I might not be the most organized person, but I try to figure some tricks to my make my life easier now and then. Between 2015 and 2018, I lost a bunch of my beloved notebooks, all around the places that I went. Some of them have been returned to me, thanks to my email address written inside of it, and some are gone missing forever. Anyways, even if the email address trick might be the most basic solutions, I still wanted to add a bit of originality to the process.

NFC enabled Notebook/Everything

Like you might know, in today’s date, most of the smartphones that get on the market are equipped with background NFC tag reading capabilities. That said, people with the newest iPhones don’t need any third party app to read the NFC tags anymore. Knowing that, I decided to equip my trusty Field Notes Notebooks with cheap rewritable NFC stickers that I bought online. Since iOS doesn’t allow its users to write on NFC tags and that I am an iOS user myself, I had to turn onto an Android device to do the job. Luckily, I had an old Samsung Galaxy that was sitting in my desk drawer. I installed the app NFC Tools and follow a couple of steps to create an NFC tag who link to a webpage. I built a simple non-indexed webpage with React that is hosted on my personal server and my notebooks were now equipped with NFC technology. Ultimately, I’d like to make great looking stickers to stick on top of the NFC tags, but for now I’ll go on with some sticky notes! 😉

Yay! App layout

Yay! App Mockup

Yay! NFC post-it

End note

I know that the NFC stickers might not be the most reliable solutions, since older iOS-running devices (pre XR/XS) can’t read them out of the box without a third party app. But I still think that’s a cool little feature to add to your plain non-technological paper notebook! I’d still recommend an email address fallback though.