Index-card journaling

I couple of days I commented on r/journaling that I was currently doing a little experiment with index cards as a way to do journaling (and bullet journaling) on the go. So here is what I’m currently using:

• A stack of A7 index cards (just some that I got at the stationery store down the road)
• A rubber band to hold the stack together
• A small pen for note-taking

On the one end of the stack I have a card on top where I keep notes for the current day, things that I notice, stuff that I want to do in the future that just came to my mind. In the top-right corner there is some space reserved to track how many kilometers I spent on my bike that day, how many bottles of water I drank, and how unkind the scale was to me in the morning. Everything I put there I’ll eventually also transfer to my A5 journal. The card is then moved out of the stack into the trash or into an archive-box.

I hold the cards in landscale-mode and put the rubber band around the left side of the stack. When I now flip the stack so that the rubber band stays on the left side, I have another card where I keep my shopping list for the next time I make it to a grocery store.

I originally wanted to try this setup because I’d been really unhappy with the quality of the Moleskine Cahier notebooks. After a couple of days in my trouser bags they had just started to show serious wear and tear. So far, the index cards perform much better! Sure, the setup isn’t as flexible since I have to remove the rubber band if I want to write on a different card, but the robustness is more important to me right now.

In the future I might try Field Notes out but at least for now this setup works very well for me. I’ve even noticed that I journal more now since I can experiment on these cards and then just copy the final version into my “nice” journal 😅 If I write something in there that I’m not happy with, I can just throw the card into the trash and not have to think of it anymore.