Editing The Pen Addict 140/transcript (section)

== Notebook Sets ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' work from? No, but this is something that I wish I did do because, uh, I have always enjoyed the set. I get more satisfaction crossing something off a list, um, than, than checking, checking it off digitally. But with the way that I work, the, the flexibility that a digital system gives, um, I actually find to be a lot better for me. It just works better for the way that I work. Um,

'''Brad Dowdy:''' right. So yeah. Right. So let me jump through a couple of these, cause we got a lot more, a lot more to get to. She, she posed a question. She was talking about using the last page of the notebook for trying out inks, um, which is something I mentioned I do. She said, here's a question, which is not necessarily paper related. And I'd be interested to hear what other people had to say, do you find that you waste a lot of time as it were exercising your pens? I think this is an artifact of having too many pens inked up. Um, I'm trying to keep them all active. Plus they're still relatively new and I keep testing ones that aren't perfect writers to check and see if they're good enough. I enjoy the pen exercising and it's sort of meditative, but it also seems a bit pointless. What are good ways to exercise pens if you don't feel like keeping a journal diary? So what she means, and I can totally relate to this. It's the, it's the curse of having too many pens inked up. And if you don't, you know, use a pen for a couple of weeks, couple of weeks, it's going to dry up. It might hard start. Um, so she's keeping that ink flow going by exercising the pens, just writing. And what I do is I do have a big scratch pad. I keep at my desk at home that when I find that I haven't been using a pen enough, but I don't want to clean it out because I need to review it or I just enjoy using it. But for some reason it hasn't, you know, been in the heavy rotation recently, I'll just get out and just start drawing, sketching, doing lettering, writing scribbles, just giving the pen a good workout. I mean, it's not rocket science. And if I find that I'm going through this routine and then I just don't enjoy the pen, I clean it out. So that's how I exercise my pens. I do just have one pad that's dedicated for basically just scribbling, garbage, doodles, junk, whatever you want to do to where you don't feel like you're messing anything up. So that's my thing. Do you, uh, do you ever have the need to exercise your pens, Myke? You don't have the, the, the quantity inked that I do, but, um, do you ever run into that?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. I kind of just, when, when I ink something up new, I kind of like to scribble around in the notebook a little bit, you know, um, and just kind of, kind of shake off any cobwebs as it were. Uh, I like to do that, but I don't, I don't need to do it a lot because I kind of don't

