Every now and there is some drama going on because some company increase prices and or reduce the amount of ink in their bottles.

Price increases I’m not going into. But for the reducing amount of ink, I’m all for it. If the amount of ink in a bottle had been reduced from 50ml to either 35 or 40 I do not think it matters in any way for most people.

There have never been a point where I have gotten beyond 30ml where I’d either been fine with moving on or known that this is a ink I always want to have available.

Maybe ink should be sold in either much smaller or much larger bottles instead of 50ml?

I’ve been a fan of small bags for a really long time. I think it started when I moved from a small iPhone 5s to the bigger 6s Plus.

For me it is fairly simple, the stuff I’d like to bring with me most of the time is larger than what I can fit in my pockets. It was easier back when I used to use coats and jackets with more larger pockets. But I haven’t really been using that in years at this point.

Where I use a sling or one of my smaller bags is when I can’t fit things in my pockets, but it would be weird or annoying to bring a regular bag. And a lot of the time I just put my sling in a larger bag since it usually has most of the stuff I always want to have with me.

So a while back I started to look into slings. Mostly to have a place to put keys, wallet and phone when I was wearing something without a lot of pockets. Typically a thing when I wear running tights. As always I started to look at the places I usually buy bags and things like that from and ended up going with a Belroy Mini Lite.

For this use I wanted something as small and compact as possible, but I’ll probably get another larger one at some point.

It features on large compartment, a smaller one on the front, plus a small pocket on the side and one on the back of the large one. And a really cool magnetic mechanism on the strap.

This far I’m really happy with it, and all of it works really great. The one thing I miss is to have two of each of the pockets inside the large one.

My typical carry looks something like this:

• Keys
• Wallet
• Phone
• AirPods
• Sunglasses or regular glasses
• Various phone accessories (pop sockets, etc)
• Flashlight
• Tiny pocket knife
• Dog bags
• Passport Travelers Notebook
• 2-3 pens
• Various other tiny items
• Sometimes a MagSafe battery

Typically I only put keys in the front pocket because things often fall out as I pull out the keys if I put more stuff in it. In the big compartment I typically put the dog bags in the side pocket and flashlight and similar small items in the back pocket and leave the rest in the main one.

It works really great for me, and have kind of become a thing I bring everywhere that just contains all the stuff I always bring with me. Often I just throw it in another bag, and sometimes I wear it as a sling.

I have two vacuum fillers: a Pilot Custom 823 and a TWSBI Vac 700R.

Two very different pens in terms of looks and price classes. The TWSBI is usually between $65-$85 and the Pilot usually between $300-$350. And the price class is important to keep in mind when I say what I’m going to say. And it isn’t a knock against TWSBI, but rather an observation of the differences in quality with more expensive pens.

What I have noticed when I’m getting really close to writing these pens dry, is that the Pilot just writes as expected until fully dry. But the TWSBI will often start to bubble and just push out a bunch of inks as it is getting really close to empty.

It is good to know, so you don’t end up with a bunch of pink ink on the page in the middle of a meeting.

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)

I’ve been looking into what my planner setup will be for 2024 for a while now.

Here are the requirements

• Dated
• Monthly, Weekly and Daily pages
• Weekly layout must be vertical
• Monthly and Weekly should be spread over two pages
• Multiple books are fine, but no duplicate sections

Nice to have:

• Space in weekly and monthly pages for goals and such
• Opens flat
• Loads of empty pages

I’ve used my current setup now for a year and a half by the time the year rolls around, because I used a six month Hobonichi Cousin A5 before I got my current one. There are only two things about I’m not happy with at the moment. I’d like more empty pages close to it to have a place to keep track of long term goals that isn’t tied to weeks or months and similar things. And I’d also like something smaller.

It may seem contradictory to want less bulk and more pages, and yes I know. Less bulk could also mean smaller pages etc.

I’m going into the options I didn’t go with in another post. And I’ll probably get into the lineup of Hobonichi planners in a third one.

The short version is that I ended up going with Hobonichi this year as well. There wasn’t really many options that would give me all of my requirements. And of the few that would, Hobonichi is the nicest.

Like I could have gone with something like Weeks plus a A6 one but it would mean duplicate sections of at least months.

Instead I went with Hobonichi Cousin A5 Avec plus a Hobonichi A5 Notebook. Avec is the same buying two six month planners at the same time. This means that I can add a notebook that looks and behaves more or less the same as my planner to the nib and maintain the same amount of bulk. I think it might be a tiny bit smaller actually.

A dumb desk thing I picked up while getting a stuffed octopus for my daughter.

It is just a small black-grey chair, kind of looks like a deck chair, that you can place your phone in.

You can place it at various degrees of tilt, and both in horisontal and landscape.

I like it a lot. A solid alternative to having a charger stand. Will probably get another one for work for when I don’t have my phone in the MagSafe stand.

So I got the binder. Not going to bother to mention the kind because it wasn’t relevant to why I didn’t like it.

Tried to use it for a couple of days, and it didn’t work for me. Being left handed the whole binder was always in the way. And I just felt like any of it worked well enough compared to using a Hobonichi plus regular notebooks for the added flexibility to be worth it.

What I’m doing next will be more centered around my Hobonichi and the cover I have for it. More details on that after I figure out more of how that will be.

For about a month and a half now I’ve been looking at binders; everything from regular office binders to Filofaxes to stupid expensive things from Plotter.

If Plotter actually shipped internationally, sorry but shipping to Canada don’t count as “international shipping” if you’re located in the US, I’d probably have one by now.

Instead I ended up ordering something else, much cheaper; I’ll write about in a while. Once I get it and have the time to actually test it out. It wasn’t from Plotter and it wasn’t from Filofax.

The reason I’ve been spending a bunch of time looking at binders for the last month and a half is because I’d like to solve a bunch of issues with my current notebook situation.

• I want to carry fewer pages of paper with me every day.
• I want to combine all my different “keeping my life together” systems into a single thing.
• I wanted something flexible enough to let me most things around as needed.

The idea is that I would get a A5 binder plus some dividers and some daily and weekly calendar pages in it. Plus a hole punch to be able to put things in it that don’t come in holes. Like pages from my A5 Rhodia notebooks maybe cut out the daily themes pages from my Theme Journal.

So instead of having an entire year of planner pages I’ll have a few weeks of them. Instead of having two entire pads of Rhodia Dotpads I’ll probably combined have more like 1/3 to 1/2 of one. And instead of bringing an entire Theme Journal I’ll only have the parts of it I use.

If it works out, I’ll probably cut my daily notebook carry down by at least 2/3.

Can’t wait to test this out.

Outside of the carrying less paper it will most likely make everything work much better by having everything in “one notebook” instead of spread between 3-4 different ones.

Plus it will be amazing to just move pages around as things change.

One of the issues with having multiple blogs is what should go where. And there are surprisingly many posts that could go either place.

The definition I’ve ended up at is that anything mostly technology related goes on my personal site; anything related to desk, pen/paper/etc, carry goes on here; and the rest goes on my personal blog.