I have never really used any Mont Blanc products, because most of them are stupid expensive. Like ridiculous expensive. Where it is so far beyond what I’d ever consider that I just start laughing whenever I find myself looking at their pens etc.

Anyways.

I decided to check out one of their inks a while back, and I ordered a bottle of “Royal Blue”.

Interesting enough their ink is really cheap.

I like the color, it isn’t anything amazing, but I have had a lot blues that are much worse than this. The ink is a little bit dryer than I prefer, at least in the Pilot Custom 823 I’ve been testing it in. Much better in the Lamy 2000 I also inked up at the same time though. So might just be that the dry pen and drier ink combination that rubs me the wrong way; as always.

I really like their ink bottle design though. Different look and interesting take on how to make it possible to ink up pens from a bottle as it gets empty.

I’ve been trying hard to get back into using pocket notebooks over the last couple of months. And it have gotten better. Still far from anywhere at the level I was at pre-pandemic.

My setup at the moment is to use my Passport Travelers Notebook. I have the blueish color.

I have two refills in it, one dotgrid and one lined. Plus a pen holder on it, where I usually have the Pilot Hi-Tec-C Coleto 1000 multi pen.

The dotgrid refills is for lists, either capture, or todo lists when it is the best option. And the lined is for writing drafts or journaling that I’m not going to keep for the long term.

I have both digital and analog journals in active use. And I think they all fall in three different categories.

I have paper journals that I’m going to keep. Like my 5 year journals will most likely end up in storage for longer if not forever, but most of my notebooks end up in the trash when I’m done with them.

While the stuff I have digitally are typically there forever.

The stuff I know will be noise in the long term will always be written on paper because I find it much easier to get rid of them than digital because the cost of keeping digital content is so much lower.

While the digital is things I will go back to look at. Some of it is proper journaling in Day One. And other things are more logs and less mindful and is often moved out of there to other places as time goes by.

Cartridges isn’t something.I have used a lot with my fountain pens. I used to use them back in the very early days. But I soon moved over to bottled ink and piston fillers and converters.

But I have since the summer gotten a few of pens where I do use them: Kaweco Sport. I have converters for them, that I haven’t tested out yet. I have just continued using cartridges with them.

The original plan was to use cartridges, but I should probably test out the converter. Where it leads all depends on how much (or little) ink I can get in them. If it is too little I’ll probably just stick with the cartridges for the convenience.

I have a common place journal that I keep in my large Travelers Notebook. The system is usually that I number the entries and change books no matter what when I get to the next year. But last year I didn’t write more than a couple of pages in it because ADHD.

So I decided to just keep the current refill. Hopefully this year will be better.

I’ve done the Theme System for a while now, both with and without their notebooks, and to a varying degree of within their system.

One thing I do differently is that while I sometimes phrase it as “The year of X” I will often change or adjust my theme after 3 or 6 months.

For me and the kind of changes I’m working on an entire year is way too long.

A while back I bought one of those paper knife thingies that look like a pizza wheel that perforates pages.

Not perfect, and kind of screws up a lot of notebooks. But I love being able to do it on pages I know I’m going to want to pull out. Will almost certainly get another of the same thing that just cuts out pages.

I’ve used the Midori five year journal for a year now.

In general I liked it, but I would not buy another one of them. Mostly because I think there are so many more interesting options to it. At the end of last year I decided to change it from being my journal to a gratitude journal, because I wanted to start using the A5 Hobonichi 5 year for the journaling instead. The main reason for the switch was that I thought the Midori was too small, and I really liked the Hobonichi layout.

If I had to get another non Hobonichi 5 year I’d probably pick the Leuchtturm1917 one over the Midori.

These are most likely the pages in my journal setup that change the most.

Currently I have them set up as follows.

• I split them into 4 sections with a washitape grid, where the vertical one go more or less in the middle of the page and the horizontal is 2/3 down on the page.
• The stop two sections are for “Events” and “Focus”.
• While the bottom two are for “Due” and “Work”.
• “Events” is where I write an outline of the day to internalize how the day will be.
• “Focus” is important things that I should work on or complete. I try to write them in a way where it is obvious what I expected; how much progress etc.
• “Work” is for important work tasks
• “Due” is things I must get done on that day.