Where do you do your best thinking?
In the shower? Out running? Walking the dog?
Probably not whilst staring at your mobile phone.
Ingenious Ink creates distraction-free notepads with purpose. These help guide you through decision-making challenges. They're like you're favourite productivity app, just without the distracting notifications.
Our story
Ingenious Ink started on Kickstarter in 2016 under the name PaperThink. After a trip to Cambridge for work meetings I found myself wandering around stationery stores to kill time. Several of these stores had paper pads with interesting designs to fill in printed on them. They were fine, if a bit big, but I thought I could do better.
A few weeks later the PaperThink campaign was born seeking to raise £90 to print a few hundred notepads from printer I'd worked with for several years. The campaign raised £1,927 and over 1,000 notepads were shipped across the globe. Ingenious Ink was back on Kickstarter the next year with 15 different notepad designs. It returned in 2018 with themed notepad sets.
In 2019 we returned with more themed sets and planner refills. We also started listing our items in Amazon.
In 2020 we moved warehouse to help us to get orders out quicker and expanded our themed sets range. We redesigned a few of our most popular notepads and have a few new ones in the pipeline.
Day planners
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Walk
The walk planner lets you schedule your time in two hour blocks, colour coded to help you work out when you have the most energy in the day.
If you’re a morning person, don’t try to do much after 9pm. -
Run
We created Run Agenda for people who have full-on days who need to be reminded to take a break. Schedule your hourly appointments, then schedule what breaks you'll take in between.
Perfect for those new to work-from-home who forget to take coffee breaks without co-workers around.
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Zeno
Pair text with an image to focus on your chosen product, collection, or blog post. Add details on availability, style, or even provide a review.
Task planners
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Paperthink
Don’t look at your to do list first thing in the morning. You’ll get decision fatigue before your coffee has cooled.
Write yourself a priority list before bed so that you know your goals for the next day. -
Task Matrix
Struggling to work out what to focus on next?
Plot all your to do tasks on our Task matrix based on urgency and importance, then follow the instructions based on which box they ended up in. -
Give Me Five
Decision paralysis?
Write down all the things you have to do, then pick the five you are ACTUALLY going to do.
The rest of the list becomes the ‘avoid at all costs’ list until you have finished the five goals you picked.
Mini planners
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Paperthink mini
Don’t look at your to do list first thing in the morning. You’ll get decision fatigue before your coffee has cooled.
Write yourself a priority list before bed so that you know your goals for the next day. -
Frog
“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” - Mark Twain
Frogs are tasks that you’ve been putting off for a long time which somehow never get around to.
"I must do that tomorrow" you think. Just as you thought yesterday, and the day before that.
Keep track of your frogs and how old they’re getting. -
Task Breaker
Big projects are hard to make a start on.
Keep breaking down goals until they're arranged into manageable subtasks using this dinky little notepad.
Ideally all tasks you undertake should be less than an hour, but we know that some of them will need a much larger chunk of time set aside to make progress
Trackers
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Week Focus
Hold yourself accountable to the changes you decide to make.
If you decide you're going to focus on healthy eating this week, write down what you did each day to work towards that goal.
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168 Notepad
You have 168 hours in the week. Just like everyone else.
Work out where you spend your time over the course of a week.
Be honest. If you spend three hours getting distracted on social media, at least it's on record and you're in a position to do something about it. -
Habit Builder
Habits take time to bed in. Focus on the minimum effort version first.
You're more likely to lace up your trainers for a run if you only have to do 10 minutes rather than 10k.
(Although if you do 10k - that's awesome)
Reflection
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Life Audit
Feeling rubbish?
Score your life in ten different categories to pinpoint why and how you could improve.
Maybe you need to go the gym more, go to evening classes, or just have a massive cards against humanity session with your friends (no judgement). -
Swapper
Identify three things you like doing and work out how to do them more. Then identify three things you don’t like doing and work out how to do them less. Sometimes small changes make big differences.We've redesigned this one into a notepad rather than a set of cards.
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Fail Better
We all fail, but some of us learn from our mistakes better than others. Dust yourself off, address your failure, stop beating yourself up and work out what was actually within your control and is something you could do differently next time.
Goals
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Finisher
You’ve picked a challenge for this year and there's a lot to do!
Don’t get overwhelmed, break down the big goals until you’re left with a little task that you can get started on today.
Worry about the others later. -
Goal Compass
For those who are in a niche field where the path to success isn't obvious. Work out what success means you you by answering the following left-field questions. Repeat for different careers if you're multi-talented.
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Smarter
You want to set yourself goals. Great. Have you checked that these goals are the best designed they could be? Use the SMARTER method to break down these goals and interrogate them to make sure you're not setting yourself up to fail.
Teamwork
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Meetings
Plan your meetings ahead of schedule to keep them on track.
Note down specific questions consider possible solution in advance.
Collect items from the whole team to build the meeting around the group. -
Batch
Right place. Right time. Right task.
Some tasks require you to be in certain places or with certain people. These conditions can act as a roadblock as setting them up takes time and effort.
Batch encourages you to organise tasks with similar conditions onto the same list. Collect tasks over the course of a week and then breeze through them in one go. -
Brainstorm
The key to having good ideas is to have many ideas.
Want to come up with better ideas? Decide on a number of ideas to come up with and don’t discount any until you've hit your target number. Brainstorm notepad has a set number of slots that you HAVE to fill before you're allowed to pass judgement.
Picking an endurance challenge? Let's see ‘ultimate camel riding’ alongside 'marathon' and 'cycling'.
Personal organisation
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Groceries
This grocery list is designed to help you decide what to buy based on what you plan on eating over the course of the week.
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Finances
This notepad is based on the 50-20-30 rule. This states that 50% of your income should go towards everyday living expenses, 20% should go towards long term saving or paying off debt, and 30% should go towards non-essential spending. This notepad asks you to make a plan each month or week as to where you're spending is going to go, and then to write down what actually happened. It uses a balance sheet system to force you to account for every coin. If you spent more than you earned, did the extra cash come from savings or credit cards?
Maxi day planners
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Week
Get an overview of your week and plan ahead.
This notepad organises your days into named parts of the day, morning, early, late, afternoon .etc.
Different people divide up the day at different times so this makes it easier to jot down events that are still a bit up in the air. -
Paperthink Agenda
Don’t look at your to do list first thing in the morning. You’ll get decision fatigue before your coffee has cooled.
Write yourself a priority list before bed so that you know your goals for the next day.
Maxi task plannesr
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Task Matrix
Struggling to work out what to focus on next?
Plot all your to do tasks on our Task matrix based on urgency and importance, then follow the instructions based on which box they ended up in. -
Task bucket
Notes and studying
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Book Notes
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Lecture Refills
