Janine Thomas

We thought you might like to read the latest unedited reviews we received on Amazon for both the original TABi and our latest A5 TABi RED. We’ve not changed a word and have included every comment we received, good and bad, since the start of the pandemic.

A4 and A5 Original TABi

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing idea
This is a brilliant idea! Starting a degree and will be perfect for notes taking. Bit thicker would be handy but loved so much brought the other size

5.0 out of 5 stars LOVE
I am a bit of an organisation person and love to have things written. This is fabulous. Well worth the money. Lovely quality. Plenty of space. Would definitely recommend

5.0 out of 5 stars A great organised note book
Great book for keeping written information in an organised way. The 3 sizes of pages are all alphabetically listed and easy to use.

4.0 out of 5 stars The more you use it the better it gets!
Takes a little bit of getting used to but the more you use the better it gets.
It is expensive for a notebook and paper quality is not what I hoped for the money but I am enjoying using it and have no issues with bleeding etc.
I think a price of £14.99 would have meant a 5 star review.
I WOULD buy again!

5.0 out of 5 stars really useful, good quality
I love this, its a simple idea but works really well for me. Its nicely made with good quality paper and nice cover. It will last me quite a long time but will buy again.

5.0 out of 5 stars Arrived quickly
Good product

[And just to prove we haven’t doctored these comments in any way – but this is the only negative comment we’ve ever received….]
2.0 out of 5 stars Should be half the price. Stay away
Interesting concept, but way way over priced for what this is, essentially a hundred or so different sized pages, of average quality paper in a very cheap vynal cover. Time will tell if it proves to be an effective note taking system, but I can tell you right now that it is worth nowhere near the listed price. Learn from my mistake.

5.0 out of 5 stars Strange but a use can be found I promise.
I wasn’t to sure at first, but now it’s brilliant.
I have cross stitch patterns coming out my ears,
But now, I have a neat list, and know sizes and threads are to hand very easily.

5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone needs one of these note organisers!
Love it! Love it! Love it! Brilliant way of getting organised.

5.0 out of 5 stars Too flexible but powerfull
It is really a good buy. I would prefer it to have hard covers but I really appreciate it.

New A5 TABi RED
5.0 out of 5 stars much better than I expected
I needed a notebook to sort out all my notes on new proceedures and processes at work, with a way of being easily able to find the right page in the quickest time, this notebook appears to be able to do just that, without the need for random sticky notes . The notebook has a soft feel cover and looks well made, the tabbed pages are a perfect size and will make it so much easier to find notes in a hurry rather than flicking endlessly through a normal notebook, saving me lots of time at work. I like that there is a slide in pocket on the inside of the front cover, handy for those bits of paper that you need to keep but don’t want to have to rewrite onto a page. A handy pen loop will mean I never have to hunt for a pen again. I would have liked a fastener on it of some description to keep it closed and all toghether but that is a minor niggle really, and a large elastic band will do the job. Now to sit down and start filling it in. Overall very happy, not the cheapest notebook out there, but very practical and should hopefully be long lasting too.

5.0 out of 5 stars what a product!
Another one where you wish you had invented it first.
Does what it says – so much easier than a note pad.

So there you have it – genuine online reviews from TABi customers. If you’ve purchased one and haven’t left a review then we would love to hear your thoughts. And if you are still thinking about purchasing your first book then please know that they’re the same price on Amazon, so if you’d rather buy them there, here are the direct links:

TABi A4

TABi A5

TABi A5 RED

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to share your thoughts.

We all hate waste. Right? The planet is suffering from far too much waste and too few resources to replace our unquenchable desire for more. So how does this relate to notebooks?

The first point to make is that paper itself is often considered wasteful where digital alternatives abound. However, where notebooks like TABi are made from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) approved sources, we are ensuring more trees get planted than are cut down. If there wasn’t a commercial reason to grow trees for paper, new trees wouldn’t be economical to plant. So a healthy sustainable market for paper products is perhaps not as bad as some of the pollution caused by the IT industry resulting from the manufacture of hardware as well as the electricity needed throughout their lives (including telecoms and online servers). The more quality paper we use, the more trees that get planted to mop up the CO2 our computers are responsible for.

