I've been enjoying reading several weblogs about "going analog," i.e., losing the handheld and going back to paper. Well, actually what I've been doing is bookmarking them -- I haven't read most of them yet because I kind of want to savor them.

I'm so drawn to blank books of all kinds that I quite often buy a small one that I love, but I very seldom use them anymore, because the handheld (in my case, a Handspring Visor Prism) is so much more convenient and can hold so much more information. It works for me, at least right now, but I still do feel the allure of writing things down on actual paper.

I was just reading this in 43 Folders, home of the Hipster PDA, basically a stack of different-colored index cards held togther with a binder clip:

Although this appears to be marketed at students for storing CDs in a school locker, it also works great for storing, organizing, and transporting index cards. Just yesterday, I was talking with a woman who wished it were easier to truck her cards between home and work without a lot of hassle. This might be one way to do that.

Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose? If you've accumulated such a large stack of index cards that you need to cart them around between home and work in some kind of folder organizer, doesn't that indicate that you've gone past the point where they work for you? I can see the value in paring down, and in carrying a dozen or so cards for notes with a rubber band around them or a binder clip, but if I was having to devise things like this CD carrier to tote them around, I'm pretty sure I would be tempted to go back to my PDA.

More on this later (I want to collect the links, because while I don't think I'm ever going to back to paper exclusively, I do find it interesting. Office supply porn. :)

Using a kids' CD filer for organizing index cards