Doing my Travel Plans on a Monologue Notebook

Recently I bought a Moleskine notepad and I really felt my productivity improved due to it. I even bought the book Getting Things Done to learn more about using GTD method to solve my life out. But the real value is the note book is next to me everywhere and I made a very strong effort to “clear my mind” to the notebook and “process” them daily. At work, I really gets more work done to the satisfation of my boss and at home, I got most of the household stuff to the satisfaction of my woman (e.g. painting the room, buying certain stuff, repairing some of the things at home etc).

I am going for a Hong Kong/Macau trip soon and previously, I would do my planning in Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and also the great Google Maps. I then printed the spreadsheet and google maps out and bring them along the trip. As you would expect, these are pretty big (A4 size) and pretty inconvenient to bring around. Besides, they really made it pretty obvious that you are a tourist 🙂

So when I visited Page One bookshop in Vivocity recently, I spotted a notebook from Monologue. It is pretty cheap ($9 as compared to $40 for Moleskine City Book for Hong Kong). It looks nice and I decided to try out my new idea that had came to my mind recently. My idea was, instead of printing out Excel spreadsheets and Google Maps, I would now copy my travel plans to the small notebook and use it for my trip. That way, I got a more portable version of my travel plans. Of course it is more work !

The Monologue Notebook looks like this:

Close Up:

So what I did was in the first few pages, I printed and pasted the Hong Kong MTR map into the front page:

I made written notes on flights and transportation on a day to day basis or the things we are going to do each day plus notes on it (e.g. what bus to take, what train to take, how much, what time it opens, what is good there, what to take note of etc etc)

I also pasted road directions from Google Direction in case I need to take taxi 🙂

There is also a nice small pocket (similar to Moleskine) at the back to hold some bigger information (e.g. maybe your bus tickets)

I find it quite fun so far. Granted that I do need to shrink the Google Maps to a smaller size and also made some screen shots and print them etc, but so far, it looked great.

I will try it out during the Hong Kong/Macau Trip and let you know how it goes ! 🙂