Instead of cash, I keep a blank check in the accordion pocket. It still works great in most situations (almost any parking garage will take a check, which has gotten me out of a couple of jams) and I’m less likely to use a check unless I really need to, thus increasing the chances of it being around when it counts.

I tried writing with a Lamy gel pen in a moleskine, and it came through the paper so you can read it on the other side. I do not like this! Does anyone else have a blacklist of implements that are NOT good for writing in moleskines?

the pen I love to use is actually not a pen but a pencil and it is the Rotring Newton. It comes in steel or as mine in lava stone.

http://www.rotring.de/products/writing/c_newton.html

btw, love the moleskin tips, i usually hide a couple of business cards in it too, but I love the tip about the metadata, so far I always wrote a header in the first line , but the top corner just makes more sense.

1. I used to find that my Moleskine pocket would tear because I carried so much junk in it. (Just the folded 8.5x11” Xmas list in there now bulks it out quite a bit.) I started reinforcing the pocket with a double layer of duct tape (one layer frays thin) and now I can stuff the pocket without worrying I’m going to lose anything. If you’re concerned about aesthetics, get some black duct tape so the reinforcement will be less visible.

2. I keep running notes for a number of projects in my Moleskine. At the start of the current entry, I put an arrow back to the page number for the last entry on this project (you DO number your Moleskine pages, right?), and then I flip back to that page and put an arrow forward to the current entry at the end. Afterwards, it looks sort of like this:

(81) Project Foo: Blah blah blah. ->85 …other pages, other projects… (85) Project Foo: 81<- Bleh bleh bleh.

1. It helps to have structural info like this in another colour, such as red or green. Bic makes a good four-colour pen you can get in any Office De(s)pot @ 3 for $5.00 or so. Having four colours to work with is very useful in general. For example, you can write lifehacks and other critical info in red so you can find them fast. Example: “Hit C-q before TAB in Emacs to prevent conversion of TAB to spaces.” That’s something you want to write in red! Later you can transfer it to your emacs.txt file.

iGadget.com has the pocket-sized Moleskine sketchbooks and lined notebooks for $5 each, the cheapest I’ve seen anywhere. One of my co-workers ordered a bunch of notebooks, but they sent him the sketchbooks instead, so I bought two off him, and some other office artists bought the rest.

Good inexpensive pen: Uni-ball Signo Gelstick 0.7 They can be found at OfficeMax (and I’m sure other office supply places).

I was addicted to the G2s, but was unable to grab them one time, and settled for the significantly cheaper Zebra Sarasa. I liked it far better, and found it lasted much longer. (http://www.zebrapen.com/gel-sarasa.html)

My wife and I took moleskines on our honeymoon for journaling. I snagged a tonne of Grand & Toy “Premium Ballpoint” pens. They worked very well, and are unbelieveably cheap. They wrote over pages my sweaty hands had rested on! I bought another box so I could cram a couple into every bag and drawer I could think of. Very useful to have that many cheap pens kicking around.

Another habit I’ve got into with notebooks of all kinds is to cover the back couple of pages with overlapped stickies of all kinds. That way you can mark your book up, mark up other books you’re reading, and you can give someone a note to take with them without tearing out a page of your book and possibly damaging the binding.

I love my moleskine, but don’t use it as often as I should, so I don’t really have any tips to share. I do, however, have some Moleskine links to share:

Moleskine group on Flickr with some excellent photos in the pool

Found that link via the Moleskinerie, which often posts Moleskine tips and tricks among other, sometimes-related topics.

I think of my Moleskin as my pocket blog — just like my blog I use it to stash thing — I assign categories — on post per page (so that there are permalinks). No novel use but constant use.