These tiny, stiff Paper cards are my friends. Measuring 3 Inches by 5 inches, they are small, but mighty. Lined, or “ruled” on one side, blank white on the other, the index cards find the perfect use in shopping lists, message notes that may be propped up, encouraging notes in kids’ lunch bags, executive directives paperclipped to documents, and so much more.

For me, currently, they mirror the high school term paper of long ago— tons of citations, references cited on one side, text on the other. Handwritten.

It’s a Pain.

The online articles and reports I try to cut and paste as notes, bypassing the cards. Fairly challenging to arrange. I wonder if I will resort to the 3×5 cards for those, as well. I consider whether the index cards will even work when at last I will need to organize them into some semblance of order.

I would need to spread the the hundreds of cards across a land mass the length of California.

In an effort to help distinguish among multiple articles written by the same author, I weigh whether or not to use colored index cards. Instead, I choose to color-code them myself with highlighter pens.

It’s a pain, but at least I won’t be stuck with leftover cards of random rainbow hues.

So far, my plastic-snap cases, an inch or so wide, overflow with cards. I upgrade to recipe card boxes, about four inches wide. I’ll need a few.

It’s a pain, lugging around the boxes in a tote bag in this high tech age, but that’s how it’s going to roll, apparently. This will grow into my largest research project yet, and my little index cards will be assisting every step of the way.

Have you used these?

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