One of the things that I learned in 2011 is that spiral notebooks should be avoid where ever possible. This post will detail why I’ve switched to using wireless bound notebooks exclusively.
Until this year, I had always used spiral notebooks due to habit and inertia — I started using them in Middle school and just continued. However, before my retreat this year, I recalled a friend’s dislike of spiral notebooks and decided to pack a wireless bound notebook in addition to a spiral one. I found that I greatly preferred the feel of the wireless notebook. Holding the notebook in my lap was more pleasant and writing was much easier without the metal coil to get in the way.
But the advantages of a wireless notebook are not limited to the feel of writing in it. Wireless notebook store better. They are a pleasant addition to a bookshelf. If you use a label maker to label the spine, the wireless notebooks contents can easily be determined at a glance. ( The calming effect of labeled file folders that David Allen talks about in Getting Things Done also applies to labeled notebooks.) The labeled wireless notebook conveys a sense of efficiency and minimalist design elegance. If pages are removed from the notebook, the space it requires shrinks accordingly. Compare this to a spiral notebook in the same bookcase. Its contents cannot be known without removing it from the shelf. Even if all its pages, the spiral notebook will still take up as much space as the metal spiral portion. Its appearance is neither pleasing nor calming. At best, a clean metal spiral looks out of place compared to other books on the shelf. At worst, the spiral is filled with the remnants of torn out pages and conveys a sense of disorder.
Another benefit of wireless notebooks is that the pages are easier to remove. In a spiral notebook without perforations the edges of the removed pages are a jagged mess. Perforations make page removal easier but there is still a cumbersome process of removing the jagged edges.
For these reasons, I will avoid spiral notebooks in the future and give away any empty spiral notebooks that I currently have.
