If productivity lives in the weeks, creativity lives in the Musubi. This is the notebook that would come with me to pen shows. So when the old Tomoe River paper was getting scarce, I purchased a small stockpile of the Musubi folio notebooks. While I don’t plan to do that this year, I still love Musubi notebooks.
Musubi Folio Notebook- A5: the stockpiled staple I mentioned I finished an entire Musubi notebook during early quarantine months because I was using it for every single thing I was writing down. Productivity, when it exists, comes to life for me on the pages of this notebook. Because I’ve used it for the same purpose repeatedly over time- I have a strong mental association with this format. But will I get more value from the notebook than I invested in it? Absolutely. Will I use every page in 2021? Probably not. I tend to use it on Sunday nights or Monday mornings to plan for the upcoming week, and when I do so I find it immeasurably helpful. The format of the Weeks is the only planner format that seems to actually make sense to my brain for planning purposes. There’s a large section of months in the middle that went unused, but that doesn’t bother me. But once I finished that notebook, the Hobonichi Weeks is the planner that I picked back up. When March rolled around I stopped using all planners for a while in favor of a single Musubi notebook. Hobonichi Techo Weeks: the only planner I used at all in 2020 Just get it down on paper, and figure out what to do with it later. It may end up somewhere else in the end (and that’s the beauty of a ring-based system with removable pages), but I never feel like I need to grab any other notebook before I write something down or sketch something or doodle or test an ink. But anything and everything belongs here. I may write notes from a meeting here and retain the tasks by adding them to my planner later. I may jot down a quote here and write more about it later in my journal. All the other planners and journals are the “exceptions” meant for specific use cases. This notebook is the catch-all where nearly everything begins. But after using the William Hannah for a couple of months, I think that mindset was backward. In previous years, I may have a notebook that’s planned to be catch-all for any “exceptions” or things that didn’t belong in the other yearly planners and journals.
I never thought a ring-based system would work for me, but if the last couple of months are any indication, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Each day I’m starting with a new, fresh notebook. At the end of the day, I review the pages I’ve used- transfer important tasks or items to another notebook or a digital system, hold on to the pages or sketches that I want to keep and get rid of the rest. I use whatever paper I’m feeling in the moment, and take the page out and move it to the back of the notebook when I’m finished. This allows me to have Tomoe River, Clairefontaine, Cosmo Air Light, Bank Paper, Col-0-ring paper, and other sketchbook papers all in the same tiny notebook. Inspired by Jesi’s previous post, I have primarily been punching my own refills with an Atoma punch. The rest of the book, however, is filled with all types of different papers. The official William Hannah paper is outstanding even for fountain pens, and I usually have a few pages of that paper in one section of the notebook. I was gifted a William Hannah a couple of months ago, and I’ve been using it almost every day since. William Hannah: the notebook I’m already using So, even though I may look back and laugh in six months, I grabbed my stack of notebooks and spent some time reflecting on the possible use cases of each one. However, there is a very thin line that separates flexibility from chaos. And for me personally, resilient systems must at their core be flexible. If 2020 has taught me anything, it’s the need to develop systems that are resilient. I say “plan” because I am using the term in its broadest and loosest possible sense. I say apparently because it wasn’t until earlier this week that I realized I had five different notebooks that I intended to continue using in the new year or purchased specifically for the purpose of using in 2021. It’s December (…how?) and after a year that deviated from plans more than anyone could have anticipated, apparently I still feel compelled to “plan” for the upcoming year.
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