There are two sides, separated by a void. There is no middle ground between. The title of this post will either have meaning to you or not, and that will depend on which side of the void you reside.
If you’re a list-writing, journaling, planning kinda person, if you’ve explored the online circus of delights that cater to folk like us, you’ll understand the mental-quick-sand-iness of it all.
Alternatively you might live a hundred lifetimes and never know such wonders exist.
Folks in the latter group: click away now. Anywhere. Just away. You won’t like this.
I’m going to geek about diaries. If this isn’t your jam, click away now. I wasn’t joking about the quicksand. It’s very real. (In a metaphorical sense)
A while back I happened on the system of bullet journaling.
As a long time list maker and glutton for stationery, this appealed to me on a number of levels, and for almost two years this system served me well.
This Leuchtturm 1917 book was my travelling companion, my mental back up, home to a hundred post-its and the landing place for my brain dumps for longer than a usual diary, and I like how it provided a home for the lists that would otherwise be swirling inside my head.
But before moving forward, we need to rewind…
It was in the quest to reduce the anxiety-inducing levels of chaos I had going on in my life that lead me to discover bullet journaling. It’s when I first encountered these youtube rabbit holes: these whole communities of planners, people with planners, people planning their planners. A number of these folk have planners to organise the videos they make about organising their planners on youtube. It’s pleasingly meta and terrifyingly quicksandy all at once. That is why this is a blog post, not a video.
As I neared the final pages of my trusty turquoise book I revisited some of the many channels devoted to listing, journaling, planning, and the like. Because it had been a while I was ready to reconsider my listing and planning options. I was ready to hop back in the quicksand.
The that thing I missed when bullet journalling was having a readily fill-in-able set up for the months ahead. (There are ways around this – downloadable-printables, suggested hand-drawn-layouts, and more. But in two years of trial n error none of these gelled with me.)
Now it was time for me to re-explore a more structured planner route for a while, to find out if I could mash up a hybrid of the bits of all the systems I like.
Back into the rabbit hole of youTube.
In the intervening years the rabbit hole had become much deeper, much more rabbitty.
[There are squillions of videos devoted to this challenge: the quest for the system that fits an ever-changing, ever-busying life. Deep down we all know there isn’t one solution, but we enjoy the quest too much to stop. Because of all the reasons.]
I emerged bleary-brained some long while later, ready to invest more than I’d usually consider because this could be the ‘Neo of planners’, the one true solution to any papery chaos and confusion. Also, these particular journals have an almost cult like following – and I needed to know why!
Unavailable in the shops here, I ordered my first Hobonichi planner through Etsy (the 6 month: July-December version) in order to dip my metaphorical toes.
There is no limit to how much you can spend in Hobonichi stuff: all the special covers and stickers and doodads that can go along with. I didn’t. I used a clear plastic cover intended for another this-size book & a postcard of a peacock to make it pretty.
The book itself? I’m kinda sold on it. I mean, enough to try a year long experiment and see if I can make this fit. These are my impressions after a few months…
Hobonichi Pros & Cons
Pro: Paper
One of the features that gets folk all ravey about the Hobonichi books is the super thin Tomoe River paper. It’s crazy thin, so much that a book with a year’s worth of daily, weekly, monthly, and other pages is still under an inch thick, but this paper isn’t so flimsy it tears and lets bleed through. What the what?
If I’m honest – that in itself is what almost sold me the first book. Then there’s the other big thing:
Pro: All the options
Daily pages with a time line for appointments, weekly spreads with hourly timelines on each day, monthly spreads with a good size box for each day. And the year with 6 months to a spread. Too much? almost certainly! But until I give it a good thorough try I won’t know which part is superfluous, so 2018 is my year of discovery.
Pro: Box grids.
I’m very much into box grids instead of lined paper. I have a dislike of lined paper which gives me flashbacks to school, but boxes and dot grids have a multifunctionality that appeals to me. It’s a yin/yang with my outside-the-edge-what-edges?-?-inherent-inner-discord-and-anarchy.
They are in an unimposingly faint print too.
Con: so many the options
4 months into my current half-year book, I find I’m still bouncing lists chaotically between the weekly and the daily pages. One will win out over the other before long, cos I’m stubborn by nature and hate to write the same thing in more than one place.
Right now I’m enjoying having a page that ‘belongs to today’ in order to list what I’ve got to do. But what doesn’t get done today has to float unfinished in the near past, and that unsettles me a bit. The Bullet Journal system made more allowance for floaty ‘to do soon’ lists. I think this will figure itself out into a system before long. I’m nothing if not inventive!
So……
I have two new planners lined up for 2018: My first full year long version for 2018 A5 size Hobonichi Cousin which I anticipate will become list central and the Hobonichi Weeks which is a year full but without the daily pages so it’s just regular diary size and can travel about with me. This one’s also got dozens of blank pages at the back which I plan to utilise for the bullet journal style lists. (BuJo folks call these collections, which is just gratingly quaint for me. As is BuJo. I’m absurdly sensitive to words and things, but also lazy and will take the easier typing option.)
Moving along…
Look! I got me a new pencil case. It’s predecessor (which is almost as old as me) has been retired to box of sentimental nonsense. The part of me that associates ‘new pencil case = new start’ did not leave when I finished school.. That was the best bit of school!
Are you a planner person? … I figure if you’ve read this far either you’re already a lister, a journaller or a planner of some kind, or you’re considering it as an option. What’s you book of choice? I’d love to know!
These new books of mine are part of a larger getting my ducks lined up strategy.
They’re coupled with another new found interest – the Getting Things Done methods of David Allen. I also discovered him somewhere in my rabbithole adventures and was instantly hooked, I listen to GTD podcasts, I bought his book which systematically working through.
The essence of this system is the idea the human mind is better used for thinking things up than stuffing full of things to remember. If we have an alternate, external way to store all the what-I-gotta-do-next things all that brain-RAM can work more efficiently too.
These are going to lead me into 2018 with my act far more together than ever before!
I know it’s popular to joke ‘things won’t change though’ in a self-deprecating way, but I really feel this becomes a self fulfilling ‘see – I told you I’d screw up again’ and I just don’t have time to spin in circles like that any more.
It took getting really ill a few months ago, have most the time and energy sucked out of my days to make me realise I need to stop floundering about and get organised. I don’t know how it’s going to take shape yet, but I do know that it will. For now that’s all that matters.
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While I reside on the edge of digital geekfulness where I appreciate I nicely formulated spreadsheet, some tidy code, but all too easily get weighed down in flipping between fonts pixel to pixel tweaks, and then endless subdivided minutiae.
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