Can you believe it? I changed my planner set up again! Oh well... planner peace round xxx...
- A6 William Hannah discbound notebook with monthly overviews, day on two pages and tracker pages
- A5 William Hannah discbound notebook for scribbling and plain paper
- A6 Nanami Paper Cafe Note for 5 year weather tracker
(you can read all about it here on my blog)
set up in A6?
While the A5 notebook and the 5-year weather tracker are still working perfectly well for me, I was at a point where my A6 notebook set up was not working well anymore.
Every day in the evenings I sit down to write my daily journal entries, the daily weather and check on my task lists to see what needs to be transferred to the other days.
In May I had three days where I was totally busy and could not do this, my tasks got mixed up, some forgotten, so a little bit of a mess. And then I realized that transferring my task list from day to day was just too annoying and took up too much time.
"When-ever-tasks"
You might say, well, finish those tasks and you do not have to transfer them .... yeah, you are right!! But my task list is a kind of a running task list with everything what I have to do, some on a certain day, but also some which I know that I have to do them one day, but if this is today or tomorrow or in a week it doesn`t matter. I call these my "when-ever-tasks"!
As I was writing down my task list on my day-on-two-pages-spread I always needed to transfer all my tasks to the next day in order to see them because my planner is lying on my desk, opened up on the current day.
But after this 3 day pause I suddenly realized that this is not really a perfect setup.
So I analyzed what kind of tasks I`m writing down:
- my household tasks
- my gardening tasks
- my sticker shop tasks
Some need to be done on a certain day, some in a certain week and some whenever.
In addition I did not want to transfer those weekly or whenever-tasks every day anymore.
What were my options:
- as I was using a discbound planner I thought that I could write down my weekly + whenever tasks on a single sheet and transfer this sheet to the current day so that I could write them down only once.
° problem was that I transferred the page from day to day without really looking at it and promptly forgot about it!
° writing the tasks down daily took up too much time but I found out that I at least have to write them down once a week to see what needs to be done and when
- then I thought about a weekly set up for my tasks to get a good weekly overview. I tried again to use the small weekly supplement of Hobonichi but this one is just too small for me and I couldn`t fit all my tasks in the daily column. Just because my writing is too broad and therefore most tasks took up two lines instead of one. Which meant only 12 tasks per day and not 24.
- then I thought about selfmade or selfprinted layouts but I wanted to stay with Tomoe River paper for sure (as it is working so perfectly together with any fountain pen ink), and selfprinting this delicate paper is just too dangerous for this paper (my printer loves to eat the sheets) :-) !!!
° I have found some lovely layouts on Etsy in the shop of DIYFish, easy to print out, very nice and clean layout but the ones for A6 size just did not have the weekly layouts I was looking for. Or you would need to fold out the pages to have more room but this fold-out/fold-in-thing does not work for me.
And then my thoughts wandered back to another japanese planner: the Jibun Techo!
I know that in my last post I dismissed this planner because I did not like the colors but looking at the layout again I thought, ok, just ignore the colors and use it as it has a really good weekly layout and Tomoe River Paper!
In addition the paper is a white paper and not a cream paper (like the Hobonichi Weeks) and I really like white paper. The grid is a really small grid, only 3mm, so you have to write tiny but you can fit so much more on one page. And the grid size is the same in all of the books, the planner and Idea books.
set up of Jibun Techo:
The Jibun Techo planner comes in two sizes, A5 slim and B6 slim. There are two versions, the normal planner and the BIZ version. In addition to the planner there are the Idea book and the Life book to create a 3-in-1 planner.
- The planner book is colorful in a muted way, the colors are very soft, the grey lines are not crisp as in the BIZ version but more soft as well, every month has different colors at the top of the pages. This planner is printed on Tomoe River Paper.
- The BIZ version has more muted colors (just black and white with a little bit of grey and light red) with a very crisp print. The paper of the BIZ planner is not Tomoe River Paper but MIO paper
Here you can see the differences between the normal and the BIZ version:
- The Idea book is a thin booklet with 40 sheets (=80 pages) of Tomoe River Paper with a small light grey grid of 3mm, the same grid as in the picture above of the weekly view
- The Life book contains all kind of preprinted pages for lists, for anniversaries, for a family tree, for passwords and lots of other things. This is as well printed on MIO paper. I will not use this Life book as it is made out of MIO paper, therefore no further details of this book.
These three books fit into the cover which is included in every planner purchase. The covers are soft plastic covers with a horizontal pocket at the front and a vertical pocket on the back (but not for the BIZ version).
Each cover includes a thick paper in different colors, depending on the size of the planner. The BIZ cover is made out of colored plastic which is not transparent.
Looking at the different options I decided to go with the B6 slim size. I want to carry my planner with me and the A5 size would have been too big.
I was not sure about the version at first, just looking at pictures I liked the colors and the fonts of the BIZ version better but I heard different things about the paper. Some say that this MIO paper is very fountain pen friendly as well, some say that their ink bleeds through the pages. I do not mind ghosting (with Tomoe River Paper you have a lot of ghosting due to the thinness of the paper) but bleeding is one thing I do not like at all!
