Introducing MiLO.
I’ve been intrigued by Merlin Mann’s Hipster PDA for some time. I tried building and carrying one myself, but I found I wasn’t really using it in a way that suited my own note taking and “next action” capturing style.
I don’t work well with discreet items all on their own note card and when I tried to capture more than one “action” per note card I found that didn’t work well for me either! I liked the idea of a low-tech solution to capturing my random thoughts and urgent action items, but the HPDA didn’t seem to be the best fit for me.
So I started thinking about what was a good fit, and I realized that keeping a list on paper was how I worked best, and making something that was easily carried was most important to me. Around the time I formalized my wants, I happened across a web site for the “Cheapster PDA” - a single 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper folded into a little booklet. I immediately whipped out a sheet of paper, folded it up and thought, “The form is good, but how can I improve on this?”
I decided that I wanted some structure to my booklet. A place to keep my list of actions, a place for free-form notes and maybe even a place for a schedule would be all items I would want to incorporate. After some tinkering around with page layout software I came up with a design that suited my desires and put it to the test. It was a single 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper run through my laser printer and then folded up. It worked great.
I dubbed it the micro life organizer; “MiLO” for short. I printed a handful out and gave them to my wife and some select friends for testing. The feedback was positive, they all liked the form and the usefulness of the MiLO! After some feedback, and tweaking to suit my own needs, I decided to roll out the MiLO to the Internet for all to use.
When the MiLO is all folded up it’s 2.75″ wide and 4.25″ tall, only a little bigger than a credit card. It takes about 40 seconds to fold the MiLO into booklet form and all you need to make one is a laser or ink-jet printer that can print to within a quarter inch of the edge of the page.
There are five lined pages, complete with check boxes, two pages are blank for free-form notes and the back page is a week-in-a-view calendar (Sunday - Saturday).
I find that I can easily get a normal week’s usage out of one MiLO, and during really busy weeks I might need a second MiLO by the middle of the week. It’s also setup so if you’re a devotee of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system you can assign a context at the top of each “action” page (for example; @work, @calls, @home, @internet, @someday).
I’m hoping that other people will find the MiLO useful too which is why I’m posting it here. You can download a PDF that you can print out for yourself: Download MiLO2.0.pdf (version 2.0) here.
PLEASE NOTE: If you’re printing this PDF with Windows, make sure to select “Page Scaling = None” on the print options when you print out a MiLO or Acrobat Reader will shrink the MiLO down by a few percent and it will not fold properly. This is one of the biggest frustrations people using Windows will have printing out a MiLO for themselves.
The MiLO is available free of charge for anyone to use. I hope you find it as useful as I do, it’s an easy way to keep a lot of items handy without needing a lot of space to do it. If you find it useful, please leave a comment and let me know!
15 comments December 3rd, 2005
