Pile of Index Cards

(This hack is for people outside Japan…)

I have been using quadrille index cards from the beginning of PoIC. A difference between Japanese and U.S. quadrille index cards is relevance between cut and grid. Japanese index cards’ cut and grid is always fixed, and U.S.’ is not.

This is critical for PoIC’s tag. Soon I see U.S. index cards actually, I started small service to send Japanese index cards. But I stop it after 3 monthes because I don’t have time to do it. Also I found it won’t solve foundamental problem at all. Index cards is office suppliy. If it is expensive, it doesn’t make sense.

Recently, PoIC is introduced on Lifehack.org and 43 Folders successively. Many people visits flickr and wiki, and we discuss about index cards actively. And again, about the difference of Japanese and U.S. index cards.

This time, discussion with Matt gives me a new inspiration about tagging for U.S. index cards. It’s base is Jan Allsopp’s comment on my blog about her trick for tagging. She shows it on her blog. She uses pigment pen and ruler to make grid on top edge of plain index cards.

Here is a problem: I’m lazy person. If I have to make grid accurately all time, I will give up using index cards soon. The procedure should be more and more easy for me. It must be finished in 30 seconds. So I use 5 mm width highlighter instead.

1. Slide a pile of plain index cards.
2. Leave one pen head width as margin.
3. Make four lines with 1 mm spacing on the edge.

That’s all. The pictures right are the example. I use yellow highlighter because it is in my drawer. Perhaps blue color is better. I finish this experiment in 20 seconds.

Now you can use U.S. quadrille, ruled, and even plain index cards for PoIC. :)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 8:47 pm and is filed under Discovery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.