Planner Season

My 2026 Planner Deep Dive

The stationery community has officially entered planner season, a time where companies announce their new releases for the next year. Planner season keeps creeping earlier and earlier. But I’m ok with September, because it reminds me of the start of a new school year. And since I work in higher education, albeit in an administrative office that doesn’t interact with students that much, it’s nice to plan something new that coincides with students coming back.

Planner season, like everything else in life now, can quickly get out of control with overconsumption, but with prudence you can still enjoy the excitement. I think for many, it harkens back to getting new school supplies at the start of a new school year and receiving a new planner from the school (remember the scratchy Millennium 2000 planners?).

In 2022, I discovered Hobonichi planners, a popular Japanese system with Tomoe River paper (formally made by Tomoegawa, and now made by Sanzen. That’s a whole different rabbit hole). Every year, Hobonichi releases new planners and accessories designed by independent artist. It’s a new season that celebrates new artist collaborations every year.

I liked the Hobonichi system because it was the perfect balance of flexibility and structure. I have always loved the idea of bullet journaling, but it felt too impractical for my needs. I don’t want to create a full spread on a blank sheet of paper every single week. But I also don’t want something that forces me into a detailed structure that doesn’t allow me to make the planner my own. The Hobonichi Cousin A5 addressed both of these issues. It gave me the space to experiment and discover what I want to look like without building it from scratch.

The Hobonichi is divided its three sections: monthly, weekly, and daily spreads. I’ve always gravitated to monthly spreads when planning out my weeks and months. I didn’t have much use for the weekly spreads, but the daily pages allowed me to mark meetings at specific times of the day along with to-do lists. Because of the roomy A5 size, the daily pages gave me a space to experiment with doodles and abstract artwork.

My makeshift missal in my Hobonichi Cousin

The daily pages also inspired me to create a personal missal-type book. On each Sunday page and Holy Days of Obligation, I would write out the verse chapters for each Mass reading, along with the responsorial Psalm, Alleluia, and Gospel verse. I loved this layout, and it inspired me to create my own missal (which I’ve never finished, but I’ll attempt it again someday).

My to-do list spread in my Hobonichi. Not all of my pages looked like this. I think I was stressed and was trying to disassociate

The next year I used the same system, but I was getting burned out and tired of the three-section system. In 2024, I switched to Plotter monthly and weekly inserts because I wanted a simpler system. It worked for what I wanted at the time, but after two years I realized I missed the complete book system that a bound planner provides. I didn’t like removing sections from the binder to make room for the current and future dates. I also wanted a vertical weekly system, because I wanted to start time-blocking to visualize my work tasks throughout the week. So in 2025 I switched from Plotter to Jubin Techo. I started using highlighters to block out my time throughout the week, and it’s been helpful. However, I’m not a fan of the paper. If you’re not a stationery freak like me, it should be fine for you.

My 2023 Hobonichi Cousin

My Jubin Techo

This year I almost went back to Hobonichi, because I wanted to use monthly and daily pages again. I also wanted to integrate vertical weekly spreads again as I did in the Jubin Techo. Of course, tariff prices have affected Japanese planners, which has made me think twice about what I really need.

I almost placed an order online, but at the last minute I checked Vanness Pens, my local stationery store, and found the Midori Hibino. The Hibino is a compact A6 planner with monthly and daily pages that span two pages. It doesn’t have the weekly spread, but the daily page layout has a timeline for appointments and time blocking. I wasn’t sure about the A6 size, so I waited until I visited the store to look through the planner. I was relieved that it wasn’t too small, and was compact enough to slip in my bag. I mostly use A5 for planning and journaling, but I thought about the times in the Hobonichi when I had a lot of free space in my daily pages, which was great for doodles but not much else. I didn’t want to journal in it (although you could) because my journal entires take up multiple A5 pages. I decided to take a chance on the Hibino and the A6 size.

Midori Hibino

My makeshift missal

It’s early to get a new planner, but I’m glad I got it now because it gives me time to think about my needs for my planning layouts. The Sunday layouts made me think of my missal-type layouts in the Hobonichi, so I started filling out the Sunday pages with Mass readings. Marking the liturgical season is also important to me, so I took a green marker and marked the right side of the page with the appropriate liturgical color.

