I’m back to having a permeant desk at work for the first time since last June. So I’m back to using the Pilot Hi Tech Coleto that I bought last year.

Nice having a non weird pen I can just leave at work. The refills are awesome. And it is too much fun switching between colors as I write to do lists.

Also useful to have a pen that has 4 “refills” in it.

In a recent episode of The Pen Addict Podcast they talked about some weird recycled washi paper notebook. And got to the subject of the price per page in notebooks and touched on price per ml for ink.

Both topics are interesting, but it got me thinking.

I don’t care that much about the price per ml of ink. What would make things interesting is to have a number of how much ink an average person would have used to fill a A5 page with long form writing with some mainstream pen.

Let’s say a Lamy Safari with a Fine nib in a Leuchtturm1917 A5 lined notebook.

I it would vary a lot from person to person on so many different levels. But probably similar levels of being off from person to person.

If we could say that the ink price per page is 0.X cents or you can fill X pages per dollar and compare that would be a lot less abstract and “okay whatever” than the “it costs 40 cents per ml” thing we often do.

The main reason I’m currently looking at going smaller than A5 for my main notebooks are simple. Most of the time I don’t use a page of A5 as one page. Or not all of it.

One option would be to do to A5 slim. Another is something like A6. Or anything close to them.

For all of my writing, lists etc an A6, Travelers Passport, pocket size etc (just talking about all of the almost the same sizes as one here) either a single or a double size of them would work fine. Most of them are written either my dividing an A5 in a 2x2 grid or in 2-3 lanes anyways. Or for writing I just waste a lot of room.

My planners are a bit more complex to get that to work with something that small to get the layout I want: weekly, horizontal, same size all days on one line. For this I think it would have to be a double spread layout if I wanted something small.

Part of my motivation for this on the short term is to reduce the size and weight of the notebooks I carry. Plus that if I get a bit smaller than A5 it is so much easier to fit notebooks in packing cubes, slings etc. The options are so much larger even if I just scale it down to an A5 slim.

The solution in a notebook world would be to use a Hobonichi Weeks or full size Travelers Notebook refill. When I get a binder it leads it me to consider how I want to do things. Multiple binders is one option, another is to not have everything in the binder, or to go for the option that is the best for all my constraints.

But smaller notebooks going forward will be what I’m going to play with next year or as I use up what I have.

The reason I’m so terribly slow with pulling the trigger on buying a binder is as always with me 2-5 reasons:

• I don’t have the money for it right now anyways
• There are a lot of other tasks getting one would put on me, knowing myself
• Plus that recently I started to reconsider sizes etc

The middle one is the main reason I haven’t done it yet.

If I get a binder I’d also had to get at least a printer, hole punch and maybe one of those cutting board thingies if I get one in a format that isn’t compatible with paper that is easy to get and print on.

All of that adds to the expense, but isn’t that big of a deal.

However, when I get a printer and start doing my own layouts there is only a question of time before I start to design my own page layouts in Affinity Publisher or something.

Like how I split my pages into three sections for my hit lists would be something I print, or the various layouts for my bullet journal. Or planner pages.

Not a huge deal, but still something I need to keep in the back of my mind as I move forward.

It would also enable me to do things in a way that I can’t now, including do a lot of things I don’t do because of how much work it would be to do it manually.

I did a small test the other week about if I need a separate daily planner or not.

Or I don’t need one, but if it would be better or just whatever.

For me, it is something I prefer to have, because having something that looks different for it, makes it easier for me when I just look at open notebooks at my desk. I also like having it as a thing of its own for the sole purpose of being able to fill it out and just put it in a book stand and let it be there as I work through the day reminding me of the plan.

Because I’m currently looking into smaller notebooks, I started to look at the non A5 Plotter sizes, and some of them are really weird.

William Hannah has two sizes, A5 and A6; the smaller is half the size of the larger one. Makes sense. And with Travelers you have a similar thing going on, not exactly, but fairly close. There an A6 notebook spread out will be the same as a single sheet of A5, a passport spread out is close to the same, probably need between another 1/4 and 1/2 passport page to get there.

Then we have Plotter, the A5 is what it is, then you have the four other sizes Bible, Narrow, Mini and Mini 5, they are kind of two pairs of sizes with a tiny difference between each. Where I’m like why? If I were to pick between them I’d either pick the larger in each group or flip a coin.

That’s what she said.

On a more serious note, sometimes I have these weird ideas. My purple Kaweco Al Sport was almost out of ink, and my ADHD (possibly AuDHD) tendencies both pulls me against using up the cartridge in that pen while at the same time wanting to put another in the loop on my Travelers Notebook Passport because what if I run out of ink.

Then I looked at both the cartridge and the pen and wondered if I could fit a spare one on top of the one in it.

Almost. Another 11mm would have made work.

That made me think that all cartridge pens should allow for this.

My current carry is mostly the same as before.

The minimal version of it is my Travelers Notebook in Passport size with some pen in it, typically either my Gel multi pen or a Kaweco Sport.

When I carry a bag I’ll also usually bring my Hobonichi planner, Bullet Journal, some A5 notebook that I use for hitlists etc. Plus a bunch of pens in my Nock.co Tallulah case. Typically two more Kaweco pens, a bigger fountain pen and either the gel pen or a third Kaweco depending on what is in the pen holder of my Travelers Notebook. And I always have a ruler with me for marking up pages quickly.

Sometimes I also bring my big Travelers Notebook and or my lined notebook for long form writing if I plan on using them for something.

Both the bullet journal and the planner have brass clips, pictures in them and all kinds of weirdness to make them very me; both of them are currently Hobonichi notebooks and both use the same cover in different colors.

The Kaweco Sport line of pens is a recent favorite less expensive brand for me. But I can never remember their naming scheme.

You have the regular plastic ones named “Classic Sport”, then you have a bunch of others all named like “X Sport” like Al Sport, Brass Sport etc.

But I never use this scheme in my pen note/spreadsheet because I prefer to not to multi column sorting and have names like “Kaweco Sport Al Purple”. Plus that it removes the entire complexity of how many columns to use for the naming.

Not that Kaweco is the worst at having weird names. I just use them as an example because they are the ones I never get right.

TWSBI is particularly annoying to me. Because you have “TWSBI Eco Color” “TWSBI Diamond 580 Color”. Some have the Diamond prefix others not. At first glance it seems like all the fancier clear body ones have it, except the Vac series? And then they have all kinds of “sub” brands like the “580AL”, “580ALR”, “Vac700R” and suddenly the “ECO-T”. But it gets worse with the Mini’s because they are just “Vac Mini”, “Diamond Mini” “Diamond Mini AL” without the numbers even though it’s just a smaller 580.

For sanity reasons I roll my own naming scheme, and try to find the actual name before writing about it.