As you may well know I am a big fan of notebooks. All kinds of notebooks. Big ones, small ones, whatever. A while back I came across the Field Notes Brand of notebooks, and they had a pretty cool story:

INSPIRED BY the vanishing subgenre of agricultural memo books, ornate pocket ledgers and the simple, unassuming beauty of a well-crafted grocery list, the Draplin Design Company, Portland, Oregon in conjunction with Coudal Partners of Chicago, Illinois bring you “FIELD NOTES” in hopes of offering, “An honest memo book, worth fillin’ up with GOOD INFORMATION.”

This is the latest offering:

I just love these little notebooks! They are a little bigger than a 3″ x 5″ notecard and are simply bound in heavy cardstock, but the paper is good quality and they fit right in your pants pocket. They make an excellent Capture Device for your GTD practice. The motto of the Field Notes Brand is “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now“.

Brilliant.

At $9.95 for a 3-pack, these notebooks are a little on the expensive side. You can get something similar at Target for about $4.00. But what you don’t get from Target are the goodies that come with your order. The first time I ordered a set from Field Notes, they threw in pencil and one of the “General-purpose bands of rubber”. And a 1-inch button. LOL. It doesn’t seem like much, but it was a treat to me, and got me hooked.

As you can see, this shipment had some more goodies. I ordered a 6-pack of pencils this time too, since I fell in love with the free one they sent last time (Good, dark lead, smooth barrel, firm eraser).

Another band of rubber, a sticker, another button (!) and a little calendar. The package also created some more drama and suspense – the notebooks were packed in another envelope. With a string closure! Cool, very cool.

When I opened the smaller package to remove the notebooks themselves there was another surprise: a packet of Marigold seeds!

Now I am hardly what you would call a gardener, but I thought that this was a nice touch for spring. Especially here in New Hampshire, we had a cold and snowy winter but the snow is gone now and we all have Spring Fever so bad that you can smell it in the air.

Once again, Field Notes proves that it is not just the price of a product, or the perceived value, but the end-user experience that makes a product remarkable. I had the best time this afternoon unwrapping and opening this package.

Now I can spend some time thinking about what I want to do with the notebooks, and whether or not I should plant these marigold seeds…

You can see what others are up to with their Field Notes Brand notebooks on Flickr. People get really creative!

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