As I’ve been thinking a lot about using different notebooks for a year, I have tried a bunch of things, and it have been a process that haven’t really progressed to anywhere useful for me, except that I haven’t let the idea go.

What I have tried is

• A cheap binder that I really didn’t enjoy using
• To use a hardcover notebook with perforated pages.
• To the different kinds of Rhodia pads with perforated pages.

I think the first could have worked out if it didn’t feel so cheap and was so much fiddling every time I opened the binder rings. And the Rhodia pads worked fine. But I really missed having a place to put pages when it wasn’t just fill it out, done, in the trash. Like weekly plans etc.

Something as dumb as a cover plus a clipboard could work. I’m still in a place where I would like to move to a place where I just have two notebooks in my daily carry. One A5, and one pocket sized.

There are a few reasons I have not gone deeper into this yet.

The main one is that it requires a lot more setup and preparing than my current system of just using notebooks that to some degree are just made for what I use them for.

It would require me to draw up layouts, at least in the start. And the tests with things like this up to now have not worked out. For the binder I got it required a lot of fiddling when I opened the rings and they didn’t like up most of the time when I closed them again. And using notebooks I can pull out pages or pulling them out by cutting have never worked out.

So, this could turn out to be something where I just spend a bunch of money on something that don’t work out.

I think this topic has moved past binders from the start, mostly because what I really want ins’t really limited to a regular binder by definition, and there are a bunch of options I am considering that isn’t really a binder.

A thing I’ve been feeling for at least a year at this point is the urge to have one notebook for my daily “stuff”. What makes it more complicated is that I also would like to be able to remove and re-order things as I do, plus remove pages that are no longer in use or relevant. Because in theory a simple Leuchtturm1917 A5 Dotgrid notebook or a top spiral Rhodia DotPad would solve this for me.

Or the Rhodia would solve it even more for various reasons, because they let me pull out pages.

But. There are a few ways each of them would not solve things for me long term. The big one for the Leuchtturm1917 is that I can’t remove pages. With the Rhoda I can pull out pages but not re-order them, plus you often end up with this big stack of left overs from pages you have removed between pages sometimes that I hate.

This leaves me at wanting something I can put A5 pages in to both hold them and kind of use them as a notebook. So a good clipboard or anything that can hold pages with holes in them in place would work.

My main two requirements in the short term would be

• A5
• The mechanism just works, no fiddling or things like that.

The setup as I see it would be something like this.

• 1 A5 page with something like the Hobonichi 3 month overview
• Then the following would depend on the actual month, but let’s say we start on a Monday in the middle of a month.
• 1 A5 page with a month layout
• 1 A5 page with the week layout
• 1 A5 page with a day layout
• Then I add pages with Hitlist layout as needed or plain A4 dot grid pages if that is more appropriate

When the next day comes, I add another day layout and combine like that, another week when I come to the next week etc.

It would make it dead simple to prepare things in advance, and change things as I go. Plus I could get a printer and actually print or copy the layouts making it even simpler.

It never stops to fascinate me how huge the difference it is in how long I can use the same pen with a finer nib versus a broader nib.

Yeah, we all know it intellectually.

But when you have the same pen with a broad and EF nib inked up in front of you it lands very differently.

I have always had a notebook on my desk for capturing things for as long as I can remember.

At some point I felt that my ADHD (before I got diagnosed and all of that) started to become so much worse that I needed a way to focus more.

Where I looked in my task manager, wrote down what was the most important to do right now. And also wrote down on it everything that popped up in my brain. That included everything from ideas, to impulses to feelings. Plus that I mix in things I want to do like responding to Snaps and chat messages in between. So it is typically like doing 3-5 real tasks, then looking and some messages etc. Pomodoro ish.

When the a page filled up I just flipped over to the next and carried over everything that was undone.

For most of the time I have used notebooks for this that let me tear pages out. Rhodia DotPads ring bound or regular is without a doubt what I have used the most.

For the longest time I just used them regular. But at some point I started to put a line in the middle because I noticed that I could waste less paper by treating it as a double page. Then later I tried with 4 boxes for different purposes but wasn’t that good for me.

Then at some point I flipped it over to the side, and started to split the page into small columns, to waste even less paper, and limit how often I have to transfer to a new page.

These days I do the same with my Panobook when I have them.

The layout I have used for the last year or so, probably longer, is to have 8 dots or 4 cm / 40mm between each line. It makes the A5 pads have 4 columns and the Panobook have 6.

Most of the time I just use the columns without have any for particular purposes. Other times I start doing Capture in the last column.

The formatting of the lists are stiff very based on Dash plus. And I will scribble over the parts where everything has been completed to make it obvious where I’m at.

This is one of the core pillars of my system that always works. If it goes more than two minutes where I’m lost, overwhelmed, I just find a notebook and start writing everything down, and then start dealing with it.

Digital could have worked for this I guess. But I’d want a separate app for this stuff, since none of the apps makes it that easy to select some stuff and only showing me this for now. Without going into some serous complexity.

One of the reasons I’m always into pen trays and holders and such is that I hate it when pens roll off my desk. And because how I most of the time use pens constantly there is usually two pens uncapped in use at the same time always when I work.

I typically will write with a finer ribbed pen and use a broader one to make divider lines and scratch out lines or sections. And I greatly prefer it when the pens isn’t designed so that it will roll off, because then I don’t have to think about it and can just leave it on the pad.

I often say that I think on paper, and then store it in digital. And that is still true.

For me it is always easy to kind of have a calendar on paper or an empty sheet of paper and just look at that and figure things out, rather than looking on a screen and all of that.

The empty sheet is particular useful for me for anything related to my ADHD, where I always try to deconstruct anything into as small units of work as possible to limit procrastination and all of that.

And visualizing a week makes planning a lot easier for me. Paper is also a lot quicker than digital.

But I always prefer to have it on digital after I’m done putting it together because of convenience.

I’ve been slowly looking into binders and disc bound systems since I dipped my toes in it last summer.

Back then, I didn’t really get into it because I wasn’t to fund of the binder I tried.

It is just a question of time before I try again with something higher quality.

But I know it would require some coordination for when I decide to try it again.

There are a bunch of things that I would have to get before I do it

• A good hole puncher that can do a bunch of pages without it being fuzzy
• Copier / Printer
• Paper that I’d both be happy with the quality of that also works in a printer
• Accessories like tabbed dividers etc

When I do this I know I’ll end up making my own planner inserts in some way. Plus A bunch of other stuff. Something that in reality means that I’m stopping carrying most of my notebooks and just having what I need for the next week in a binder instead of large A5 notebooks plus six months of planner pages etc.

At the moment I’m slowly trying to figure out what to try next. Because I know that anything cheap won’t work. Since that was where it broke down the last time.

Usually when I get new inks and they are available in multiple colors I go with a small bottle.

Sometimes that leads to me buying a big bottle once it runs out. Most of the time I don’t.

It seems like the ink colors I currently test out the most is blue and pink. For all of the blues and pinks I’ve had, there are two blues (Iroshizuku Kon-Peki and Iroshizuku Shin-Kai) and one pink (Iroshizuku Tsutsuji) that I either have bought more than once, or would buy more than once.

For me, what makes me buy another bottle, and a big bottle of an ink instead of just finding another one to try is that feeling of “fuuuck that is a great color” when I write with it.