I’m still deciding how I want to fill out the weekday sections, but I’m giving myself time to let that come to fruition. So far I want to incorporate these specific areas:

• Tasks

• Time-Blocking

• Rosary Intentions/ Reflections

Hibino monthly pages

I don’t want to overload it and put myself in a box, so these three elements are sufficient for me right now. As the year winds down, this is a good time to figure out what I need to track, what snags I need to untangle this year, how my processes can change, and what’s important to me. But humans aren’t processors like chips in a machine. I don’t want my planner to reflect a machine that checks tasks on a list. I don’t like getting bogged down into habit tracking. I want a holistic system that reflects my authenticity. That means some pages may have written notes. Some may have Bible verses. Some may have deep reflections and prayers. They’re not supposed to fit into grid-like structures that operating systems gave us. I still have some of my Grandfather’s old planners and notebooks from the 70s. He has random math problems and numbers strewn throughout some of his notebooks. I enjoy seeing these random indiscriminate pencil markings much more than I would seeing typed text on a screen in serif font. It shows his humanity in his own hand in a way that computers can’t. And that’s what I want my planners to do.

My grandfather’s 1972 logbook. He didn’t work for GE, but he received free swag. I can reuse this planner in 2028

My grandfather worked for the Arkansas State Forestry and received this awesome Smokey the Bear planner for 1978. 2023 was a repeating calendar

Part 2: Sacred Space Notebook

A few years ago I purchased an A6 notebook cover from Little Mountain Bindery, a small business in Fayetteville, Arkansas, that makes custom notebook covers and offers book rebinding services. As a fellow Arkansan, I felt compelled to support this local stationery business. Since I mostly use A5 covers, I thought I’d try a different size this time. For Americans who don’t understand random paper size callouts, here’s a quick overview:

A4 is the popular standard sized document, sized slightly longer and skinnier than our 8.5x11 standard sized document. If you fold an A4 in half on the long edge, you get A5, which is used predominantly for notebooks and planners. A6, as you can guess, is half the size of A5. Since I had a few A5 covers, I decided to go for the A6 cover for pocket notebooks. I tend to use pocket notebooks for jotting down notes and keeping any other scribbles that don’t require large amounts of writing. Many users today find them a useful means to stave off doomscrolling.

I also find myself gravitating toward smaller notebooks for Mass. They’re compact enough to slip in and out during times in the service when I want to jot down a quick reflection from the homily, or a prayer that comes to me that I want to reflect on more deeply. Since Mass is an interactive experience, I don’t have many opportunities to sit and reflect for too long, so a small form factor is most useful for me in those situations. For a long time I used this A6 brown trifold cover for my Mass notes, and then put it aside for a while. However, I decided to push it to its limit to see how I could make this simple notebook cover a reflection of my interactivity in Mass. I didn’t just want to create a place for words, but a sacred space that incorporated reflection, images, and scripture passages. I’m still figuring out what works best for me, but I’m pleased so far with what I’ve created.

This A6 journal is similar to the Traveler’s Notebook system I discussed in Part 1 of this series on personal operating systems. It’s a brown leather cover with cords to place three pocket A6 notebooks. This design, however, incorporates a trifold cover instead of the bifold of the Traveler’s. The first part of my Mass cover is my reflection journal. This is my go-to for journaling and reflecting on anything that pops into my mind. This practice helps me focus on the present moment and not let my mind wander too much during the homily or other quiet moments in the Mass. The second cord holds a handmade pocket iconostasis made by DoorNumber9 on Etsy. The iconostasis is a small sewn book that shows all 12 Great Feasts of the Church. Each scene can be flipped through in a book form or expanded in an accordion style.

It’s such a clever way to meditate on the major stories outlined in the New Testament in a visual way. I’ve written some about the philosophy of Iconography in past articles and how meld them into my spiritual life. The iconostasis fits perfectly in this A6 cover, and I love the ability to create a compact notebook shrine that’s easy to take with me. It’s another tool for me to disconnect with my phone and focus on the constraints of the objects in front of me, with the visual interactivity to keep me engaged in a unique way.

The third cord holds a Field Notes pocket notebook for traditional rote prayers and chaplets. I used to keep this in my Plotter I wrote about in a previous article. But I decided to move it over to this cover since it fits well in this A6 cover. This size is perfect for chaplets that I don’t know from memory, such as the St. Michael chaplet. Housing prayers in a simple pocket notebook keeps these items more organized than digital means, or even in a pre-made book, as it allows me to curate my own on prayers that are meaningful to me.

So to recap, this cover houses three main components:

• personal reflection

• iconostasis for visual prayer and meditation

• commonplace pocket notebook for traditional rote prayers and chaplets

These three components housed in one cover provides a unique experience that allows me to slow down and engage in practices that actively help me grow as a person. I hope this inspires you to reflect on how you can create your own personal physical system.

