Punk publishers in the 70s and productivity bloggers in the 2000s never had much to say to each other, but they landed on the exact same folded sheet of paper for the exact same reasons.
Zines have been the domain of punks, sci-fi obsessives, and anyone with something to say and no patience for waiting on a publisher since the 1970s. Punk Globe, one of the earliest and most cited punk zines, was distributed as photocopied pages folded together starting in 1977. The riot grrrl movement of the early 90s ran on the same production method: a copy shop, a stapler if you had one, and hand-to-hand distribution at shows.
The one-sheet, one-cut fold that makes an eight-page book without any binding at all became a favorite specifically because it removes the stapler from the equation. No stapler means no equipment cost, no jamming, and a print run that scales down to a single copy without looking cheap for it. For a scene built on "make it yourself, right now, with what's in the room," that's not a small advantage.
David Allen publishes Getting Things Done, kicking off a productivity movement that treated capturing every stray thought on paper as a discipline, not a chore.
Merlin Mann introduces the "Hipster PDA" on his blog 43 Folders: a stack of index cards held together with a binder clip, built explicitly as a GTD-friendly reaction to expensive, complicated electronic organizers.
PocketMod launches: a free web tool that lays out to-do lists, calendars, and notes onto a single printable sheet, folded with one cut into an eight-panel organizer. Boing Boing covers it that September as a "pocket-sized DIY customizable paper organizer." It's the exact same fold zines had been using for decades, now filling a shirt pocket instead of a distro table.
Nobody in the GTD blogosphere was citing punk zine tradition, and nobody making minicomics in 1994 was thinking about task management software. The two scenes arrived at the identical physical object independently, because the fold solves the same problem for anyone who has it: turn one sheet of paper into a small book, for free, right now, with nothing but scissors.
That's really the whole appeal in one sentence, whether you're printing a four-page comic or a week of to-do lists. The format doesn't care what's on the page.
PagePacker was originally built by Aaron Hillegass at Big Nerd Ranch in the early 2000s, the same stretch of years when GTD, 43 Folders, and PocketMod were all happening. It automates the exact fold this page is about, for either audience: load in comic pages for a zine, or a week's worth of task lists for a paper planner, and it lays them out correctly for the same one-cut fold that's been serving both crowds since before either had a name for what they were doing.