I go through this exercise yearly. Or have done so three times now. When I need a new planner I go through the online stores I usually buy from, and various companies I know make planners plus looking at some blogs to see what’s available. And then I’m usually left with a rather small list of options that would work for me.

Mostly because I want month, week and daily pages without any duplicates and a vertical weekly layout.

This year I had four options to consider:

• Hobonichi
• Travelers Notebook
• Plotter
• The binder I bought and tested out this summer

The binder didn’t work out for me, and Plotter is out the window because the binder experiment didn’t work out plus that Plotter don’t shit outside North America.

I usually always buy the Travelers Notebook refills no matter what, because they’re not that expensive, just in case and I change my mind. But I decided to go with Hobonichi again. The main reason I didn’t pick Travelers Notebook is that they don’t open flat and stay open plus the feeling of multiple refills is much less nice than a proper notebook.

Other than that they’re mostly the same. Going with TN would most likely be a much smaller and more compact setup as well.

For the rest of the notebooks I looked at, all of them either had the wrong weekly layout, or would mean that I had at least duplicate monthly pages. And I just don’t want to deal with “where do I have them again?”

Would love to see more contenders to make this choice a bit more challenging next year. Because this year and the last time I properly looked into it I was left with a list of:

• What I currently use (Hobonichi)
• What I used before that (Travelers)