手帳会議2023

I used a Moleskine 12-Month Weekly Notebook Planner for keeping appointments and a Hobonichi Techo A6 Daily Planner for keeping a minimal daily journal and food log.

  • I found I appreciated compartmentalizing in this way, where (forward-looking) appointments were kept separate from (backward-looking) daily logs. This relieves some of the tension of deciding what belongs where. However, managing two planners was somewhat inconvenient and resulted in not looking at the appointment book for periods of time.

  • I experimented a little with color coding information in the Hobonichi Techo using highlighters to underline movie, book, and TV show titles.

  • I added a simple habit tracker in the Hobonichi’s daily summary pages using highlighters of different colors to represent habits.

  • Smearing became a vexing issue because of the combination of fountain pen ink, coated paper, and left-handed writing.

Highlights of this year’s system:

  • Discovering Tomoe River paper in the Hobonichi Techo
  • Playing with highlighters and color coding information
  • Habit tracking
  • Being consistent about micro-journaling each day
  • Starting to consider the visual appearance of spreads

Next year, I would change:

  • Stop logging food. It became burdensome early on, and wasn’t valuable.
  • Merge planning and micro-journaling into one planner to ease the process by avoiding duplication.
  • Color code to differentiate different types of events or information.
  • Switch to gel pens to mitigate smearing and allow for color coding.
  • Use blotting paper to keep between pages to prevent transfer of ink, keep place, rest writing hand on.
  • Take advantage of sticky notes for marking tentative plans.