But there is another point relating to how we use the paper in notebooks that might be considered as wasteful at first glance, and that’s where we decide to start a fresh page rather than try to fill up every square inch of empty space. By leaving empty space, especially the reverse of pages, we end up using more paper for the same volume of notes. The downside to filling up pages with randomly taken notes is that they then become a muddle of unrelated pieces of information where each item becomes harder and harder to find as the density of notes increases. It becomes extra hard to find notes written on the reverse of pages when you’re flicking through them. It also means that related thoughts can easily be pages away from each other (or even notebooks away!). A nightmare if you need one or more notes to help construct the one you’re working on.

TABi resolves this by letting you assign titles to every page, including its reverse, even if it is a continuation page for a previous title (some Tabists use coloured highlighters to link subjects). Instead of squeezing your next note into the first available space, you just find its subject on a previously dedicated tab, and then use the next available space on that page. Or you start another page with a continuation arrow on its tab if you need to. So you’re still squeezing notes into empty spaces, but now you’re also categorising them for fast retrieval later.

The biggest benefit of a TABi, or a digital notebook come to that, is the time and effort it saves in finding your notes again. But there is also a benefit in having your previous notes about that topic immediately to hand on the same page where you are crafting your current note. The one potentially wasteful downside is starting a fresh subject on a new page, but then not being able to fill the page with enough notes. This means it’s a jot, and we recommend you make jots on the set of pages with tabs at the bottom right corner of your TABi where they’re always quick and easy to find. At least you’ve then only got a small number of pages to search for a note you know is just a jot and didn’t warrant a whole page.

I am sometimes asked why I invented TABi. The answer is probably not as obvious as you might have thought. Yes of course I needed to find my notes quickly, so using a three-dimensional array of tabs allowed me to write a tab for every page where a traditional one-dimensional set of tabs on the right of the pages wouldn’t have given me enough tabs to index enough pages. The real reason I needed TABi was because my notes were chaotic. Nothing related one note with the next other than it happened in a chronological order. What I needed was an additional clue as to where in that sequence a particular note could be found.

Had I been a neat and organised person perhaps using a tablet or laptop to record my notes, then I would have no need for something like TABi. And if I had wanted to stick to paper as an organised person, I would probably have become a convert to bullet journals or some other type of indexing discipline. But my character is disorganised and undisciplined by nature. I strongly admire people who create order out of their lives, but I’m not one of them.

So I invented TABi to let me STAY DISORGANISED, and not to force me to use a structured way of storing my notes. TABi lets me write tabs to give me, and only me, a clue about what’s on that page. But the order in which I use pages, the notes I make on them, and what I write on their tabs is completely unplanned – because I like it that way and I don’t have to change my habits. Unstructured information hiding in my notes has received a sort of structure by encouraging me to invent a keyword or two to sum up what my notes on that page are about… and that’s all I need to do to help me quickly find them again.

TABi lets me remain chaotic but for the effect of that lifestyle choice to become less problematic. For people like me, it’s not an organisational tool, it’s a disorganisational tool! Amazingly organised people also love it because it helps them become even more organised. But the challenge for TABi is how we make disorganised people aware it exists… when by definition they’re not the sort of people who seek ways to become more organised!

All ideas gratefully received.

by Jerry Horwood, TABi inventor and founder.

Most of us lead pretty complicated lives. We juggle work, social, play, relaxation and panic as best we can to achieve successes ranging from survival (ideally) to ecstatic amazement at our achievements – and all points between. Rarely does everything neatly fall into place precisely when it’s meant to. My life is no different from most, a chaotic combination of serendipity and attempts at using structures and disciplines to prevent me becoming overwhelmed. I muddle through.

When I had a proper job, I had tasks assigned to me, I developed To-Do lists and I adopted the Urgent/Important prioritisation matrix to decide which tasks to tackle first:

… which you can read more about here. But there was a catch. My lists and prioritisation techniques were defined by time. When should I do what? And in order to do most of the stuff in my lists, I needed information… and a lot of that information was in handwritten notes, recorded in the most haphazard way possible – sequentially. One after the other with nothing relating one note to the next except that it had been made after the one before it.