Part 1: Traveler's Notebook System

To start off this series, I want to give an overview of the Traveler’s Notebook system, a simple leather cover with strings that allow you to insert multiple slim notebooks. Many companies have their own version of this system. The “official” Traveler’s Notebook system was created by the Japanese company Midori in 2006. This system gained popularity fast in the stationery world due to its sleek and open-ended customizability. It takes time to get used to if you are used to traditional square notebooks. The full-size version is a more rectangular A5-slim size. Midori designed these covers in the Japanese wabi-sabi design philosophy, which focuses on simplicity, nature, imperfection, and impermanence.

Ninety percent of my journaling happens through notebook covers now. As much as I love the traditional hardbound notebook, I love the ability to customize a full system to my own. It also comes with the added benefit of making my own notebooks. It makes it a little cheaper in the long run (if you don’t continue buying covers…).

The main con to this, however, is that you have to try find a reason to use multiple slim notebooks at the same time if you want to commit to something like this. But that’s part of the fun of the system. It’s also easy to get overwhelmed. To me, it’s a mixture of both. But over the years, I’ve experimented with different notebook ideas enough to know what I’ll use and won’t use.

Even though I love the idea of these notebook covers, it took me a while to get comfortable with the slim format. When I first acquired a full-size Traveler’s Notebook, I mostly used it as a junk journal and commonplace book for song lyrics and quotes. It was easy to travel with and jot down lyrics to songs that spoke to me at specific times. I eventually learned how to make my own pocket folders using card stock. This allowed me to store various items such as prayer cards in my Traveler’s Notebook system. This is when it started to click: I could customize this system in a way that reflects my personality in more ways than a simple notebook could. I enjoyed the idea of physically containing objects that are important to me in a way that I haven’t experienced in a long time due to digital curation and storage via computers and smartphones. It was like a neatly organized binder on the first day of school.

my first Traveler’s Notebook

Even though it was slowly clicking, I was still reticent to journal in this system due to its size. I think a lot of the problem had to do with the type of paper I was using. I mostly used the blank paper inserts, which were great for junk journaling and random lyrics, but a bit uncontrollable for my writing.

Freedom Overspill

Later on I moved to the limited edition Hotel series. As a long lover of hotels, I felt drawn to the design style and retro stickers. I’m glad I got it when I did, because they now sell for ridiculous amounts of money on eBay.

For a long time I used this cover to junk journal with my granddad’s old user manuals. I now use this cover as my main wallet, complete with a wallet insert, card holder that I use for holy cards, and graph paper insert for journaling. The graph paper insert helped me feel comfortable with the slim rectangular format.

Why I Journal by Hand

I use a journal insert because it helps my brain slow down and focus on what I need to think deeply about. Typing doesn’t allow my thoughts to flow to deeper places as writing by hand does. They skim the surface to quickly arrive to their destination. I use a keyboard to bang out emails as swiftly and concise as possible. It’s a good tool, but not the best route to discover the intricacies of myself as a human being. Not everyone feels this way, of course, but it’s a good practice for me to switch contexts and slow down. I don’t want to rapidly bang out my thoughts in the same way I bang out an email or text message.

Watercoloring

Recently I found a blue Traveler’s Notebook that I use for watercoloring. I wanted to get back to traditional sketching and painting, and this was an easy system to bring along.I also bring a watercolor pen and small pan of paints in a kit.

Encountering the Real World

In the Traveler’s Notebook system, mixing my wallet and journal together provides a compact solution for my essentials. It’s a good way for me to compartmentalize my life in a way that doesn’t require the use of a screen. I want to ensure I don’t fall into the trap of only living life digitally or not at all. But I also want to ensure I don’t over consume the physical objects that lure me in life. As with everything, I must maintain a delicate balance.

Lately it seems like a tide is shifting for us who are fatigued by social media and the internet in general. With the rise of AI slop, never-ending social media discourse, the internet feels synthetic now. This synthetic world accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and has only increased with AI. Facebook feels distorted. YouTube feels shallow (although it’s been great for long-form podcasts recently). And Instagram is overstimulating with content and pressure to buy. I avoid TikTok because I don’t like its addicting nature. Notebook systems like Traveler’s keep me away from this synthetic space. It puts me in my own little space that I can partially control.

