Circa Balanced Life Stepped Project Notebook Cover

Update: It looks like this item has been discontinued by Levenger

The Circa Balanced Life Stepped Project Notebook caught my attention recently when I was looking through some of the new products on the Levenger site.  You will see why the unique format for this notebook can be a life saver for people with multiple lists, projects, or contacts they are working with.  Lucky for me the kind folks at Levenger sent over a complimentary sample of the Stepped Project Notebook for this review.

The “Grass Green” Cover of the Circa Balanced Life Stepped Project Notebook

The Circa Balanced Life Stepped Project Notebook concept was created by professional organizer, Julie Morgenstern.  The version you are looking at is the junior size  that measures 6 3/4″ x  8 3/4″.  It uses the standard 3/4″ Levenger Circa discs and has a translucent plastic cover that lets you see through to the grass green colored cover page.  In addition to being the Levenger Circa format that allows you to rearrange pages, the paper quality in this version is also 100g fountain pen friendly.  I did a quick test when I got this notebook, and the paper is definitely fountain pen friendly.  The ink didn’t show through to the other side of the page at all, which is essential for me in a notebook like this.  So by now you probably want to know what is so special about this project planning notebook, huh?  Well check out the next picture and I’ll do my best to describe it.

Circa Balanced Life Stepped Project Notebook Inside

When you open up the Circa Balanced Life Stepped Project Notebook you are presented with 12 ruled sets of 5 different sized sheets of paper.  Each of them has a header labeled “Project” where you can identify the name of your project.  The 5 different stepped sheets of paper are all 5 1/2″ wide but each is a different height as follows:

• 4 1/2″
• 5 1/2″
• 6 1/2″
• 7 1/2″
• 8 1/2″

The sheets are different heights so that they overlap each other, but leave just enough of the top of the sheet under it so that you can see the title of 5 projects at one time.   I’m sure that most of you are like me and you usually have more than one thing going on at a time.  It might be a project or lists that you are working with, and this notebook layout gives you the most optimal and space efficient layout for up to 5 items at once.

Before you start writing in this, you will probably want to give some thought to which projects or lists will require the most writing so you can use the different size sheets accordingly.  This layout has definitely allowed me to feel like it is easier to multi-task and keep a bit more organized.

I’ll need to work with it a bit more before I can be totally comfortable with it in terms of knowing how to manage my work flow, but I definitely think it has a lot of potential.  The only issue that I see at this point though is that Levenger doesn’t seem to sell refills for this yet.  Definitely check out the Circa Balanced Life Stepped Project Notebook if you struggle with keeping multiple lists or projects organized.  Thanks again to the folks at Levenger for providing this sample.  Maybe they are just trying to get me addicted to this format now too, they definitely know what they are doing.

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©2015, Brian Greene. All rights reserved.