i hate the feel of cheap paper
Me too. Especially with fountain pens, the writing experience is horrible.
I use cheap notebooks
11–20 of 282 posts
Re: I use cheap notebooks
#12I almost exclusively (On the rare occasion I use paper, mostly as a prop to look professional or not mess up a low tech ambiance, or some other specific use case) use an A5 6 ring binder. I especially like how you can print 2 pages on a US Letter, cut it in half, punch it(If you don't have a 6 hole punch, use an existing 6 hole sheet as a stencil and punch the marks), and it's close enough to A5 to work. It's great f…
I think your comment would be easier to understand if you stated your geographical location.
In Europe, I would expect A6 paper to be decently easy to find (although I don't think I've ever bought any, so salt away if you feel like it). A few seconds on the local Amazon surfaced [1], which is 2,000 sheets for SEK 218 (€19 or US $20) which I would not call hard to find nor expensive ...
Edit: forgot the link! :)
[1]: https://www.amazon.se/Copier-Paper-2000BL-A6-vit/dp/B004G6Q3...
Re: I use cheap notebooks
#13I almost exclusively (On the rare occasion I use paper, mostly as a prop to look professional or not mess up a low tech ambiance, or some other specific use case) use an A5 6 ring binder. I especially like how you can print 2 pages on a US Letter, cut it in half, punch it(If you don't have a 6 hole punch, use an existing 6 hole sheet as a stencil and punch the marks), and it's close enough to A5 to work. It's great f…
> I almost exclusively (On the rare occasion I use paper, mostly as a prop to look professional ...
Yellow legal writing pads were good for that, back in the day.
Re: I use cheap notebooks
#14I used to have a similar hangup, I liked getting expensive notebooks and very rarely used them because I was worried I was “wasting” the page by writing banal stuff on it. I ended up fixing it by complete accident. I ran across yet another nice notebook* and to save on shipping I bought three of them. Later on I happened to be in an office supplies shop with a friend and she saw some pens on the shelf that she remembered as being the best pens she’d ever used*. They didn’t have single pens but the box of 12 wasn’t that expensive so I thought sure, why not, and bought a box. When I got home my notebooks had been delivered. So I was standing there with a whole box of nice pens in one hand and a whole stack of nice notebooks in the other hand, both of which I had bought excess of on a whim, and something just clicked in my brain like “these aren’t scarce resources, these are plentiful”, and I’ve never had an issue since.
I don’t think it’s a bad idea to buy cheap notebooks (or cheap pens), do what works for you. But if you want to use nice notebooks and find yourself struggling to do it, you could try buying a bunch to teach yourself they’re not so precious and rare.
*: The notebooks are Code and Quill, the pens are Uniball Vision Elite, I still use both to this day. I have a stack of 10 finished notebooks and I’ve lost or given away God knows how many pens, but I’ve never run out of either.
Re: I use cheap notebooks
#15I thought this would be about laptops. The laptops I use for work and personal stuff cost around $100 and are effectively disposable. They are not great for intense use, but the vast majority of tasks go just fine. And when developing any serious slowdown shows up right away so my work ends up being usable on low end hardware with janky connections. When one of these laptops got stolen recently I just got another one, provisioned it using some scripts, restored my personal data, and that was that. Total loss was a little over a hundred dollars and a half day of work.
Re: I use cheap notebooks
#16Get a leather composition book cover for the look/durability, then just use $1 composition books. I’ve had one like this for 10y and works great.
https://www.amazon.com/Leather-Journal-Composition-Notebooks...
Re: I use cheap notebooks
#17I thought this would be about laptops. The laptops I use for work and personal stuff cost around $100 and are effectively disposable. They are not great for intense use, but the vast majority of tasks go just fine. And when developing any serious slowdown shows up right away so my work ends up being usable on low end hardware with janky connections. When one of these laptops got stolen recently I just got another one…
Same reason why I would never go for anything beyond the base model Macs. Losing/damaging the base model (~$1k) is something I can live with, less so to the fully-specced out $4k+ one. Not to mention that those aren't super reliable to begin with and given their anti-repair stance there is no cost-effective way to repair any eventual failures the way you can do on a PC.
Re: I use cheap notebooks
#18For quick notes at my desk or around the house (i.e., TODOs), I use the backside of opened mail envelopes (i.e., mostly junk mail). They are the ultimate in not having to worry about wasting paper, etc.
They are fold for pocket friendly, magnet to fridge, etc. Obviously not for long form (e.g., meetings' notes) but great for random thoughts, etc.
Re: I use cheap notebooks
#19I thought this would be about laptops. The laptops I use for work and personal stuff cost around $100 and are effectively disposable. They are not great for intense use, but the vast majority of tasks go just fine. And when developing any serious slowdown shows up right away so my work ends up being usable on low end hardware with janky connections. When one of these laptops got stolen recently I just got another one…
I came here expecting the same :) Though I prefer used Thinkpads. There's a plentiful supply of leased machines. Instead of disposable, they are excellent quality & nicely repairable and upgradeable in nearly all aspects. (Screen resolution compared to macs has been annoying me, ....) And I get to be smug about using the more sustainability focused option :)
Re: I use cheap notebooks
#20There are several Muji stores in my city. I get high quality stationary on the cheap.