My Personal Operating Systems

No matter how entrenched I become in my digital workflow, I will always need to include analog tools in my life. Right now, I’m drafting this article in my new Lochby B5 folio. I love the act of physically compartmentalizing my workflow and experimenting with analog structures that reflect what’s important to me and what I want to learn.

My original intent for this article was to focus on notebook covers, but as I progressed, I felt a new theme emerge: I love tinkering with organization systems, both analog and digital. I’m a technical writer, so I nerd out at discovering processes, procedures, tools, user contexts, and information flow.

At first I thought this idea may just be a way for me to justify my notebook obsession. But I think there’s more to this picture. I organize my life in both analog and digital means. I am continually trying to tinker with my digital workflows and systems to make my life more efficient, creative, and focused. But I can never go all-in because it becomes a sea of distractions and wasted time. We’re hitting an attention and focus crisis point in our society, and I am trying to navigate these rough waters as much as anyone else. In 2025, I find myself wanting to balance my use of both analog and digital organization systems.

The Analog Operating System

I don’t think I’m the only person asking how to maintain balance from this digital rat race we find ourselves in. Many companies now are creating notebook cover systems for people like me who still need to organize their thoughts with pen and paper. I’ve been experimenting with these systems, trying to push the boundaries of creatively using notebooks for planning, brainstorming, praying, pontificating, and drawing. A new trend on the internet is emerging, called the “notebook ecosystem,” where people show how their notebooks holistically fit into their lives. Internet trends and their popular SEO keywords can become cringey at times, but I was intrigued by this terminology. In my article on how I used my Plotter notebook as a spiritual everyday carry item, I discuss how this notebook system enhances my spiritual life and prepares me for my monthly spiritual direction meetings. I want to continue focuses on this topic and see where my experiments take me.

After a bit of ruminating, I thought about the idea of notebook covers becoming analog operating systems. Similar to a computer operating system, notebook systems allow you to create and organize data and information.

Of course, computer operating systems perform much more complex tasks at fast speeds. But for me, the speed can be detrimental at times. I find myself using analog objects when I need to focus and do deep thinking. The process, and how I go about it is just as important as the final result. If I’m not careful, I can easily find myself going from start to finish without focusing on the process, or filling the process time with distractions.

The Digital Operating System: From text to Pictures to Text Again

The front-facing element of the operating system is the user interface, which relies heavily upon metaphors to help users perform tasks. The directory structure, once directed by the user in a text-based command-line interface, now uses a metaphorical paper filing system with folders and files. And now mobile operating systems are becoming even more rudimentary, where you rarely even interact with a directory or filing system. Everything you need are in contained in apps.

I have used this metaphorical graphic system for decades now, with a few adventures inside DOS here and there. As a technical writer interested in information architecture and how people interact with systems, I find myself wondering what systems work best for me now, as a 36-year-old millennial who was exposed to paper, books, handwriting, command-line interfaces, Windows 95, Mac OS, iOS, and film cameras.

This poses an interesting question for my workflow: Lately I find myself gravitating toward text-based interfaces again, and use the physical object itself rather than its digital metaphor. I don’t want a complex GUI. I want the computer to be the computer and the paper to be paper. That may be from the mental overhead of the amount of graphics I see and interact with on a daily basis. I’m tired of seeing thousands of images a day. I’m tired of deciphering what’s in the callout box. I’m tired of parsing through thousands of results to find what I’m looking for.

And I think this is where AI is slowing weaving its way into my workflow. It provides a simple interface that allows me to ask questions, retrieve answers, and move on to another part of the process without spending time parsing through pages of search results and web pages. Of course you have to discern its answers to parse through sources, like everything else in research. But the ability to use a simple text-based interface makes me think that we’re moving away from complex graphical interfaces and toward the simple command-line interfaces of before. Using a computer in this way frees me up to get my face out of the screen and into the physical world and interact with its objects.

Investigating Why

So this is where I am right now in my life. I spend too much time on social media and the mental overhead of my digital use is making me tired. So I retreat to my notebooks and stationery, where I enjoy the slow process of physically using tools to enhance my life, perform tasks, and just be human. In this process, I’m discovering the use of AI in helping me with my digital workflow. I also find myself gravitating toward smaller online social groups for more meaningful discourse. I want to ask myself how to maintain balance in this complicated world that is not slowing down.

I want to take the next several weeks to investigate my analog and digital workflows and discover how I can better tailor these systems to live a life that God has called me to live.

Throughout this process, I want to focus on a few specific questions:

• What do I want to accomplish?