So I ordered both versions to see about the differences myself. Ebay has a lot of sellers where you can order directly from Japan, I used this option as the webpage of Kokuyo (the maker of Jibun) contains too much Japanase and I`m not able to read that.
I ordered the normal planner with a black paper in the cover, the BIZ version with a red cover.
And yes, decision was made very quickly once I had them in my hands and was trying out my pens on the paper: MIO paper does not like my inks, therefore I decided to use the normal version with Tomoe River Paper.
The bleeding on the MIO paper was only sometimes, and using light inks with a F-nib might not produce any bleeding at all, but I use some B-nibs and darker inks and even the smallest dots of bleeding are are big no-no for me.
Colors are ok?
At first I was not quite sure if I can really get used to the color layout of the normal version, it is blue and orange on the weekends and has different colors per month. And the lines are not as crisp as in the BIZ version, they are more lighter and softer.
But I was very surprised that once I started to write down something my writing stood out more on these pages than in the BIZ version, the lines kind of faded in the background and the colors don`t really bother me anymore.
And I was able to use all my fountain pens + inks, all are working well with no bleeding at all! For any trackers I use my Pigma Micron pens, as well no bleeding at all.
The Jibun Techo does not come with all the fancy cover options like they offer for the Hobonichi planners, the cover is a simple transparent plastic soft cover. But I like the
simplicity of it, you can fit the planner and three Idea books into it, as all are the same size. The pocket in the front gives you the option to add a picture according to your mood or the season. The whole cover, even with up to 4 books in there, stays slim so you can easily take the whole planner with you.
And here is now my set up:
overall: one Idea book for lists, one planner in the middle, one Idea book at the back for daily journaling
First I have to say that this planner is the ideal planner for a lot of trackers! At first I thought what will I do with all these extra pages which are in this planner for any lists? At the beginning I left them empty and concentrated more on the weekly pages.
But with time I thought about these empty pages. I started to count the boxes of the pages with the lists and I found out that you can create monthly trackers on each of these pages. You can use five boxes for any titles and then you have 31 boxes across, so one box for each day. As there are 14 pages of lists (the titles are printed on each page but I just ignore them, like "favorite phrases" or "book list") you can use one page per month and still have two pages for other uses.
All my lists are in my Idea book which I keep at the front of the cover, I like to keep these lists for a longer time and not just one year, to check on them and add other things on these lists. Like my book reading list, or my book idea list, or my fountain pen ink list (when I use which one in what pen), my online order list, or my favorite movie list.
So, now let`s go from the front to the end of the planner:
1. monthly overview ==> my step tracker per day
2. preprinted lists ==> my monthly trackers
please scroll up two pictures, you can see the monthly trackers up there :-)
3. the monthly overviews ==> for my appointments and for birthdays and important dates
4. the weekly overviews ==> for all my tasks, daily and when-ever-tasks
at the top I write down important dates or appointments, I cover these fields with a little stamp as an OK-sign, when I have transferred and finished everything of this particular day.
In the middle boxes all my daily tasks are written down, I do a color coding for my household, my garden and my shop tasks.
When I have finished a task they get a red check mark, when I transfer them to another day they get crossed out in black.
At the bottom I add again the weekdays and the dates of the week, to have a better overview of the week days.
Right at the bottom I track my daily water and tea intake and my steps.
On the left side I write down my when-ever-tasks, perfect space to always see them, to not forget them and either do them or keep them as a reminder.
I love that I now have a weekly overview of my tasks, and as it is a yearly planner I can enter any task at any day of the year whenever I have to.
Here is a picture of a "fresh" week:
4. looking back on 2018 pages at the very end of the planner ==> my weather temperature and rain tracker
the weather right now in July/August here in Switzerland is really hot, we now had a couple of days with more than 33° celsius, which is quite unusual for us. And in addition, nearly no rain, so everything is very dry. I wanted to have an visual overview to really see these weather conditions and be able to compare them to future years. And July has way too many days in red for my liking ;-)
At the back of the cover I have inserted an Idea book for my daily journaling:
Here I can write down the daily happenings or whatever took place in this world or in the world of sports (here we have some games of the World Championship of Icehockey... and I`m proud to say that Switzerland won the silver medal :-) !!).
I have small stamps to highlight my tasks of the days and there is room enough for any small images which I print out with my Canon Selphy.
I really have to say that the more I use this planner the more I like it!
The best things right now:
- all tasks in a weekly overview
- I do not have to tranfer them on a daily basis but on a weekly basis
- everything with Tomoe River Paper, I just love this paper!!
- room enough for any trackers (there are so many tiny boxes especially on the weekly pages, you can track a lot more than I do right now)
- you can easily take the whole planner with you as it stays very slim, even with two Idea books in front and back
If you want to see a whole overview of this planner with a lot of pictures please head over to Jetpens, I think they have the very best review of this planner! You can see as well pictures of the Life book which I have not included in my post.
I hope you have enjoyed reading about my newest set up and maybe you can use some ideas in your own planners!
Thanks a lot and (planner) peace to everyone!
Andrea
StickersSwissMade
P.S. as always, I have bought everything with my own money and I`m stating my own opinion just because I like what I use.
P.S.S.
and when you still have pages in this planner which you do not use, they are perfect for some color doodling :-)
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