Back when everything was still paper, I'd go get a couple of those 29 cent report binders with the metal 2-hole stays that 5th graders get at Walgreen's. In one of them, I'd put all my travel logistics - photocopies of Thomas Cook pages, hotel confirmations, etc. In the other one, I'd put photocopies of various guidebook pages organized by day, with maybe a couple of hand-typed pages with bullet notes of key items. For a 21-day trip to Austria, Switzerland, and Spain in 1993, it was about 60 sheets of paper, double-sided. As I left cities, I threw pages away. Then, I'd make a second single-sided photocopy at leave it at home, where somebody could fax me 3-4 pages to a hotel if my original got damaged.

Now, with many of my travel resources being online, I load stuff into MS Word documents for each city, with a lot of cut/paste and some transcribing from hard copy. Train timetables for the routes I want are at sites like hafas.de and get summarized into an Excel spreadsheet unless they are very complicated. That stuff goes in my Handspring (I use a MS Word/Excel viewer called Documents to Go which is nifty) which goes in my jacket pocket. I have combined the two binders into one, that's maybe 15 pages for a week with with copies of maps and walking tours and the like in addition to my confirmation letters.

If I'm going to be in a city for more than 2-3 days, I'll spring for one of those $6 laminated city maps that fold up and fit in my jacket pocket and have a subway map included.