• What principles are important in my life?

• How does the medium I use affect this process?

Stay tuned for more. In my next post, I’ll focus on a specific notebook system I’m using.

My Spiritual EDC Notebook System

https://youtu.be/Ha9x069KXoM

In the midst of the confusing cyber world we live in, many people have turned to pocket notebook systems to keep them from social media doomscrolling. The irony, of course, is that the internet has been good to the analog community, fueling desire for pretty notebooks and stationery. But I think a lot of good can come from turning people back to pocket notebooks and pens. If the internet can inspire people to have hobbies away from the internet and learn to use social media moderately, then it’s a win for me.

A few years ago I discovered Plotter, the Japanese ring bound system that has a ton of customizable options. It’s like the old Filofaxes but much smaller. You can’t go into this thinking you can stuff every aspect of your life into it like a Filofax. You have to consciously decide what you need in this present moment in your notebook. That may stress people out. It certainly stressed me out at the beginning. Paper in, paper out.

You have to think about this notebook in a systematic approach. It’s not just a stack of paper glued together in a book. It’s a notebook cover that allows you to implement different sections, folders, and dividers for specific reasons. It’s like in school when your teachers made you have three-ring binders (are those required anymore?) with specific section dividers. But in a Plotter system, you have to determine what those sections are used for. And it took me a while to figure out what sections of my life would be important for me to divide. Maybe that’s why analog systems are popular today—it’s a physical manifestation of what you think is important in life.

Plotter provides accessories, such as paper pads, folders, pouches, and section dividers, to help you create your own flexible system. Unfortunately, the covers are expensive. But if you didn’t want to throw down the money for one of theirs, the accessories are reasonable enough to purchase for an alternative cover. My specific cover is called the “bible size,” which is what we called “personal size” in the west.

But I don’t want to focus so much on what I’m using but how I’m using it. I don’t want this to turn into some type of popular influencer content where I’m trying to sell an expensive notebook system. What fascinates me is not the brand but the systematic approach to journaling and how analog tools can help us discover what’s important to us in ways digital systems can’t. It took me a long time to discover what my system looks like, but it’s slowly coming to fruition to reflect who I am in my mid-30s.

My spiritual EDC system

I use my Bible-size Plotter for personal and spiritual reflection. It’s nice to have a physical manifestation of components in my life that help me focus throughout the day. Due to its size, I call this my “Spiritual EDC (every day carry) System.”

The first part of my system is a zipper pouch, which holds holy cards, a Padre Pio coin (randomly given to me by someone at Starbucks after a conversation. He didn’t know Padre Pio was my confirmation saint), and a green scapular, because I need all the help I can get for my conversion. The back of the zipper pouch holds my business cards and a Field Notes pocket notebook with specific chaplet prayers that I can’t remember.

After the pouch, the planner is the first section of the notebook. Right before the planning pages is a note I wrote on the components of the First Saturday Devotion from Our Lady of Fatima. I decided to start this devotion a few months ago, and is what I ground myself with throughout the year. Having this note at the beginning of the planner section reflects that truth about my goal.

The monthly planner section doesn’t include any work-related tasks or meetings, just personal and spiritual items to pay attention to.

The cool thing about a flexible binder system is you can move pages around as needed. Some users like to place individual note pages between the monthly spread pages. I need to spreads clean, though to see the full month. So any notes for the month go behind the current monthly spread. For this area, I have a note page with questions that my spiritual director gives me to reflect on before our monthly meetings.

The next section contains brainstorming notes that pertain to my business and a personal to-do list. Right now, I mostly have sections on my business plan and online store layouts.

Last, I use the Project Manager folders as an archive of sorts. The first folder holds swatches from my inks. It’s a nice reference to have to quickly see which inks I have and what would go well with my pens. The other Project Manager folder holds small journal entries I’ve written at Mass and the Adoration Chapel. It’s important to have space to quickly write out prayers and thoughts on my heart. I like placing them in the folder in the back because it’s not easily seen the first time you open the notebook.

Overall I’m pleased with the system, even if it is a bit small. I think you could create something much less expensive with more room. But if you have the means, the Plotter is an excellent system to help organize your life. My goal is not to pressure you to buy a Plotter, but to investigate your own needs and create your own external analog system that reflects who you are, what’s important to you, and what you need to accomplish. We can all do this on our phones, but I’ve never been able to fully replicate the ease of jotting thoughts down on paper.

I’d love to hear what you use if you have an analog system.