So I had goals and tasks defined by priority, and information resources to help me achieve them defined by the unrelated factor of when they had been created. Actually, it was worse than that. If I could relate a note to a date, then I had a chance of finding it again if I could recall that date or had a diary index system (like bullet journals perhaps). But like most people who don’t have the patience to create a bullet journal and who have decided not to use digital media to store notes (which automatically records dates and indexation), my notes were made one after the other. A note about a meeting might be followed by a mindmap, followed by a shopping list, followed by a jotted phone number. The only thing relating one to the next was the completely irrelevant juxtaposition of what I was doing with my notebook before I made it, and then what notes I made after it. My ability to find a note was defined by my memory of what I was doing before and after I’d made it. When I searched for it, my brain was constantly deciding ‘was the note I want made before or after the one I’m currently looking at? Should I therefore head backwards or forwards to find it?’ Crazy!

Why did we all put up with this? Answer… because it was simple and we’d universally got used to it.

Which is why I invented TABi. Suddenly I was more productive. My notes might still be made in chronological order (although I love using the project sets on the bottom row to cluster stuff I know I’m going to use a lot), but the relationship between each of them is no longer significant. My chaotic life can continue to be reflected in a series of randomly made notes, but my ability to find them again is no longer controlled by the order in which they are taken.

by Jerry Horwood, TABi founder

Many of us persist in using paper notebooks, despite the constant lure of upgrading to storing and retrieving our notes in digital devices. There’s something about writing which endures in our collective psyche. And there’s something about buying, holding and using our notebooks which is a very personal experience. So what are the factors we consider when we select our next notebook – assuming they’re not provided free of charge by our employers and we get little choice other than possibly its size?

It seems not many of us think particularly rationally when we buy notebooks. And why would we? Until now, pretty much the only practical factors affecting our purchasing decisions have been to do with just size and price. Once we’ve decided on these – and size tends to relate to the degree of portability we require – our foremost consideration is about its appearance. This then breaks down into two categories. Most importantly the cover – its colour, design and texture, and then lower down the scale of importance, the quality of the paper. Add a few other bits and bobs such as pen holders, bookmarks, elastic straps and wallets, and chances are that the notebook we decide to buy is the one with the cover we want others to see and judge us by – thereby suggesting you really don’t judge the notebook by its cover, you judge its owner. In other words, the choice of which notebook to buy has always been largely emotional rather than rational.

And then along comes TABi. It’s probably the first time EVER that people are being asked to consider not just how they take notes, but also how they find them. Any rational decision-making for purchasing the best notebook to suit your needs has previously only related to MAKING notes, and never before to FINDING them. For the first time in the history, there’s a whole new rational component to consider in your decision about which notebook to select. Your emotional impulse about which cover to buy will now compete with a new dimension with your rational judgement. You’ll now also need to decide:- ‘Does it matter if you can easily find your notes again?’ If your answer is ‘no it doesn’t’, then carry on selecting the cover design that suits your mood. But if it does, welcome to the Tab it Habit!

Oh and don’t worry. In time we’ll produce a wonderful range of exciting cover designs. But for now, we’re concentrating on making you look really smart and cool… when your TABi’s open.

We’ve had a number of users sending in great ideas about ways they’ve discovered to get the most out of their treasured TABi. So here are a few you might find useful too. Do keep sending us feedback!:

“When I start a new page for a meeting, I don’t know if it’s going to fill a whole page. So I just put the date at the top and only write a title if I fill up the page. Otherwise I can assume the date means FROM rather than ON, and continue to write notes on it so I don’t waste paper. At least I still have a clue where my notes are, and I can still write a short title or two if I want when the page is full.”

“I sometimes use Meeting pages much like Project pages, but for notes about subjects I don’t think I’m going to need many pages for like ideas for blog posts or phone numbers. So I don’t write a date on their tabs, just a title.”

“I love using highlighters to link topics together. It not only makes my TABi more fun to use, it really does help my eye jump to what I’m looking for especially when the book is filling up.”

“I’ve seen people trying to pick up the corner of their tabs to open it. That makes the tabs curl up. If you hold the tab with your thumb and bend the back cover back, the tabs won’t curl.”

“The way the cover wraps around the spine doesn’t allow thicker pens to be inserted. So while it looks great, I’ve found the best way to attach a pen is by putting the clip on the inside and the pen then lies neatly on the outside. Perhaps one day TABi will include pen holders in the cover” – Great idea. We’re looking into it! The TABi Team.