This is going to be my first real investigation on my blog. I came across this link while browsing Flickr today at work.

Mike Rohde has ‘hacked’ a Moleskine plain note pad to become an organiser, to replace his usual PDA. Interesting concept in itself, but it leads to a more complicated argument - in the world of syncing PDAs, mobiles, iPods and the like to a fully functional iCal / similar piece of software that allows multi-calendars, email and visual notifications and the like, why would anyone want to turn back time and create the ‘ultimate’ manual diary?

I, like many others, use iCal regularly, even daily. It provides me with an easy to use and functional way of managing myself (which I couldn’t do without), and also allows me to sync with my Nokia so I know what I’m meant to be doing ‘on-the-go’. For quite an un-organised person, iCal makes me quite organised. But, why would someone want to go back to paper after the rise of accessibility of programs such as iCal in the last few years?

I have loads of old sketchbooks sitting around, both in London and at my parents’ house. These are full of doodles, scribbles, note taking, things to do, and a lot of other stuff. I rarely look back at sketchbooks once I’ve made notes, in fact hardly ever. Most of the pages in my books are probably never re-visited. But the reason I have so many old sketchbooks is simply this - there is nothing more satisfying than starting writing in a new, crisp sketch book or diary. Whether it’s going to make me more organised or not, writing in the book makes me think that I’m putting some order into my life, that every mark I make on the page is done for a reason and that each mark will be beneficial to me as an organised person.

What iCal is lacking, is the ability to scribble, to sketch, to create completely unique references that work for each specific individual and not making them work with a formula common to everyone with a Mac. In this sense iCal is relatively uniform and unflexible, it allows no personalisation. I still have two sketchbooks in my bag even though I run everything I need to do through iCal, because I like writing stuff. I still write things I need to do in my sketchbooks rather than noting them down on stickies or another digital form - a) because it’s more accessible, and b), because of the satisfaction factor.

This leads to a possible investigation looking at organisation software and personalisation. If someone could strike a balance between ease of use and synchronisation, and personalisation, you could have a winning piece of software on your hands. I’m not talking just using a graphics tablet to allow scribbling - I mean full scale personalisation in terms of keys, legends, colours, tables, graphs - whatever.

I may look in to this further when I have a spare few days, it is a very interesting topic though.