'''Brad Dowdy:''' change it up a lot. Right. Right. So yeah, I, yeah, I can see that. And I wish I didn't have to do that. Honestly, I'm much happier with three pens inked up than seven to nine, which I have right now. But when I find myself in that large amount of inked up range, I do feel like I have to exercise them every few days just to, uh, just so they don't get clogged up. So let's see. So Greg says he's an, he's another addict that has come all in since listening to your show. I just thought I'd share quickly a photo of my stash, perhaps small by the standards of some addicts, but at least what I consider under control. So he's got some pictures of his stash. We can throw them in the show notes, but he's got a rodeo webbies, Apica premiums, moleskins, Lloyd's terms, field notes, and the Baron figure apprentice, um, all in the stash. And it's probably ballpark 20 notebooks, not counting three packs of the smaller notebooks. So that looks like a pretty normal stash for, for, um, the listeners of the show. I would say, uh, it's even a little bit light. So you need to step your game up, Greg. I don't know. I'm just kidding. Um, use your notebooks people. We'll, we'll talk about that on when we talk about field notes more, but, um, I did appreciate Jim's shout out to me in that episode, Myke. I definitely caught that. Um, so Greg says he also has a few smaller notebooks in play, such as field notes, moleskin pockets, Baron figure printings, one in my toolbox, one in the car, and a few around the house for quick notes. There's always one or two in use to record baby info. Um, that's a surprisingly big deal. And I did the same, um, you know, when they're eating, when they're going to the bathroom, we're going to have to get Casey lists on this show to get him out of the digital world and into the analog world for tracking baby poops. So, um, he'll, he'll get on that. And he'll also learn that I'm not British. Um, again, for real this time says their utility notebooks, all in use, always more than one. My one rule for larger notebooks, such as my current daily use Webby is one at a time cover to cover. I don't touch another new one until it's full and finished. I've started notebooks. I wasn't crazy about, but I stick to the rule, fill it and finish it before opening a new one. I feel like I'm getting my money's worth. And this also somehow keeps the nicer ones from being too precious to beat up and use says I'm a web designer developer. So I fill them up pretty quickly with notes to do list, wireframe sketches, et cetera. This allows me to feed my addiction for variety. While I burn through them. This is a huge problem for me, the larger size notebook. I can't tell you the last time I finished one. Do you use like say an a five or greater size notebook, Myke? Um, instead of like the memo book size. Well, yeah, I use the arts and sciences, right? Okay. So yeah, but it's, it doesn't have that many pages. That's totally reasonable. But do you have, you have used like the a hundred plus pagers recently? No. Yeah. It's like the rodeo webby or something like that. Oh man. That that's like a fantasy of mine. This is how ridiculous I am. It's like, I would love one day to be able to get a rodeo webby and fill it from front page to back and have every page used and have something on every page, even if it's nothing important. I never finished those books. I finished memo books all the time, but the larger notebooks, I've kind of stopped using for that fact. I'll get 10 pages into it. And I think I've gotten maybe 30 or 40 pages into a webby. And then I end up just putting on my notes and, you know, I'm in my book. And, um, I, I think that's a very, um, very good goal to have for the larger notebooks one at a time, cover to cover, don't touch another new one until it's full and finished. Ooh, that's a, that's a serious challenge there. That's a Seinfeld level challenge. Um, if you ask me and I'd like, I'd be curious to see how many people really, really do that because that's, I find that extremely hard as much as I want to use those types of notebooks. Um, that is a monstrous challenge for me. I don't, I don't know if I can commit to that. So I can commit to buying some more pens, Myke though. Yeah. Do you have anything? Yeah. Yeah. What do you get? What do you get? Do you have anything I need to check out?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Oh, I see what you, I see where you're going with this. This week's episode of the pen addicts brought to you by our friends over at pen chalet. They sell authentic, amazing roller balls, fountain pens, ballpoints, mechanical pencils, and so much more with loads of your favorite brands like Monteverde, Pelican, Lamy, Pilot, Namiki, Sailor, Kaweco, and so many more. They have great, reliable, fast customer service. They're always adding new pens every single month and they have loads of other stuff like carrying cases, pen holders, refills, fountain pen converters, and so much more. They have free shipping on orders of over $50 in the continental United States, but they also sell internationally with very reasonable shipping rates too. Pen chalet has low prices on high quality pens and offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee. So go to penchalet.com and use the code pen addict to save 10% on your order. But what you should be doing is clicking that podcast link at the top of the website page and enter the password pen addict for even more savings as well as your 10% off. Today, we have a few different offers for you that the guys over at that Ron and the guys over at pen chalet have put together for you. So we have the Platinum Izumo, which is at 40% off. And then once you put the pen addict code at checkout, you'll be make it 50% off for you. And Ron has also wanted me to let the listeners know that they still have some of the Kaweco art on sale and they're getting more back into stock this week as we kind of sold them out. So they're going to be, they're taking delivery of some more this week. So there'll be some back in stock. So you should check out those. And they also have some great prices on the Platinum 3776, including the nice Per, Sai and Shoji models. So you should go and check all of those out. Some great deals this week, Brad.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So definitely check out these Platinum deals. The Izumo is not a pen I was familiar with before I saw it at pen chalet. And what it is, it's an Arushi lacquer pen. If you've heard me talk about Nakaya before, and Nakaya is actually an offshoot of Platinum. So Platinum has the artisans to apply these Arushi lacquer techniques to these pens. And this one's, you know, different, much different looking than, than a traditional Nakaya. And it looks really beautiful. It's a very expensive pen. And I don't know, you know, if everyone's in the market for something like this, but it's certainly something to check out and see how beautiful it is. I've never seen that barrel shape or design before. So I'm going to keep my eye on that one. And then he also has really good deals on the, the 3776, which is meters, Myke, of Mount Fuji in Japan. And the, the price on these is really, really good for 14 carry gold nib. We're talking like around a hundred for the rhodium, the plated nibs. And there's actually one that I bet he only has a few of, and by the end of the show, he's not going to have any of, he has one of the 3776 is just the standard model for $59. And after the coupon, $53. And that's a gold nib pen and just in, oh no, it's a stainless steel nib. So that's why the price is that way. So it comes in broad stainless steel nib. I've never seen that. I've never seen the 3776 with a stainless steel nib. So that's interesting if you like that barrel. And then the pure and the shoji in the shoe. I own one of those. I love them and they're great. So definitely check out these great deals from Pen Chalet. And thanks to Ron for sponsoring us this week on the pen addict. As always. Thanks guys. Yeah. And thanks. Thanks for buying all those art sports last time. Yes. Ron got, Ron got a good laugh out of that, that we, we knocked him out of stock, but he was able to find some more. So I talked to him about that. So he's pretty excited about that. All right. So this is a, this is an email I liked here. And this is a, something you're going to have, people are gonna have to check out in the show notes after the fact. And this is from Brian. He says, I never listened to podcasts. I randomly listened to episode 137 because the title fascinated me. So props to the chat room that pick out titles.relay.fm. See, your work is important. You're doing important work here by picking out titles that people will just listen to our podcast randomly. So props to y'all. It says the idea of multiple active note, notebooks. He, he fascinated him and he wanted to hear what you guys had to say. As it turns out, you guys mentioned a few topics of interest to me. I knew I wanted to write you and I started to. My reply was getting quite long and I felt it needed a better place than being trapped in an email. So I turned it into a blog post, but stated it as a direct reply to you guys. So he has a whole organization, um, blog post that we will link to. It's very, very long. And I read through it a couple of times and the tidbit I got out of it is one we just mentioned. And I wanted to reiterate it because I think it's such a good idea and it's for calendaring. And he says, yes, I would rewrite my calendar events for the day. It seems tedious and redundant, but it really only takes a couple of seconds. I would look at my outlook calendar for work and put those things down. I'd then look at my personal calendar and put those things down as well. Even though I have both readily available and could easily look at both from any phone, tablet, or computer I'm currently using, I find the act of listening, listing them for the day to be extremely helpful. It sets the idea of the flow of the day in my head better than just looking at a calendar and not having it soak in. I thought that's a really important point. And that's kind of what you were alluding to, Myke. Sometimes it just works better. You can put that puzzle of your day together better laying it out on paper than looking at it digitally on your phone or your computer. For some reason, it grabs a hold of you better and you can manage it better. At least I find, I totally find that to be the case. So related to that, he says, as an aside, I find that a paper calendar for my personal stuff is not an option. Most of my personal events are not my own activities. These are family activities. When my wife works, kids, events, etc. The digital calendar allows easily sharing between multiple family members and we invite each other to stuff to keep everyone up to date. So this is 100% what I do and what I want to do. This is why you and I have talked about that I can't use a Hobonichi, like a day planner, right? I can't have that day tied to a date because I feel like that's a calendar and that needs to be digital because I have family things and outside things that I need to handle. But for tasks related to a calendar, I want to have that digitally and then pull out those tasks and put them into paper. I don't know. It makes me sound weird saying these things out loud, but it's like, I agree with that 110%. It's like exactly what gets me. I think it's all weird though, right? What we're

