I just got a plain Hobonichi A5 notebook for the first time.

Weird I haven’t really bought anything from them outside of their planners, after all of these years.

It is a plain A5 softcover square grid notebook. Personally I’d prefer a dot grid, but that’s not really their thing.

The notebook itself is exactly like their planners, except not as many pages as the regular ones, filled with the blank pages you find at the end.

My plan for this notebook is to just use it for goal tracking. I bought a new cover for it. And I’m going to use one of the markers at a page with long term goal tracking and the other at more right now progress against the long term goals.

So far I really like this notebook. It is a very nice soft cover notebook. Might get me to look more at soft cover opens flat notebooks again?

I finally got to ordering next years stuff from 1101 / Hobonichi last week. And I fucked up and forgot one thing, so I had to figure out where to find that somewhere local ish. I forgot to add the regular A5 Hobonichi notebook to the order.

This is all of the stuff I got from both orders

• Cousin A5 Avec
• A5 Notebook
• A new cover
• A clip on ruler
• Plus a couple of bands to have around them

Can’t wait until it all shows up.

I’ve been looking at pen trays for a really long time, because I can never make up my mind about what to get.

Some are not what I want, most are kind of what I want, and some very few are exactly what I want.

What I want is something small where I can put a few pens. This is always 1-5 pens. I don’t want a cup, I want a tray to put them. Not a strong opinion if it is a zig zag thingy or the pens touch.

This far I’ve found two options I’m seriously considering. One is an Amazon Basics “half tray” that is kind of what I want. At least from the utility perspective. And there are a few options on the Ugmonk site that would work for me.

There were also a few other options on Amazon that looked interesting but priced too close to the Ugmonk stuff for me to bother to look closely at them. Hilarious when one option is less than $6 and the others are $69.

The Kaweco line of fountain pens have always been like this black hole in my collection. I never got into them getting started and it was first this year I started to look into them.

So, I got a regular Red Sport earlier this week. I liked it. I think their EF nibs are great for Germans. As it doesn’t feel like a medium.

Then I decided to get another the other day. So I found a AL in Purple.

This one I like much more than the plastic one. Really love that it has more weight to it. Got it with a medium nib, but also ordered a EF replacement nib at the same time.

It might end up as something I use a lot in the pen loop of my Passport Travelers Notebook.

Everyone knows where this leads right? I’ll probably get a brass one when I order something the next time

There are a few things about planners that makes zero sense to me, that I just have accepted. And a few of them were brought back to my attention on a recent Pen Addiction. Not sure if it was on the one on the Relay or on the one you get access to if you are a member on the blog. Probably the latter.

The guest complained about how it makes zero sense that you have all the monthly pages in one section, and then the weekly in another and daily in a third. And I could not agree more.

When I was attempting to use a binder, but gave up on it partly because I didn’t like it that much. Might have liked it better with a Plotter, was to have a system where I just had a month spread, a week spread, a bunch of days and maybe the month/week spreads for the previous and next.

I get the complexities of doing it like this. But it would work so much better for me if my planner was organized chronological like this.

The guest on the show did their own layouts on plain notebooks, but my ADHD brain don’t have the time and focus to get into that.

I’d also love to have more planners that was much less than the entire year. When I work in my Hobonichi at the most I’m looking at:

• Last/Current/Previous month/week
• 5 days back
• 5 days forward

But I’m always carrying 356 days of daily pages, 52 weeks of weekly pages and 12 months of monthly pages. This is a big part of why I’m going to go with an avec for next year to at least cut it in half.

I guess I’m not alone about having spent stupid amounts of time looking at their Analog system. And like everyone should know at this point is that there is only a question of time before I get into it.

However.

I think the system itself is very interesting. Especially the combination of their regular card system plus the new week stuff. But there are a few things about it that annoys me.

The weekly cards should have had 7 equal columns instead of the stupid small ones for the weekend. And there is no carry story for them like there are for the regular cards.

So if (or rather when) I were to use this I would have to get a pair of both stands to be able to have a productive setup both at home and in the office.

I wish there was discounted kits that accounted for this, I assume to be rather common setup.

There are so much cool stuff in their store though. And I really love that they are trying to do something very different from the rest of the planning and friends industry.

After the Dingbats notebooks didn’t work out that well for me I decided to get some top ring bound dot pads from Rhodia.

They work much better for me. First and foremost because it is much easier to tear off pages. And also because their design is much more out of the way.

Not a perfect solution though. What I feel more and more like is to have a setup where I can re-arrange pages as needed. Not sure where it will lead

This is a weird thing I do. In some periods I buy a lot of pens, notebooks and inks. And in other periods I don’t. I just use what I have until it runs out before I start buying things again.

It is especially true for things that both take up a lot of room and are “consumable” in lack of a better word. Like paper and ink.

Funny story.

With my hit lists I always experiment with different formats and layouts of doing it. Usually because I want to waste as little paper as possible, while making them as non intimidating as possible.

Some times I just use them as you expect. One column in regular portrait orientation. Other times I use two columns in either portrait or horizontal orientation. Lately I’ve used them in portrait but divided them in four.

What is hilarious about this is that I have basically turned A5 sheets into four index cards.