2024 Techo Kaigi – My planner and journal lineup

Jan. 1 is New Year’s Day to the rest of the world, but to us planner nerds it’s the day to kick off all our big plans for our planners.

2023 Planner Review

• Main planner: I started this in a Midori Hibino and loved it because I like the A6 page for a daily mind map of to do’s combined with space to take notes. But there were problems: I sometimes needed more than a page of notes and I sometimes didn’t need any. The paper was cream, which I also didn’t love. And the book, as cute as it is, was too thick to carry everywhere, especially while traveling, which I have to do all the time for work. About 2/3 of the way through the year I switched into a Hobonichi A6 and stopped taking notes in my planner—this has been great. I got a Bible size plotter and now take work notes in that.
• Life book: second year doing this in the Hobonichi Cousin and it was great. It’s a brain dump book for anything and everything, and I used the dates as an index. In the fall I was inspired by Megan Rhiannon to section off part of the pages for dated use and it’s been a great tweak to the system so far.
• Anti Social Social Journal: this was an unplanned and unexpected success. I kept up with it all year consistently. It was therapeutic and I love the finished artifact—a record of all my activities and time spent with loved ones over the year, as well as a journal where I did some serious introspection.
• Team planner: while I manage my own individual to do list in my main planner, this year I had to manage a growing team at work so I started the year with a planner dedicated to that and chose the PAL planner. I’ve determined I have a real need for a planner dedicated to this purpose, but the PAL planner wasn’t it. The layout is cool and different but not functional enough for this specific use.
• 5-year journal: I use a Hobonichi A6 5 year for this. 2023 was my second year and though I missed some days I still love it. It was fun this year to be able to look back on last year.
• Language practice book: I experimented this year with writing a daily entry in a Hobonichi A6 Planner in Portuguese, and failed. Work got too busy and I gave up. This is why I had a spare A6 Hobonichi to move into for my main planner in the last few months.
• Hiking journal: I dedicated a Hobonichi weeks to this because in 2022 I started hiking every single week and was writing about each experience in a Hobonichi Weeks. I carried the practice over into 2023 and the journal itself as a system worked great, but work and work travel pretty much hijacked my entire year so I didn’t hike as much, leaving the journal more empty than not.

2023 Planner Lineup

• Main planner: I’m going to continue in a Hobonichi A6 Techo for daily to do list management. I’ve also borrowed an idea for expense tracking from May at Yoseka and will incorporate that into the annual pages.

• Life book: keeping the same use case as 2023, this time in a Hobonichi A5 HON.
• Anti Social Social Journal: I loved this practice so much in 2023 that I already started in a 2024 Weeks. I know more about myself this year and set slightly more ambitious goals in terms of dedicating time to family and friends.
• Team planner: I’m going to try this out in the new Take a Note B6 weekly planner which has a grid design and vertical weekly layout that I think solves a bunch of problems I had with the PAL.
• 5-year journal: will continue into my third year in it.
• NEW – Self care journal: my social journal was so helpful and successful that I’m going to take the same approach to self care, broadly defined. In a dedicated Hobonichi Weeks this includes taking care of my home, investing time in personal hobbies and creative pursuits, and setting time aside to decompress. I think I neglected myself for work this year which had a ripple effect on many things in my life, so if I’m going to set a weekly goal for myself this one’s important. I’ve already stated this too, and I love it so far.
• RE-INTRODUCED – health journal: in 2021 and 2022 I tracked a lot of health stuff in a Hobonichi Weeks but stopped in 2023 because the tracking felt burdensome and I wasn’t learning anything new about my body anymore. But I realized 2 things this year: that there are actually still things I want to track and no longer have a good place to do that, and the reason I started to feel my old health journals were tedious was because I was tracking for the sake of tracking and it was just too much information with not a lot of value. So in 2024 I’m bringing it back but only logging notable things that are functional/actionable, and I won’t put pressure on myself to fill the pages.

There it is! Multiple planners and notebooks may seem like a lot to manage for some, but for me it helps with focus and also makes looking things up much easier. More on that here.

Happy planning, and happy new year!