'''Myke Hurley:''' doing. Like, I don't think any of this, I mean, I don't mean that in the nicest possible way. Like, none of it's any less weird than anything else that we do, right? So the fact that having multiple

'''Brad Dowdy:''' notebooks on the go is, is kind of crazy. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I, I'm definitely not, uh, I don't really care about the weird factor at all, but sometimes when you're like rattling these things off, like how I handle this stuff, it, that's why, you know, putting all this down, getting all this response from all these different people, um, it's not, it doesn't make you feel more normal, but it makes you feel like, okay, you know, I think we have something here and I think I can work with this system and I think I can improve on this system. So I love getting this, this kind of feedback, the amount of words of feedback we got for this episode is just mind boggling. So, all right. So that was Brian. Um, let's talk about Jack. So Jack says my five active notebooks and their typical pen companion. So I thought this was good because he, he ties them not just to the notebook for the task, but the pen for the notebook for the task. You are Jack. You are a hero. He's a hero of ours. You know, Jack is our hero. You are a prince among men, sir. So he has his number, number one is a Moleskine pocket size branded for Dropbox. Always in my pocket. I usually use one of high tech C retro 51 and Lamy Safari. Number two, field notes, ambition edition used for meal planning. I love the look of the Sino DX 038 brown black in the ambition series. See, this is like perfect. I was like, that's the perfect choice. It's like the pen sommelier that we've talked about, you know, having the right ink and the right pen. So the right color matches the feel of the notebook. And I love you, Jack.