I think this was the first time I broke an expensive pen. I dropped it on the floor in the office I was in at the time.

It made me so angry and sad.

I ordered a replacement unit more or less right away; changing it from a medium to broad.

I decided to do a short blog post series about all the pens I have dropped about broken over the years, at least the one I can remember.

Re-visiting a lot of uncomfortable feelings here…

The way I do my own theme system is like this.

I look at my previous theme and think about putting into words how I want to improve over the next three months.

Then I try to find 5-10 outcomes to make that happen.

After that I do what I call a “sub-theme”; and that is a 1-2 week period where I have one goal and one action per outcome. Where the idea is that I try to move them forward every day by doing something.

At the end of a theme or sub-theme I do a retrospective and use that to influence what I’ll do next.

I always have these phases with my pens. Sometimes I have 2-3 fountain pens and a gel pen in my bag. And other items I just have like 10 pens in it.

Until I just can’t deal with having so many pens in use and start cleaning and putting them away as I write them empty.

At the moment I’m very much in all the pens territory.

There is a weird feeling I get when I get near the end of a yearly planner. Partly it is like: I filled all of this; but also: why am I dragging around 11 months of filled in pages?!

This is the system I have been on for a while now.

Structure

Let’s start with that.

• I write a Theme, plus description, and 5-10 outcomes. Ideally closer to 5. That lasts 3 calendar months.
• Then I do weekly Sub Themes. For them I define one goal for each outcome, and a Daily Action for each. The idea is to have a thing I can do often and reach the goal that in turn moves me closer to the outcome
• I journal every day in relation to the Theme / Sub-Theme mainly about what worked, didn’t work and turn it into tasks that I can work on.
• After each Sub-Theme and Theme I write a retrospective before deciding on the next one; I usually have a draft written before the retrospective and change it based on it

Tools

• I use Chronicling for tracking the Actions
• I write the daily journaling on paper in a lined refill in my passport sized Travelers Notebook. Because they have no long term value for me to keep around.
• The retrospectives are currently being kept. It might change
• The Themes and Sub Themes exist both digitally and analog; the analog version is in my A5 Hobonochi notebook that I use for all goal and focus tracking. I also keep a digital version to make it easy to look up.

My first attempt at this was to do it on paper, a long time ago actually, this summer. I tried to do my own thing on paper. But it never worked out for me. Mostly because of all the up keep of creating the layouts.

This time I first tried to do it in Notion, but I never liked it that much. And doing it digitally lead me to a setup with too many Outcomes, Daily Themes etc.

Then I started to play around with a different system; mostly the app Chronicling for Daily Themes and Day One for Daily Journaling; it stil had all the too much problems that I hadn’t addressed yet, plus the daily journaling had no structure at all.

After trying this out for a while I ended up with more of a hybrid system

The official journals worked well, for the most part during the time I used it.

But at the end of last year a bunch of things happened causing me to move on from it.

I had a subscription for them through Cotton Bureau; fuck I hate spelling that. That got in this weird state because they complained my card didn’t work, I made sure it was money on it and they used like FOREVER to actually charge it, like 12+ hours, and by that time there wasn’t enough money anymore.

And I started to think and decided I wanted to try something else for a while. Mostly because I felt like it was a good time to do something based on the same idea but with less fixed constraints.

For the year or so I used the Theme System Journals this is how I used them as I reached the end of the final one.

Something got messed up with the subscription renewal on the one I had and I just decided to explore doing a similar things with other tools when that happened.

• I did a new theme and new goals after three months always
• Sometimes a slight variation other times a big shift
• The Daily Themes was adjusted after each 15 day period
• In the daily journal pages I used to fill in the best and worst things in relation to the theme / goals in the two first boxes
• Then some things I could improve on and ideas etc in the big one
• And in the final one I wrote the most important thing for the next day

In addition to all of this I always wrote a retrospective after each 15-day period plus after each journal was used up.