I stumbled across the little black book on the Ideabook.com (http://www.ideabook.com). Sheep that I am, I hunted all over town for one. I bought one of each of the graph paper, the sketch paper, and the lined paper. I have always been a bit of a Luddite; I love manual typewriters, film cameras, and Rubenesque women, and to say that I fell in love with the little Moleskine would be pulling the trigger too soon. I filled my first ‘Skine within two weeks, and had already developed all sorts of little efficiency techniques—all before I discovered the so-called Moleskine hacks of 43Folders.com (http://www.43folders.com), and Mike Shea (http://www.mikeshea.net).

I love these little books, and their hacks, so much that I have decided to offer up my own little ‘Skine hack that I use to help me sort, find, and link information with ease.

Some of the hacks on both 43Folders and Mike Shea say that you should number the pages, and you should, but not every freakin’ page. Numbering every page is a pointless waste of time and not very efficient. So here comes a mini-hack: only number the right-hand facing-page; it takes half the time.

If you number only half the pages then you need some way to tell where on the pair of pages the information you need is written. The answer is to divide the pair of pages into quadrants.

I used to draw a line across the middle of the pages with a blue water-color pencil, the spine of the pages served as a natural border, but I have since stopped the practice because I am used to the idea and it was a waste of time.

Now, linking to information is simple; make a note of where in the book the information is continued to or from.

As has been suggested on other sites (i.e. 43Folders.com and MikeShea.net) you can use a sort of meta data system for linking bits of information in your Moleskine. The Moleskine markup language is easy to learn; it consists of two directional indicators (← means continued from, while → means continued on), the page number, and the quadrant. In the example above the note is continued on page twenty-four, quadrant C, and it was continued from page eighteen, quadrant B.

If you looked through your Moleskine as you read this you will notice that by numbering the pages in pairs you will be left with two pages—first page in the book, and last page—which have no corresponding facing page. Here comes another mini-hack: don’t waste these pages, use them as a table of contents, a sort of home page if you will, to link together the major chunks of information using the same Moleskine mark-up that is used to link the pages.