What about using one of those little photo printers? I bet it could be easily hacked to print cheaply on 3x5’s. Just an idea, no base in fact.

My advice:

Buy some cardstock and a good papercutter.

Design cards of any shape you like… cheap.

I should reformat my hipster cards to be just flat 3x5 paper size for this. hehe.

Get the Avery 5388 index cards and use the template in Word. In Word, use Format—>Text Direction to make it print vertically.

I hold all my contacts in an Excel spreadsheet and mail-merge them into a 2-column Word document that I print on an index card. If you have good eyesight, you can choose a really small font and cram your whole address book on a single card. It’s easy to update too.

I really don’t like the avery cards, they’re yellow, not white, and that’s distracting under good light. Also, they have perforations along the edge.

fuss

And the effort involved in cutting paper to a perfect size is very not trivial. On my “when I can afford it” section of “Someday maybe” is a cheapass dedicated printer to run off sets of index cards on demand.

When I’m allowed to use a computer again… oh, wait. :)

Anon: Have you actually looked at the Avery cards? They are astoundingly expensive.

I’ve been doing this for a-g-e-s. Thought it was ‘obvious’. If you have a team/family it lets you reproduce cards for multiple people easily. Even if not everybody is using the Hipster they like having information compact and handy.

3x5’s can turn into new address cards to hand out, maps to the house, Project contact lists, Committee rosters (not everyone is geeky and wants an email). Their size makes them stand out from all the other papers people get handed.

The first company I worked for out of college had scratch pads marked “Avoid Oral Instructions”.
It always comes to mind when I hand information to someone.

I’m a teacher and have made a pile of custom templates (some in wordperfect, until I realized the print function was dying a slow death; now they’re in Open Office … set your margins around for .25; text 8 pt Verdana). I’ve got cards for day-specific todo lists (some days I have a pile of stuff I have to do just on that day); I’ve got checklists for each class to check homework completion, for recording contacts with parents, etc.. Whenever I give a test, I make a card with the ‘official expectations’ covered in that test and if a student has glaring problems with one or more, I just check off a little bubble so when I’m doing my report card comments I’m not trying to remember where they had problems.

The first company I worked for out of college had scratch pads marked “Avoid Oral Instructions”. It always comes to mind when I hand information to someone.

I think I might have to make that my new motto. “Avoid Oral Instructions.” That’s good. :)

They make 3x5 index cards with blue lined grids already, and cheap too. I buy mine at RiteAid and Walgreen. The brand is Oxford. Not high quality… but they have grids.

Hope this helps

I am psyched! “Avoid Oral Instructions” is such a good line. It needs its place here at the office. No more breakage. And we need to replace those yellow-stickies as well.

I worked for Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. from 1982-1985 and again from 1991-1994. I seem to recognize “Avoid Oral Instructions” as something I saw on notepads from my second stint.

Goes along with something I remember hearing: “Verbal instructions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.”

I just went through several nights trying to get my printer to print my GTD lists onto the Levenger lined 3x5 cards. Finally got it working with the Pages template. However, since my printer doesn’t support index cards (the paper feed won’t close up tight enough - the card keep skewing to the side) I had to create a “block” that sits in the paper feed to hold the card upright. Kludgy, but works. Now my hipster has a more professional feel to it.

Avoid Oral Instructions, I can add one from my days at Hughes Aircraft Company: Avoid Verbal Orders (AVO).

@ Steve: Me, too. I prefer ‘em since you can take notes vertically or horizontally and keep it nice and neat, relatively speaking. Cheap ‘n’ Easy.

I hacked a togehter some peaces of AppleScript and php to get Entourages today todo items into Pages. The layout fits to my printer and is in german, but maybe someone wants to use it. You can try to change the layout in the Hipster.template in the package content.

The link is on the Pages site in the wiki.

Scott, please do so.

I’ve been doing this type of stuff a bit myself.

I’ve even printed Douglas Johnston’s DIY Planner templates onto 3x5 cards, and they work great but you have to have quite a fine point pin (and no presbyopia). You can print anything, you just have to have it automatically resize the document for the page size, although, again, the far-sighted need not try this at home.

I have an HP 3500 color laser at the office and it works great.

What??! Is everyone pimping for the Ink Cartridge Industry??!

Holy cow, I’ve got enough burned-out cartridges to build a 1/5 scale model of the Taj Mahal and have some to spare. A full third of my income goes to printer ink. Just yesterday I saw a leather-clad Hell’s Angels-type out behind the local elementary school handing out Epson printers to the kiddies for free.

What??! Is everyone pimping for the Ink Cartridge Industry??!

Heh.

My life changed when I found offbrand generic EPSON carts for $3 each; almost 1/10 of what I’d been paying for the real, branded deal. Crazy.

I wrestled with this one for a while! My printer (an HP Laser jet 1012) SAID it could only handle full size sheets, but it had a little tray on top of the normal tray with adjustable width that would go down to any size, my solution was to make a Pages template with a 3x5 text area in the top-center of the page, anything written in there prints to index cards nicely when I tell the printer it has a full sized sheet!

I have been using a Canon iP3000 to print onto store-bought 3x5 cards—it works wonderfully and it’s a great printer. It prints natively onto 4x6 cards, and it’s really easy to print onto a 3x5. I’ve found that iCal is great for a HPDA. Save the week view as a pdf, and open it in preview. Select the area you want, and print the week onto a 3x5 card. It works wonderfully.

I run a hipster which is 8.5x11 paper folded into 1/6 size and clipped with a binder clip.

I’m Windows and Outlook, but all I do is print a week calendar, 2 months calendar, a filtered phone list, and a context-filtered do list. With it I keep some extra calling cards and another sheet or two of reference. I reprint on a weekly basis.

I fold these individually so that I can get at them easily, but find that I don’t need them often, because I also print a daily calendar folded into 1/6; this sheet also contains my daily do’s. I keep this in my shirt pocket. It is my main bucket for handwritten notes.

BTW, Outlook 2003 (and probably earlier versions) has a print template that prints calendars, etc. on whatever paper your printer understancds, constrained to hipster card size, so you just use scissors or a guillotine to cut it down.

It’s a little wasteful of paper, but I found it a fast way to get a calendar printout for three months into my hipster.

How much ink does printing 500 cards actually take? This sounds like this could very quickly cost more than buying them from a printer (not necessarily levenger).

Printer ink is way past the price of gold or oil. We’re up in saffron strand type prices. And saffron goes a lot farther.

Re: cost of ink,

That is why you use a laser printer. With 3000 sheets out of a toner cartrige (and far far more then that printing on 3x5 cards) your price per card is dramatically reduced. Home laser printers can be had for just over 100 bucks nowdays. Granted you only get B&W that way. Color laser is available but typically is priced beyond most home budgets.

Furthering the “Pages Templates” approach, I quickly threw a template together (should be available soon at http://iworkcommunity.com) based on Merlin’s “Implicit Simplicity” and inspired by Levenger’s “Power Business Card” approach with their signature 3x5’s. Download, Mod, & Enjoy!

Has anyone designed an A4 sheet for multipe 3x5 index cards. Maybe 3 horizontal and 2 vertically to maximise paper use? I don’t mind cutting them down. They don’t have to be ruled as I will type the info I want anyway. Thanks.

Going back to the index card basic

The good thing about using index cards is that they come cheap, very cheap. With everybody doing everything electronically, this is going back to the basics, big time.