Mike Rohde's Custom Moleskine Planner

"This is my customized Moleskine planner, made from a standard pocket Moleskine (ruled) to resemble the format of a Moleskine Weekly Planner.

I created this planner, because Moleskine 2006 Weekly Planners are hard to find and expensive. But beyond cost or scarcity, I thought it would be interesting to create my own planner from scratch.."

Mike Rohde
Rohdesign

Image link to FLICKR
© All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Comments

[Chris Meisenzahl]

Necessity IS the mother of invention! ;-)

[Gary]

I think the creative part of this experiment is very cool; I would question the logic of MS planners = expensive. Time is money, and I'm sure the cost of the planner is well below what your hourly design fee is! Nonetheless, there's a value in personalizing a planner to this extent. Plus, it brings to mind other possibilities of combinations in one lovely Moleskine!

[Mike Rohde]

Indeed Chris, indeed. :-)

[Mike Rohde]

Gary, you have a good point as to expense — I did consider the cost vs. time needed to create a custom planner. However, with almost half the year gone, $40 for a 2006 weekly planner wasn't a great value. I considered the 18 month planner, but the format didn't work for me.

For me, the project of creating a planner was more interesting as an experiment and a process than buying an M planner. I wanted to see if it was doable, and if for me I could even improve upon the Moleskine design. And you're right, using a standard M offers the remaining pages for task management, which is something a stock M cannot offer.

I may buy the 2007 weekly for next year... we'll see. It certainly would be easier. :-)

[Alice de Sturler]

I made a 2007 calender using the week-at-one-glance strategy but I skipped a page for notes. Mo-Tue-Wed are on the left page and the right page is empty for notes and details about the appointments on Mon-Tue-Wed. Sometimes you need to write down more than just when to meet where hence the empty page on the right side. On the next spread you find on the left the back of the empty page also empty, and on the right page are Thur-Fri-Sat-Sun. If you want to see the entire week-at-one-glance, just hold the empty page in the middle.

[Mike Rohde]

Great idea Alice!

[Mac]

My approach is to use a day to view moleskine diary and keep a same size cahier tucked stored in the back. I then use the Cahier as my notebook and gtd planner and the diary for my schedule. The only problem was the size of the diary so i have moved up to large sized moleskines.

[Dustin]

This is basically identical to what I do, but i use a cahier.
:D