraps of our footprint on this world: they’re relegated to inboxes and folders, or printed out in some grim, relentlessly linear typeface like zombie handwriting. I’ve postcards and letters from when I was a summer camper, paper-thin aerogramme envelopes written after I’d moved overseas. Letters my parents received, stamped by military censors. Love letters from my marriage that spanned not quite a generation. Letters from girlfriends whose children are parents. Letters from relatives who’ll never write again.

We’ve lost an amazing connection with our past. Unlike the buggy whip or the clay tablet, written letters are more than just words whose medium has passed. They’re pricelessly annotated: flourishes of the script, cramped little words clearly written in the dark, in haste, stained with tears, grease, or blood. Reducing them to electronic bits, trite acronyms and fractured English sucks the marrow from the bones of their message, leaving a harrowed skeleton without the beauty of a full bodied letter.

Those of us who write in journals, who consecrate our thoughts, ideas and feelings to the printed page are carrying on a sacred tradition, one that blogs, twitter feeds and facebook “walls” can never replace. Nor should they, as the power of our words is diluted, somehow, when they’re cast to the ether’s wind instead of being nestled into an envelope, or blotted into place on a single side of a single page of a singular book.

The purpose-driven notebook

Stephanie forwarded a link to this terrific post at A Penchant for Paper about deciding what to do with a new Habana notebook.

Should I just keep it for the future? … Perhaps it would be better suited to a pocket-sized, portable sketchbook? Or perhaps I could use it to write poetry in. Or perhaps to keep notes on the books that I am reading, and lists of books I want to read in the future. Or perhaps…

I often purchase notebooks for specific purposes — a Bloc No. 8 to use as a reporter’s notebook (fits handily into back pockets), a Steno pad to keep on my desk for work-related to-do lists (the red line down the center helps divide essential from inessential tasks). But there’s something really lovely about getting a notebook without a specific task in mind. There’s the sky’s-the-limit joy of speculating about potential uses, and the joy of experimentation, then the joy of discovery when you find the use that fits…

Mind you, I’m not trying to endorse mindless consumerism here (buy now! think later!). I just think it’s nice to be open to possibilities.

How do you say ‘2010′?

Jim Burke, General Manager of The Daily Planner, was on NPR recently to talk about the new year: is it two-thousand ten or twenty-ten?

Burke, who has to say the word “a zillion times a day, it feels like,” prefers “two-thousand ten.” His rationale?

Because probably of the movie “2001,” people just got used to saying that over and over again. So when they move to each year, they’re just saying 2002, 2003 all the way through.

Another guest on the program found a different pop-culture reference to support his preference for “twenty-ten” — the 1969 Zager and Evans song “In the Year 2525,” which begins, “In the year twenty-five twenty-five, if man is still alive, if woman can survive…”

You can listen to the interview, or read a transcript, at the NPR website.

How do you pronounce it?

Image via.

Guest post: What did you do last month?

DianeB of Pocket Blonde is a Manhattanite by way of Pennsylvania and a lifelong appreciator of fine pens and paper. Today, she talks about how she and her colleagues keep track of what they do at work each month.

Without fail, on the first work day of every month I send out a one-sentence email to my colleagues: so, what did you do last month? The Monthly Report is due, send them to me as soon as you can so I can put them together, format the document, and forward to our boss, the Assistant Vice President.

The Monthly Report actually began years back as the dreaded Monthly Meeting, a 90 minute endurance test where all of us would report to our two higher ups, the Assistant Vice President and the Vice President. Some of us were brief, some were wordy; a few were great speakers, most of us were not; various colleagues had too much work at one time, while others tap-danced around their lack of projects. And we all had our various delivery styles as we went through the ups and downs of the month past, ranging from Buster-Keaton-Charlie-Chaplin-silent-comedy to Ian-McKellen-Judy-Dench-The-Scottish-Play-tragedy.

But the AVP and VP got bogged down in meetings, and so we switched from a monthly meeting to a monthly written report. Which meant—horrors!—we had to write down what we did each month in order to put it in a monthly report. My colleagues and I have experimented with different ways of keeping track of our workload, including typing everything into an Excel spreadsheet (too sterile for me, but works for many), making notes on yellow stickies and pasting them to each other in long flowing lines (JD was not happy when Housekeeping accidentally cleaned his office instead of DJ’s that one time), and jotting down assignments in a planner (how grown up).

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Customized covers: a trip down memory lane

Another thing I stumbled upon while I was home the other week for Thanksgiving: my old assignment diaries from junior high and high school. I thought about Kate Marshall and her fifteen years of journals, then decided to take some pictures.

We were given one of these “dockets” (or maybe we had to buy them, I don’t remember) at the start of each year to keep track of homework and tests. There was probably some sort of time management indoctrination involved; I seem to recall my 8th grade Latin teacher being very strict about having us write down the day’s assignment in our dockets, rather than on a random scrap of paper or, God forbid, simply trying to remember it.

Here’s what my docket looked like in 1991-2; I would have been in 7th grade:

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Sticky label goo

I made an impulse purchase at the stationery store yesterday: a nice little cardboard folder from a company called ri cargo. (Here’s the same product on Amazon.) I was feeling pretty good about the purchase; the folder is pretty, functional, stiff enough to keep my papers from crumpling in a soft leather bag, and small enough to actually fit inside said bag.

Then I got home and tried to take the bar code sticker off, and the honeymoon was over. It left behind a gooey, silver mess, and of course once you peel those things off, there’s no getting them back on again. When this happens with plastic products, some Goof Off and a rag tend to do the trick. But what’s to do with paper products, other than wait for the goo to harden and get dirty, then try to scrape it off with your fingernails?

Details…