Whether it comes down to finally setting up the workspace of your dreams, refreshing your portfolio with side projects, or simply just committing to doing a given task on a daily basis, organizing and planning for success is among one of the more difficult challenges outside of the daily grind.
While one could resort to a never-ending carousel of task management smartphone apps, it’s always nice to have an analog option to keep your life organized, too. Sadly, few weekly planners and calendars emphasize planning for goals and personal challenges outside of when to get up in the morning and when to feed the cat.
The Spark Notebook wants to switch up how you think about scheduling your days, your weeks, your months and ultimately, your life through the use of embedding challenge reminders into the layout of its various daily, weekly and monthly planning templates.
“I take my notes seriously, and in return, they help me be taken more seriously.”
Designed by Kate Matsudaira, an entrepreneur who appropriately designs success and career development programs for a living via her Seattle-based Popforms business, the Moleskine-like book is broken up into a variety of diagrams that bring the best of daily planners and the like into a minimalistic body.
“For my entire career as a technology executive, I’ve struggled to find a notebook that had the functionality I needed that I also wouldn’t be embarrassed to carry into a board meeting,” says Matsudaira. “It seemed like the only notebooks with goal-planners, journaling pages, and organization systems were bright pink and looked like a scrapbook (or something akin to the paper version of Windows 95). Not exactly what I was looking for to be taken seriously as a technology executive.”
After purchasing 50 different notebooks and pulling the best elements of each…along with iterating nearly 100 times over for the Spark layout design, Matsudaira has finally launched the final iteration of the Spark Notebook on Kickstarter with nearly $100,000 in pledges with 11 days left to go in her campaign.
She has even offered to let you test her layout system for free if you are willing to share the project on social media…however it won’t come with the tried and tested binding and paper selections that ended up in the final Spark Notebook, which are currently selling for $25 USD.
“In my career, I have managed hundreds of people, been on the boards of several companies, and I have had access to some of the world’s most successful people,” adds Matsudaira. “And the one thing I’ve seen over and over is: the best of the best are always organized and always put together.”
To get a free sample of the layout or find out more, head over to the Spark Notebook Kickstarter page.
