A Woman Packs For A Week (Monica Ricci)

Monica Ricci, professional organizer, shows how the other sex does it. This is a good comparison to the last post - Tim Ferris packing for a trip to Maui - because it is for a week also, but her trip includes business and pleasure, so I think that is a bit tougher. Here is an example of her minimalist packing aptitude.

Your Life. Organized. : Tips for Packing Light: "I left Atlanta on Sunday and I come home next Sunday so I'm out of town for a full week with only a carry-on bag and my purse. (LOVE this thing!) My seatmate on the plane thought it was amazing that I hadn't checked a bag, so I thought I'd share a few tips for packing light...
This is what was in my rolling carry-on bag. There's the large Eagle Creek Pack-It Folder which holds all my clothes (except the jeans, t-shirt and sandals I was wearing when I took the photo), the three smaller Eagle Creek zipper pouches which hold my underwear, my non-liquid toiletries, and my cords and chargers.

Next to those you can see my little blue cosmetics case and my regulation quart-size Ziploc bag of liquid and gel toiletries, my orange pashmina wrap and baseball hat. Below those, there's my curling iron and two pairs of shoes. Look closely and you'll see my sneakers are stuffed with socks and a sports bra."

Plus, she added in her laptop and cooling mat. Follow the link to more pics and tips on this packing post.

Great job. A week with only a carry-on roller bad and a purse - and she's a woman!

A Man Packs For A Week (Tim Ferris)

From the Blog of Tim Ferris, who is packing for Maui in this post. This is much more my style than was the Nancy Novogard packing post. I will never be the one who inter-wraps my clothes with tissue, then places them in recycled dry cleaner's bags to reduce wrinkling. One of the many ways in which I will disappoint Martha.

» How to Travel the World with 10 Pounds or Less (Plus: How to Negotiate Convertibles and Luxury Treehouses): "I practice what I’ll label the BIT method of travel: Buy It There.

If you pack for every contingency—“better bring the hiking books in case we go hiking, better bring an umbrella in case it rains, better bring dress shoes and slacks in case we go to a nice restaurant,” etc.—carrying a mule-worthy load is inevitable. I’ve learned to instead allocate $50-200 per trip to a “settling fund,” which I use to buy needed items once they’re 100% needed. This includes cumbersome and hassle items like umbrellas and bottles of sunscreen that love to explode. Also, never buy if you can borrow. If you’re going on a bird watching trip in Costa Rica, you don’t need to bring binoculars — someone else will have them."

He follows this bit of wisdom with a video and packing list explaining everything in this photo, why he is packing it, and where to get most of the pieces. This is minimal packing.
I am wondering if he has another pair of shoes? My guess is that this pile is sans a traveling outfit, which he is wearing for the plane ride there. This is for a week long trip. There must be more shoes . . .

Summary of Online Note-Taking Programs

Here is a good summary of several of the leading online information collecting programs from Web Worker Daily, via Lifehacker.

Web Worker Daily » 7 Apps for Online Note-Taking «:

"If you’re like most of us, you deal with piles of unstructured information every day: phone numbers, ideas for later consideration, snippets of information from the web, recipes, phone messages…the list is endless. For the web worker, moving this information into an online notebook can be an attractive proposition. Rather than tie yourself to one computer, or even one operating system, you can get at your notes from anywhere that has a web browser handy. Not surprisingly, there are a fair number of choices in this arena these days.

For this roundup, I stuck to online applications that let you save free form notes in some sort of organized fashion for later use."

The 7 apps summarized are:

Google Notebook

mynoteIT

Notefish

Notezz!

Stikkit

Yahoo! Notepad

Zoho Notebook

The consensus among Lifehacker, and Web Worker Daily and its commenters is that Google Notebook and Zoho Notebook are the front runners.

Organize Your Information In One Place

It all started with bookmarks in the Internet Explorer toolbar. A way to keep track of my favorite sites. Then bookmarks were not enough as I started researching projects on the web. I was printing out the articles to save them, so I had the full versions at my fingertips, without having to search through a bookmarked web page.

Next I started using Evernote, a great free product for clipping web articles with the touch of a button while I surfed, and the ability to add notes, reminders, etc. Evernote was just the ticket, until I started traveling more and using a laptop in addition to a desktop, in which case I had a different set of notes on each machine. Well, Google to the rescue, with a type of online Evernote-style product called Notebook.

Official Google Blog: Note this: "Note this" 5/15/2006
Posted by Bay-Wei Chang, Senior Research Scientist

"Search is all about finding the answers you need. Unfortunately, some kinds of questions--like where you should stay and what you should do on your Hawaiian vacation, or what kind of digital camera you should buy, or what the latest treatments for arthritis are--can't always be answered in one sitting, or by visiting one site.

That's why we built Google Notebook--to give you an online 'notebook' where you can organize all your research, add personal notes to it, and share it with others. Google Notebook surfs along quietly with you as you browse, letting you clip and annotate whatever text, images, and links that help answer your question, all without ever leaving the web page you're on."

If this sounds like something you'd like to try, you can find it here

There is a Firefox extension that puts a "note this" button on your toolbar for super simple copying. This is a perfect addition to the wired traveler's online toolbox. Spreading the Google Gospel - Amen.